Your contract can say "independent contractor" all it wants — the Supreme Court has already ruled that the label doesn't matter if the actual relationship looks like control, not independence.
The Precedent: Uber BV v Aslam [2021] UKSC 5
UK labor law includes an intermediate statutory category under Section 230(3)(b) of the Employment Rights Act 1996: "Worker" status, distinct from both a traditional Employee and a genuinely independent Self-Employed contractor. In Uber BV v Aslam [2021] UKSC 5, the UK Supreme Court established a principle with real teeth: a written contractual label misclassifying staff as "independent contractors" is void where the operational reality demonstrates subjection and control instead.
In plain terms — what your contract calls you is not the final word. What matters is how the work actually happens day to day.
The Three-Prong Worker Classification Test
- Personal service requirement: if you can't freely substitute another person to do your work without the company's approval, this points toward Worker status rather than genuine self-employment.
- Mutuality of obligation (MOO): an ongoing expectation that the company provides tasks and you carry them out while logged onto the platform — a two-way expectation, not a one-off arrangement.
- Organizational control: the company controls fare/rate pricing, algorithmic dispatching, penalties for rejecting tasks, and customer rating management — all signs that you're operating inside the company's system, not running your own independent business.
What Worker Status Actually Guarantees
If you qualify as a "Worker" (rather than a genuinely self-employed contractor), you're entitled to real statutory protections that many gig workers don't realize they're owed:
- National Minimum Wage: calculated across the total time logged into the app awaiting dispatch — not just time spent actively completing a job, as the Supreme Court specifically affirmed in Aslam.
- Statutory paid annual leave: 5.6 weeks per year, equivalent to 12.07% of hours worked for irregular work patterns.
- Automatic pension enrollment: statutory auto-enrollment into a workplace pension for workers earning above £10,000 annually (this threshold is confirmed unchanged for the 2026/27 tax year).
What This Means for You
If you're working through a gig platform and recognize the control patterns above — set algorithmic dispatching, penalties for declining tasks, no real ability to substitute someone else — you may be entitled to Worker status rights regardless of what your contract calls you. This is a genuinely separate question from whether your actual take-home pay is fair (see our companion piece on gig worker earnings), but the two often go together: workers who are actually misclassified are also the ones most likely to be shortchanged on minimum wage once waiting time is properly counted.
Use our Before Signing a Contractor Agreement Checklist to compare your actual working arrangement against your contract's description, and our Gig Worker Earnings Checklist to calculate your real take-home pay.
Related Kibbo Tools
- Before Signing a Contractor Agreement Checklist →
- Gig Worker Earnings Checklist →
- Gig Economy Resources (Directory) →
Sources
- GOV.UK — Employment Status guidance, official breakdown of Worker and Employee rights. gov.uk
- UK Supreme Court — Uber BV v Aslam judgment. supremecourt.uk