Non-Standard Forms of Employment: Trends and Prospects of Ukraine’s Legal Regulation

This paper examines the modern trends and problematic aspects accompanying the reform of labour legislation and the regulation of non-standard forms of employment in Ukraine. The complexity of reviewing labour law in Ukraine prompted the legislator to make targeted amendments to the current Labour Code, which was adopted in 1971, concerning non-standard forms of employment, i.e. remote work and homeworking. This paper focuses on current trends in Ukrainian law-making policy oriented towards deregulating employment relations and labour legislation, as well as the draft laws reviewing them. On the one hand, the reform put forward will expand the scope of fixed-term employment contracts, legalizing on-call work and gig workers. On the other hand, the Ukrainian legislator seeks to include in the Labour Code the indicators of employment relations which can help to identify and distinguish them from self-employment or civil-law relations. It is concluded that the legislator’s law-making strategy of ‘plugging a hole’ in labour legislation does not deal with its obsolescence.