68As regards the risk of abuse relied upon by the Kingdom of the Netherlands, arising in particular from the performance of short periods of employment solely for the purposes of obtaining portable funding, it should be pointed out that the concept of ‘worker’ for the purposes of Article 45 TFEU has an autonomous meaning specific to EU law and must not be interpreted narrowly. Any person who pursues activities which are real and genuine, to the exclusion of activities on such a small scale as to be purely marginal and ancillary, must be regarded as a ‘worker’. The essential feature of an employment relationship is, according to the case-law of the Court, that for a certain period of time a person performs services for and under the direction of another person in return for which he receives remuneration (see, inter alia, Case 66/85Lawrie-Blum [1986] ECR 2121, paragraphs 16 and 17, and Case C-345/09van Delft and Others [2010] ECR I-9879, paragraph 89).