I'm Dutch but not particularly knowledgeable about this, but as far as I understand it the reason being a ZZP'er is so popular is precisely because you don't have to hand in a lot of money to required stuff like retirement and insurance and stuff.

The types of zzzp'ers I'm most familiar with are in construction and they are cheaper than traditional businesses. They're outcompeting traditional businesses because they don't have to pay retirement and insurance and all that.

It's been a topic for years here what to do about ZZP'ers because if something _does_ happen to one at work (ie an accident to their health or to the house they're working on it whatever) they typically don't have insurance which leads to big personal problems for them.

It's like a high risk high reward type of thing, but the issue is that they're also outcompeting traditional workers all over the place.

Otoh, if you were to require them to pay for stuff like insurance and retirement, the whole idea of being a zzp'er will cease to make any sense. You don't earn any higher any more, you will need to charge more so people have no reason to prefer your services over traditional ones.

Zzp'er just means that you work alone and have no personnel. Ie, similar to a freelancer basically.

Also sadly enough, often zzp'ers are less skilled than traditionally employed individuals. Not exactly sure why that is but might be related to how they were trained and a lack of institutional knowledge due to not working with an established workplace/having regular colleagues etc

Everybody pays retirement, the public one, you pay it through taxes. They probably don't pay a private pension. And insurance yes, some don't pay disability insurance which pays you for a while if you're injured and can't work (don't underestimate here the lobby of the insurance companies who pay the press to complain that people don't buy their insurance policies. In the end they are the ones who profit most). One benefit of being a zzper is that you don't have overhead. When you're employed the company gets 100/hr for your work and pays you 25/hr, some of that money may be there to keep you employed when there's less work to do, although when a company is in trouble they will find a way to fire you. The most part goes to the owner of the company, who can take it out, or grow the company, but in the end for their own benefit. There's other dynamics of course, take construction companies, projects come and go, sometimes one company gets a big project, then sometimes another one gets it. These are different companies. They couldn't always employ the same number of people, but they benefit that they can quickly scale the workforce by hiring zzp-ers.

Exactly!

If ZZP outcompetes more "socially responsible" options, it's a buggy system and should be fixed. Freedom as a freelancer should probably be the only/primary benefit of such a designation, not the ability to dodge responsibilities.

Thank you for the color!