From the Contract of Employment to the Personal Work Nexus

摘要

This article describes the author’s plans for and design of his research project upon the Personal Work Contracts in European Comparative Law; it seeks consultation with the readership about those plans and that design; and it develops two linked aspects of the theoretical infrastructure for that project, namely the analysis of the ‘family of personal work contracts’ and the analysis of the ‘personal work nexus’. The analysis in terms of the ‘family of personal work contracts’ asserts the validity and utility of the wide and inclusive notion of the ‘personal work contract’ as a central organising category for individual employment law and of a multi-dimensional way of viewing and understanding this category as a family of contracts within which the contract of employment is of course important but is not an over-dominant paradigm. The analysis in terms of the ‘personal work nexus’ argues that the contracts within this ‘family of personal work contracts’ may be better understood if they are placed in the explanatory framework of the ‘personal work nexus’, which is a concept of a yet looser and more comprehensive set of legal links or connections within which personal work relations may be cast. Ways are suggested in which these analyses may contribute to the better meeting of the regulatory needs of personal work relations and in which those analyses might be refined and tested by means of a European comparative methodology.