A story about Upwork fucking over freelancers in order to upsell their clients

It looks like the OP is in California. California courts recently ruled that contract workers are presumed to be employees by default of their employing organization, and places the burden of proof on the employing organization to prove they are not [1]. This test is stricter than others previously applied, and among other things, requires the work done by freelancers to be independent of the work normally done by the employing organization.

Since OP was doing freelance marketing work for a marketing organization, California now requires him to be an employee of that organization.

Upwork is acting to comply with California law here. There are civil and now criminal penalties for failing to comply (ie: people can go to jail, including the company improperly classifying freelancers).

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/tonymarks/2018/05/29/the-califo...

It's an interesting story, and Upwork definitely screwed up here. But it seems too simplistic to say that Upwork is trying to upsell clients.

As the author mentions toward the end of the story, he was no longer showing up as eligible to freelance because Upwork determined that he might be classified as an employee of the company. It sounds like the company could still request him to work for them, but they would have to do so as an employee, which entails different payroll responsibilities (which Upwork could provide at an extra charge).

But it doesn't sound like Upwork's goal was to upsell the company on these extra charges. First, the company didn't realize that they could still hire him at all. According to the author's friend, who worked at the company, they didn't find out about the employee-hire option until they pressed Upwork for details of why he disappeared from the freelancer section. If Upwork were trying to upsell the company, they wouldn't have disappeared him from the freelancer section — they would have shown a notification saying "you can still hire this person, just upgrade your account!".

My guess is that Upwork was hoping that the company would just hire a different freelancer and wouldn't care much about the transition. Why? Because Upwork's benefit is partly the low cost, and once you add in all of the employee-related stuff, it would be much more expensive to hire through Upwork.

I could be wrong about this, but based on the (relatively thin) facts provided, it seems like this wasn't about upselling. It was about avoiding the risk of employee/contractor misclassification, and hoping the company would hire a different contractor.

Not the first time I’ve heard of Upwork fucking over freelancers and I’m sure it won’t be the last. Is there any good alternative for freelancers?

Unrolled: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1060659941491363841.html?...