Employment Status and Trade Union Rights: Applying Occam’s Razor
本文分析了专业寄养照顾者工会因成员不被视为法律上的“工人”而无法注册为工会的案例，探讨了奥卡姆剃刀原则在解释“工人”定义中的应用。
The National Union of Professional Foster Carers (NUPFC) was set up to represent the distinctive occupational interests of foster carers. As a preliminary step, the NUPFC applied to the Certification Officer (CO) to be ‘listed’ as a trade union. The CO refused to add NUPFC to the ‘list’ of ‘trade unions’ because its membership was predominantly of foster carers who were not ‘workers’ under domestic law. A ‘trade union’ is defined in section 1 of the Trade Union and Labour Relations (Consolidation) Act 1992 (TULRCA) as an organisation ‘which consists wholly or mainly of workers’. A ‘worker’ is defined ‘in this Act’ in section 296(1) TULRCA as meaning an individual who works under a contract of employment or ‘under any other contract whereby he undertakes to do or perform personally any work or services for another party to the contract who is not a professional client of his’ (emphasis added). It provides a general definition of ‘worker’ wherever that term is used in TULRCA, save for the wider definition unique to industrial action in section 244(5).