The Concept of a Digital Employment Relationship
Abstract
Employment relations are important for human society, affecting its economic and social fabric. Most persons are involved in employment relations for a part of their lives due to their prevalence and continuing nature. When society moved from the industrial stage of development (Society 3.0) to the post-industrial society (Society 4.0), employment relations received a powerful impetus to the changes provoked by the ongoing digitalization. The legal regulation is gradually changing due to these changes. The subject of the study is the emergence of the phenomenon of a digital employment relationship, which is characterized by the peculiarities of the composition of subjects, the object of this relationship and its content. The purpose of the research is to formulate and substantiate the concept of a digital employment relationship. To this end, the authors analyzed the signs of “classical” employment relations, examined the transformational processes taking place in the world of work, and named the main consequences of these processes. New entities are identified that can potentially take the place of digital employees and employers, and the conditions under which these forecasts will become reality are listed. The progressive development of cyberspace with further convergence of physical and virtual spaces can be considered as a vector of digital transformation. The result of this process will be the transition to the next stage of society’s development (Society 5.0). During the research, a set of general and special academic methods was used: dialectics, hermeneutics, historical, comparative legal and system-functional methods, as well as the method of forecasting and logical techniques. The authors substantiate the transition of a growing proportion of employment relations to the virtual space, propose the concept of a digital employment relationship in the context of further evolution of the post-industrial society, identify the features of the content of such relations, develop criteria for classifying new potential subjects of employment relations, formulate the definitions of a digital employment relationship, a digital employee and a digital employer, put forward a proposal to include relevant norms in employment legislation.
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