In the UK in a variety of circumstances you can petition a court to issue a wind up ("liquidation") order for a company if it refuses to service its debt to you.
All you need to do is to file and the company would need to show up in bankruptcy court and explain why they should be put under administration (and really the only valid reasons would be that they don't owe wages (any more)).
Very effective at ensuring companies protect wage payments - I repeatedly had it drilled into me from accountants when on the other side of the table how vital it was to ensure salaries payments went ahead no matter what other difficulties (the priority order was roughly taxes that it'd be an offense not to ring-fence, electricity/phone/internet because they could just shut down and wipe you out, and salaries - everything else was lower priority because it could be fought or negotiated over).
If you'd miss salary payments you had no recourse other than to beg and/or borrow or come to an understanding with employees.
The one thing giving you some flexibility was a government insurance pool for salary payments that'd cover up to 6 months, so if you treated people nice they'd be willing to give you some grace knowing their salaries would eventually get paid (though claiming back takes time).
It's a very useful way of leveling power in cases where managers might otherwise see employees as the easiest to push around.
But even so in many countries there is the concept of "deemed employment" that may or may not give rise to employment rights. Basically: if it quacks like a duck, and walks like a duck, it may very well legally be a duck.
... 8) to manage any risk of loss to us, a User, or any other person; or
9) for other reasons.
And if they terminate the account they can keep all the money they owe you. Also, it claims contractor aren’t their employees. Instead they are “unsecured creditors”.
There’s also a bunch of stuff about how they can pass chargebacks through to sellers, and if you already withdrew the money, you have to deposit it back into your account.
It looks like the business model is to force skilled laborers to work under pseudonyms so that Freelancer has complete ownership of the contractor’s reputation and professional credentials. I’m shocked that this is a thing!
The Eula claims on one hand that they’re not a party to the contracts, but they go to great lengths to make sure the contractor and the employee don’t share their real world identities with each other (they even audit the contents of the files produced as part of the job, eavesdrop on audio/video/text chat/emails/etc).
I think this forces them to become a payment intermediary, which means they do have to deal with lots of thorny issues.
Welcome to the sharing economy, I guess.
Apparently, there is no repercussion for putting non-enforcable conditions in an EULA, so companies are encouraged to throw as much self-serving protection language in there as possible in the off chance that it will stick.
They are international, so I wonder if they can venue shop to some country where this is enforceable and first world courts don’t have much influence.
They have a registered office located in Australia.
It was a relatively easy job (took me about an hour and a half) and I only charge $75. So, not sure if it'll be worth the hassle.
Oh, and don't do business with them.