And I know you guys are not my labor lawyer.
Background: I am self-employed in Spain, under a system called “autónomos”. This means that physical person Nava owns legal entity Nava: both have the same tax ID, but they are subject to different taxes (ppNava owns a house; leNava doesn’t; leNava has to charge and declare VAT; ppNava doesn’t; the combined entity pays my SS and my income/business-gains taxes) and contracts between them and third parties fall under different parts of Spanish law.
When I offer my services as a consultant I am not offering the services of ppNava: I am offering the services of consulting firm leNava, whose propietor is ppNava and which right now has a single employee (ppNava) - it could have more employees if it happened to be convenient.
Now, try to explain that to consulting agents. For some reason, every time I’ve had a contact about the Netherlands, they insist that I have to be directly employed by a firm in the Netherlands and must get a Netherlands SSN, etc. They simply don’t seem to be able to grasp the concept of “in legal terms, hiring me is like hiring Cap Gemini Spain or IBM Italy to send a consultant to the Netherlands: your client would be hiring my firm, not me as an individual.”
Is there a legal figure similar to “autónomos” in the Netherlands? I know the British self-employment formulae are different to the Spanish system (this doesn’t help the confusion, as international agents tend to be in London), but I think it would be helpful if I could ask the agents to tell their clients I’ve got a formula similar to [something which exists in the Dutch legal framework].