Precarious employment is not a legal term. The components of precarious work are: short-term, uncertainty, low incomes, which do not provide a decent living. Most of precarious workers work though civil law contracts. Precarious employment usually reflects in a disguised employment relationship: a relationship that is contrary to the provisions of the Employment Relationships Act (ERA-1), carried out through civil law contracts, even though the relationship contains all the elements of the employment relationship (so called SER – “standard employment relationship”). Employers more and more often choose such forms of (illegal) employment in order to reduce labour costs, which results in lower labour and social security for workers who are working in such types of employment.
The largest group of precarious workers are self-employed, and within these the most of them are so called independent contractors (s.p.). The social security system in Slovenia builds up equal rights in the social security system to the self-employed and employed workers (employees). However, an important difference is that the self-employed themselves pay the total social security contributions, while when it comes to employment relationship, this duty is divided between worker and employer. Self-employed persons are not entitled to a lot of social rights, such as paid leave, bonus, severance pay, etc... This mostly influences the self-employed, working in disguised employment relationship (so-called bogus self-employed) and economically dependent persons (self-employed, that gets the least 80 percent of their annual income from one client), whose position is more comparable to a normal worker (employee) as an economic unit - the individual contractor.
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