The coming gig-based economy
I received some good criticism via e-mail on the blog entry here. The premise was that, where he worked, the principal company went out of the way to make certain he could not be mistaken for an employee. Agreed, sort-of.
Some workplaces, especially if they have had trouble with this issue in the past, are extremely careful to handle contractors per IRS guidelines and legal concerns. In a later post, I'll flesh out the basic differences and talk about the persistent unfairness in labor laws and how it affects players who come into the game late.
Other companies are not so careful. In fact, some are quite sloppy about it, and are, of course, at elevated risk.
A company that has never had any serious trouble with either lawsuits or the IRS is less likely to be as cautious as one that has has such trouble. Maybe they will never have trouble, maybe they will. The point here isn't history, it is risk.
Brief blog posts such as mine (brief on purpose) cannot deal with all the complexities of a subject as vast as the one under discussion here. I take a few instructive, common cases, fictionalize the results to make a compact and litigation-free narrative, and comment on that. It's not a straw man, but it is stereotyping. Since I stereotype situations rather than people, I think this is a good way to illustrate points. Readers of this blog probably don't want detailed, long, scholarly accounts.
However, I continue to do homework. For example, why is the contractor / employee distinction such a big deal? Here's someone's theory about that. Not a bad theory, although I suspect it needs some fleshing out to be coherent. Here is an article on the difference: Contractor or employee: What's the difference?
Here is an article questioning the difference, and pointing out the FLSA act was passed in 1938. That law is so out-of-date that it is worthless. Our legislators are persistently overwhelmed, and the great mass of laws already passed are unlikely to change anytime soon. We are stuck with legislation passed so long ago, that the assumptions used to justify it back then don't match the reality today.
This is a great argument for mandatory legislative lifetimes (sunset laws) - a law passed today can only live a few years, and then it is automatically repealed unless Congress goes to extraordinary effort to keep it alive. That is expensive for them, and advantageous for the rest of us.
We're going for the big picture here, not the fiddlin' detail. To get the narratives short and readable, I simplify a lot.
And I'm going to keep on doing exactly that.
Why is this important? Because one of the changes coming is a move to a more gig-based economy. There is no way the current rules defining contractors can be made to work in such a climate.
Some workplaces, especially if they have had trouble with this issue in the past, are extremely careful to handle contractors per IRS guidelines and legal concerns. In a later post, I'll flesh out the basic differences and talk about the persistent unfairness in labor laws and how it affects players who come into the game late.
Other companies are not so careful. In fact, some are quite sloppy about it, and are, of course, at elevated risk.
A company that has never had any serious trouble with either lawsuits or the IRS is less likely to be as cautious as one that has has such trouble. Maybe they will never have trouble, maybe they will. The point here isn't history, it is risk.
Brief blog posts such as mine (brief on purpose) cannot deal with all the complexities of a subject as vast as the one under discussion here. I take a few instructive, common cases, fictionalize the results to make a compact and litigation-free narrative, and comment on that. It's not a straw man, but it is stereotyping. Since I stereotype situations rather than people, I think this is a good way to illustrate points. Readers of this blog probably don't want detailed, long, scholarly accounts.
However, I continue to do homework. For example, why is the contractor / employee distinction such a big deal? Here's someone's theory about that. Not a bad theory, although I suspect it needs some fleshing out to be coherent. Here is an article on the difference: Contractor or employee: What's the difference?
Here is an article questioning the difference, and pointing out the FLSA act was passed in 1938. That law is so out-of-date that it is worthless. Our legislators are persistently overwhelmed, and the great mass of laws already passed are unlikely to change anytime soon. We are stuck with legislation passed so long ago, that the assumptions used to justify it back then don't match the reality today.
This is a great argument for mandatory legislative lifetimes (sunset laws) - a law passed today can only live a few years, and then it is automatically repealed unless Congress goes to extraordinary effort to keep it alive. That is expensive for them, and advantageous for the rest of us.
We're going for the big picture here, not the fiddlin' detail. To get the narratives short and readable, I simplify a lot.
And I'm going to keep on doing exactly that.
Why is this important? Because one of the changes coming is a move to a more gig-based economy. There is no way the current rules defining contractors can be made to work in such a climate.
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