Working on your own: Comparing European dependent and traditional self-employment with salaried employment through personal, occupational, and self-perceptional features

Abstract

This work explores personal/family, occupational and self-perceptional features of salaried employees versus self-employed´s ones to comparatively corroborate whether the advantages of self-employment have more to do with certain intrinsic compensations, identifying key features that might characterized today’s European dependent self-employed. It relies on the use of binary logistic regression and multivariate analysis model. The findings reveal that the working conditions of extrinsic nature are more unfavorable for self-employed compared to those of the salaried workers; while self-employed enjoy more flexibility when deciding both schedule and development/content of activities, compensating their greater precariousness with a considerable flexibility and autonomy. The elements of intrinsic compensation are considerably reduced for dependent self-employed, when working conditions are compared. The originality of this work, giving the lack of research in this field, is grounded on a comparative examination of the 21st century European dependent self-employed's labor characteristics in the still current context of economic crisis.