Gig economy uptick started during financial crisis of 2007-08
Between 2003 and 2015, the number of flexible workers in the Netherlands increased from 2.1 million to 3.2 million, making it the country with the sixth highest percentage of flexible workers, behind Poland, Greece, Spain, Portugal and Italy.
In a report published last month, Professors Paul de Beer and Evert Verhulp of the University of Amsterdam take stock of the flexible working situation in the Netherlands by answering 30 questions. They start by defining what they mean by ‘flexible working,’ explaining what it is not: ‘flexible working covers all forms of (paid) work that do not form part of a stable working relationship with fixed working hours’. In their report, the authors identify two main groups of flexible workers: workers with no contract of employment (self-employed people with or without employees), on the one hand, and workers with a temporary contractual relationship (those on fixed-term contracts, temporary agency workers, etc.) and/or with variable working hours (‘zero-hour’ contracts, on-call work, etc.), on the other.