Companies now have to be rude to contractors to avoid a similar lawsuit.
https://www.nytimes.com/2000/12/13/business/technology-temp-...
I get that there are freelancers who like not being employees but that's not the case here. I bet most Temps at Google would love getting employee status and there's no reason most of them shouldn't. It's not like Google couldn't afford the extra payroll.
This is a version of a minimum wage, and runs into the same tradeoffs between economic growth and social fairness.
The only reason Google is doing this is because they don't want to spend the same amount on benefits and other overhead on 15$ per hour worker as they do for a 30$ per hour one.
Like they were sitting there and paying for all this work they could automate, but now they are gonna wake up and autonate it all in a day
Make it more expensive to have long-term 'temporary' contractors, and they'll transform them all into employees overnight.
some people don't want to be employees, they want to be contractors.
Highly educated, well-paid people much more likely than people doing physical jobs. If you can negotiate your rates, your projects and can skip some corporate bullshit that fits some people. With a physical job where the wage is hardly enough until next pay day, I doubt that is a preferred option for many.
I mean no disrespect to the "gig economy" people, but 1099 requires a lot of discipline. Most of them probably don't need to pay estimated taxes and instead will be cutting giant checks to the IRS each year. It requires a hell of a lot of discipline to stare at thousands of dollars of money sitting in your own bank account knowing you cannot spend that no matter what--that is uncle sam's money.
I wonder how many gig economy people wind up owing the IRS a ton of money. Especially when they have to pay self-employment tax on top of normal tax.
Plus I bet very good money 99% of them aren't paying state or municipal taxes. As a 1099 I had to pay Washington State B&O tax every year as well as some token amount to Seattle.
This is all due to Microsoft who used contractors like regular employees in the 80s and 90s but did not compensate them like regular employees. It's not the workers fault.
If you consider those, the cost of your average employee to the company employing them is roughly 1.6x to 2x their gross income. An overpaid contractor would have to make well over 2x that of a normal employee.
Or, you know, not do the thing they want to do which is to have employees while pretending they aren't employees.
For the first 6 weeks of his contract with the government, he didn't have a computer at his desk. So he sat there reading manuals and stuff.
I don't think the government will ever want to reform the system of "contractors should be employees". The government too benefits from contractors. Bigly.