Hacker News Reader

Comment by lutorm | Hacker News Reader

This "contractor" thing has to be shut down. If someone gets all their work from amazon and is told by amazon when, how, and where to deliver packages, they're not contractors. It's just a completely transparent attempt to externalize costs and liabilities.

View on HN

At least in the UK they are not directly working for Amazon, but an agency, who only handles Amazon deliveries. Many other industries work in a similar way, where the employee/contractor effectively works for one company, but is paid by another company, for example retail and commercial cleaning and maintenance staff.

You can't say they need to get rid of all "contractors", because temp staff are obviously beneficial around the holidays for these companies. What could work is to have a limit on how long the employee can be on a temporary contract, but such rulings would have ramifications on other industries (Julie is taking 1 1/2 years off for maternity leave and you need someone to replace her for that time). Plus I'm sure whatever new legislation is introduced, Amazon will find a way to work around (You get the benefits of a permenant employee after working for 6 weeks? Ok, after 5 weeks we don't need you anymore).

Yeah the company-to-company situation is a bit different. But I believe that in the case of temp agencies, the workers are actually employees of the temp agency, right?

Temporary, yes

Are you going to legislate away all contractor work? Because every medium to large company and even government agencies utilize contractors.

You can't build and develop subject matter expertise on everything. And besides that, contractors are often used to scale when you have demand that you can't necessarily meet with your current capabilities.

I guess I don't understand how your "solution" to this problem scales to the regulatory world outside of Amazon.

Contractors that are given tasks or objectives and set their own hours are fine.

Contractors that are all but employees in name (ie, their routes picked, hours required) are not.

That's not even nearly what I said. I said that if someone is consistently told how, when, where, and what to do, or what to wear, then they're an employee.

If, on the other hand, they're asked to do something and have the freedom to set the price for the task, to accept or reject the task as they see fit, and perform it at a time, place, and manner of their choosing, and they perform this task for several different clients, then it's perfectly reasonable to consider them a contractor. Which pretty much is what the IRS says, as well, as linked by jcranmer above.

> I said that if someone is consistently told how, when, where, and what to do, or what to wear, then they're an employee.

I'm sorry this is simply not true. I work for one of the largest Health and Hospital Corporations in the States (They own 25 hospitals and have 60,000 employees) and sub-contractors Are Always told "how, when, where, and what to do, or what to wear,". Always and Without Execption.

I contracted for 8 years in the energy industry. How, when, where, and what were standard requirements defined by the company I worked at. The main difference day to day was I didn’t attend some company town halls or have access to the wellness facilities.

Are you proposing a massive overhaul to the legal framework around contractors or just wanting to target Amazon?

No, but I think you and the other commenter would not have been allowed to be contractors if the IRS rules were actually enforced. Have you read them?

> If someone gets all their work from amazon and is told by amazon when, how, and where to deliver packages, they're not contractors.

Legally speaking, they're probably not contractors in that scenario. In the US, a primary determining factor is whether or not the employer has the ability to dictate what and how the contractor does work. See for example https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employe...

AB5, which is currently rattling around the California Senate, should dent some of the worst of these abuses.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com