Summary

Modern employment relationships are often organized in such a way that the person working is acting on the basis of a contract under the law of obligations, thus falling outside the scope of employment law, and therefore being less protected than employees. The provision of employment-related rights only to contractual employees is strongly criticized as the so-called new forms of work make it increasingly difficult to determine the traditional relationship of subordination. Discussions on the extension of employment-related rights to individuals acting under other forms of contracts are taking place in international, European Union and national institutions.

The legal problem to be analysed in the article is the potentially insufficient labour protection of an independent contractor operating under the law of obligations which, according to the positions presented in international labour law, needs to be strengthened by extending employment-related rights. Although international organisations and scholars are of the opinion that employment-related rights should be extended to all other workers besides employees, the author only focuses on the extension of employment-related rights to independent contractors because this is the most common form of working, besides working as an employee, in Estonia. The aim of the article is to find an answer to the question of who must be considered an independent contractor to whom employment-related rights should be extended, and whether and how the main employment-related rights should be guaranteed to an independent contractor in Estonia.