Employment status; worker; personal service; substitution. The Supreme Court held that a plumber engaged under a contract describing him as an independent contractor was a limb (b) worker. The dominant feature of the contract was an obligation of personal performance: a right to substitute only another Pimlico operative was too limited to negate it. Pimlico was not a client or customer of a business carried on by him, given the degree of control it exercised and the contractual restrictions on how he worked. The holiday-pay sequel is Smith v Pimlico Plumbers Ltd (No 2) [2022] EWCA Civ 70, entered separately.
Status; worker; drivers were workers while the app was on, due to control and subordination.
Worker Status; substitution clause; a genuine right of unfettered substitution defeats worker status.
Limb (b) worker status; dancer; personal service; fee retention. An employment tribunal held a dancer was a limb (b) worker of the bar where she performed: substitution required the bar's approval (dancers arranged cover through a shared WhatsApp group but the bar had to approve it), dancers were recruited by interview and performed personally, and the bar retained fees from client payments, telling against a client-customer relationship. First-instance decision; discussed in Cruz, 'Dancers are Workers' (UK Labour Law Blog, 2020) and Nocella (2026) 55 ILJ 462.
Status (Dutch law); prejudicial ruling: no ranking among the Deliveroo circumstances — entrepreneurship (circumstance ix) carries no different weight than the others and includes conduct outside the relationship being classified ('external' entrepreneurship). The same work for the same platform can be employment for one worker and not another. Collective enforcement under art 3(2) Wet AVV requires individual circumstances not to diverge too widely.
Status (Dutch law); applying HR 21 February 2025, the Court of Appeal reversed the 2021 first-instance finding that Uber drivers were employees. Although embedding, contract formation and remuneration pointed towards employment, the drivers' entrepreneurship (investment, multi-app working, own client bases, liability and incapacity risk) outweighed those factors. No group of employed drivers identifiable; individual claims left open.