Courts order dozens of employers to compensate freelancers who should be employees

Courts are handling more and more cases brought by freelancers and self-employed who believe they should have been fully-fledged employees at the company where they worked. In the 47 recent cases, the court ruled in the freelancer’s favor 24 times, according to research by Nieuwsuur.

In these cases, the courts ordered the employer to retroactively award vacation days, collective bargaining wages, travel expenses, severance pay, pension, and sick days. The amounts can amount to tens of thousands of euros per fake self-employment case.

The Tax Authority has been actively enforcing the rules against fake self-employment since January. But the number of lawsuits has been increasing since 2023, when the Supreme Court ruled that Deliveroo delivery workers were not freelancers, but employees and retroactively entitled to everything covered by the collective agreement for delivery workers.

Freelancers and self-employed persons who did work that should have been done by full-time employees can also claim pension accrual retroactively, even if they or their employer never paid pension premiums, labor law attorneys and the Judicial Council explained to Nieuwsuur.

In such cases, the employer must back-pay into the pension fund for up to five years. For the remaining years that the worker was employed under fake self-employment, the pension must come from the pension fund.

According to the Pension Federation, this results in a pension gap of an estimated 1.3 billion euros - an amount that will ultimately be covered by the participants who have paid pension premiums.

Labor law professor Evert Verhulp thinks the gap will turn out to be many times higher. He expects that the number of people who have been doing full-time jobs as freelancers will be higher than the 200,000 that is currently estimated.