Il saggio è destinato al volume “Il lavoro povero ‘san phrase. Oltre la fattispecie”, a cura di B. Caruso, in corso di pubblicazione per il Mulino. Il volume è un omaggio dei giuslavoristi catanesi alla memoria di Riccardo Del Punta.

The paper focuses on poor self-employment and proposes, in the first part, a taxonomy of the critical conditions common to employees and self-employed persons, highlighting the requests for social protection of the some self-employed and emphasising that the main problem is how to delimit the areas of self-employment in need of protection. The paper then illustrates the series of sectoral legislative interventions through which the italian legislator has already taken steps to guarantee fair compensation in some segments of self-employment. The final part of the paper deals with the possible answers to in work-poverty in the area of the self-employment in terms of policies and regulatory options. The paper argues the opportunity for two different regulatory approaches: one based on the identification of a third category; the other based on the modulation of the protections through regulatory micro-systems dedicated to specific segments of self-employment, for which the fixed and one-dimensional approach of the case is not suitable accord adequate protection.