The purpose of this Special Issue of the European Labour Law Journal is to present New Trade Union Strategies for New Forms of Employment to an audience of labour law scholars. New Trade Union Strategies is a research report written by Nicola Countouris and Valerio De Stefano to express the results and conclusions of a two-year research project which they had organised, commissioned by ETUC with financial support from the European Commission. It is an evidence-based policy document: this brief foreword suggests some ways of placing its policy conclusions within an academic framework of labour law theory. This is a framework which, I hasten to acknowledge, is constructed from my own personal viewpoint, and is overtly normative in character. The authors decided to place the idea of the ‘personal work relation’ at the centre of their inquiry, and the following paragraphs will reflect on the purposes for which they have done so. An explanation of their decision is provided at the outset, in the Executive Summary (at page 7):‘The concept of personal work relation captures the fact that in modern labour markets, work can be provided in a variety of ways and through a range of modalities and patterns. These can range from the classic subordinate, bilateral, and continuous provision of employment, to more nuanced and complex forms of work, involving multiple parties and economic entities, and ultimately developing in the realm of autonomy and, in terms of their legal characterisation, self-employment. In developing the present project, one of our main hypotheses was that a concept of worker based on the idea of ‘‘personal work relation’’, could usefully capture a wide range of employment statuses across a number of national (and probably supranational) legal systems.’ This ‘main hypothesis’, which forms the basis of the policy proposals that are canvassed in the Report, is one with which I strongly agree (as might be predicted!), and I am certainly not casting

中文翻译：

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新型就业形式的新工会战略–简要的分析和规范性前言

《欧洲劳动法杂志》这一期特刊的目的是向劳动法学者们介绍新的就业形式的新工会战略。《新工会战略》是由尼古拉·科图里斯（Nicola Countouris）和瓦莱里奥·德·斯特凡诺（Valerio De Stefano）撰写的研究报告，目的是表达由ETUC在欧洲委员会的资助下组织的一项为期两年的研究项目的结果和结论。这是一个基于证据的政策文件：这个简短的前言提出了一些将其政策结论置于劳动法理论的学术框架内的方法。我必须承认，这是一个框架，它是根据我个人的观点构建的，具有明显的规范性。作者决定将“个人工作关系”的概念置于他们研究的中心，接下来的段落将反映他们这样做的目的。首先，在执行摘要中（第7页）对他们的决定进行了解释：“个人工作关系的概念反映了这样一个事实，即在现代劳动力市场中，可以以多种方式和范围提供工作模式和模式。这些范围可以从经典的从属，双边和持续的就业机会，到更细微和复杂的工作形式，涉及多个政党和经济实体，最终在自治的领域发展，就其法律特征而言，自我就业。在开发本项目时，我们的主要假设之一是基于“个人工作关系”概念的工人概念，可以有效地涵盖许多国家（甚至可能是超国家）法律体系中的广泛就业状况。” 这个“主要假设”构成了报告中讨论的政策建议的基础，我对此表示强烈赞同（可以预见！），我当然不会抛弃