Income support policies in the framework of liberal professions: a pathway for coordinated conditions in a common market?

The paper deals with income and working conditions of "weak" liberal professionals in Europe, and with the strategies to improve them. After having defined income support policies in the domain of liberal professionals, the first chapter conducts a quantitative analysis about average compensations and job satisfaction of these workers in six EU Member States, starting from data collected by Eurofound through the Sixth European Working Conditions Survey (2015). Afterwards, the author conducts a comparative legal analysis concerning France, Italy and Spain, about benchmark policies to provide income support to "weak" liberal professionals. Therefore, the second chapter examines the structured juridical frameworks that in these three countries were adopted to sustain the income of liberal professionals after the abrogation of mandatory tariffs: the Italian "fair compensation" (equo compenso), the French statute of the avocat collaborateur libérale, and the Spanish TRADE (in the form in which it is applicable to liberal professionals). Chapter three, hence, focuses on social security assistance, and in particular on the conditions in which "weak" liberal professionals can access public insurance against involuntary unemployment in the three compared countries. The fourth chapter deals with the compatibility of the examined measures with the EU antitrust law. Finally, the paper is concluded by a proposal of an adaptable package of measures to improve the income support policies for "weak" liberal professionals in the European context, suitable to be integrated in the European Semester.