False Self-Employment Has a German Word for a Reason
When a legal system names something precisely, it usually means it has thought harder about it.
The Word That Does Work
Scheinselbstständigkeit — literally "apparent self-employment," but better rendered as bogus or false self-employment — describes a worker who is nominally independent yet substantively dependent on a single client. Germany's Bundessozialgericht, its federal social court, applies a set of codified indicators to determine whether the label is fictitious: Does the worker operate under the client's instructions? Do they lack other clients? Are they economically integrated into the hirer's business? A cluster of affirmative answers triggers a presumption of employment, with consequences for social-insurance contributions rather than (as in the UK) employment-rights entitlements alone.
The German approach contrasts sharply with the British one. In the United Kingdom, employment status has been carved out tribunal by tribunal, case by case — from the multiple test articulated in Ready Mixed Concrete v Minister of Pensions (1968) to the Supreme Court's 2021 ruling in Uber BV v Aslam, where the justices emphasised the primacy of subordination and personal service over any contractual label the parties had chosen. There is no single statute that codifies "false self-employment" in the UK; the concept is real, and HM Revenue and Customs pursues it through IR35, but it has no unified name, no single test, and no single forum.
What Germany achieved through Scheinselbstständigkeit — a named, codified, socially-insured category — other jurisdictions approach obliquely. California's ABC test, formalised by the state Supreme Court in Dynamex Operations West v Superior Court (2018), comes close: it creates a rebuttable presumption of employment and forces the hiring party to disprove three specific conditions. The EU's Platform Work Directive, adopted in 2024, borrows the same logic, building a five-factor presumption for digital-labour platforms. Both instruments acknowledge, implicitly, what the German word states openly: that the nominal independence of a worker may be a fiction, and that naming the fiction is the first step toward correcting it.
Precision in language, in this field, tends to produce precision in enforcement. Jurisdictions that litigate status without naming the underlying problem keep relitigating it.
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