What I don't agree with, the underpayment of workers enabled by government "subsidies". A barista in London may be offered £21K per year to work all his shifts (I'm looking at a job ad), yet needs double that to live, so government "subsidises" the employer by providing the other "missing" £20K in universal credit, housing benefit, and so on. It's no wonder employers take advantage of this.
Meanwhile the customer thinks his coffee costs him £3, in fact the true cost is a multiple of that because of the ~£20K "subsidy". Meanwhile you can hear the faint sound of laughter, which is the employer, knowing that the taxpayer is picking up half his true wage bill.
Wait a second, Isn't this just corporate welfare and goes against capitalism and supply/demand free market economics? Why should other people's taxes subsidize other people's businesses?
If your business is a net negative to the economy due to it only being able to survive on subsidies, then it has no right to exist.
We're not talking about subsidizing national security industries like semiconductor manufacturing, aerospace, renewables, pharma, we're talking about subsidizing someone's cafe/fast food business so they as a business owner can pocket the profits while paying their staff below market and having the taxpayer pick up the tab for the difference.
Or is this just a cloaked form of UBI to prevent mass unemployment?
i also don't see the issue with housing support. in vienna more than half of the population lives in subsidized housing. the current rate is that 2/3rds of any new built housing is subsidized.
and it apparently works out. instead of paying higher wages so that no one needs subsidies, everyone pays higher taxes to fund the subsidies. it's redistribution of income. yes, i guess you could consider it a cloaked form of UBI. i believe the key feature is that this model makes the whole economy around housing and income less volatile.
No! Why are privately owned restaurants part of a city's "livability", as if going out to eat food made by an underpaid slave wage class of migrant workers, is somehow a god given entitlement for the western person, and not something beholden to the same supply and demand market rules of any other business? Why should restaurants get special treatment so that their owners can buy another Porsche while they exploit cheap desperate foreign labor and the taxpayer subsidies? What about plumbers, hairdressers, landscapers, web-dev shops, yoga, why aren't those businesses part of a city's livability and entitled to subsidies?
And if you expect restaurants to be a public service for sake of livability, then they should also be state run and not for the profit of the restaurant owners.
> in vienna more than half of the population lives in subsidized housing.
What about the other half who pays for those getting the subsidies but don't get to live in subsidized housing? What's their opinion? I doubt they're happy they're paying market rate rent to a private landlord just so their neighbors can pay much less subsidized rent and beat them at wealth building.
It's always nice and easy when you're the one getting subsidies to justify how amazing subsidies are. I've never met a person complaining about receiving too many subsidies or asking themselves where the money from the subsidizes is coming from and if that's fair to others.
>it's redistribution of income.
Who would agree to this if they'd get to vote on it. I mean to have their income redistributed to others, not to have others income redistributed to them.
Forced income redistribution like in the case of Austria since you brought it up, just creates a vacuum where the most talented most hardworking people leave for greener pastures abroad to escape it, and you're left with a stagnant economy of average or below average people who don't see any point in hard work and will prefer to optimize for a life on getting the subsidies rather than funding them, so the government ends up with a bigger and bigger debt hole funding all this in exchange for votes.
See the Austrian guy who developed Openclaw then left because of the way Austria treats small business success and entrepreneurship.
Central planned income redistribution always leads to failure in the long run. This only worked in the post-WW2 Europe when there were a lot more people paying into the system than receiving, but not in today's world and economy.
that's the point, it's not an entitlement, it's paid for by taxes. and it is what makes a city attractive. same goes for shopping streets (as opposed to shopping malls) etc.
they make the city desireable and livable. which in turn attracts business, which brings in tax money.
you have never been to vienna, i guess. it's the most livable city in the world it frequently comes out at the top of the most desirable city for expats.
support for entrepreneurship is indeed a problem, not just in austria, in all of europe, but those are two different issues. there is no reason why it could not be improved while continuing to subsidize housing. on the contrary. subsidized housing means that as an entrepreneur i don't have to pay premium salaries in order to hire people like eg. in san francisco.
steinberger got hired by OpenAI three months after he revealed his project. to argue he left because because of how austria treats entrepreneurs makes no sense. did he say that that is the reason? i'd like to know if that's really true.
Central planned income redistribution always leads to failure in the long run
vienna's housing policy is successful for a century now. and i expect it will continue to be successful.
You're whitewashing subsidies. And you refused to answer my question, why should restaurant owners have their businesses subsidized by taxpayer so they can get away with more profits? Why not other businesses too?
>they make the city desireable and livable. which in turn attracts business, which brings in tax money.
Which businesses move to a city because of restaurants and the "vibe"? Why does Amsterdam or Berlin have way more tech, startups and business than vienna if the city is more desirable?
Maybe businesses investments and restaurants are a completely different things.
>vienna's housing policy is successful for a century now. and i expect it will continue to be successful.
Only for those who benefit from it. But what about the rest on the rest?
Wouldn't this problem better solved with a normal contract that obliges the worker to take the shifts the employer is interested in?
> Gig work allows these companies to offer work without commitment, while the worker may offers his labour without commitment.
Makes it sound like employer and employee are on equal footing. That is very much not the case.
This is basically a cousin to “at-will” hiring rationalization in the US. It’s nonsense in that case, and it’s nonsense with zero hour contracts. There is a little to no benefit to employees. It just puts them in an even more precarious situation. The power dynamics are not fair between them and employers, those kinds of systems are inherently lopsided. Yet proponents keep insisting it levels the playing field. I don’t get it.
It’s basically arguing for the fusion of worst parts of being a hired employee and a freelance contractor. Both have advantages, both have compromises, and these “gig economy” jobs make sure that basically none of the benefits of being a contractor exist.
“At will” employment is the term you are thinking of.
[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/zero-hours-contra... (Bottom para.)
[1] Inward migration to the UK was 1.3M people in the year to June 2023. UK population was about 67/68M at the time.
Anyway, looks like migration is now down to about 480,000, with the big drop occuring in the second half of 2024.
Work, technology, supply chains, data, health and safety, and the whole economy are all far more complex than they were in the 90s, of course regulation increased: we had to adjust to respond to the new challenges and everything else. It increased because the damage companies can do increased significantly too (we are literally discussing about existential threats to humanity and life on earth in the last few years), and because we learned again and again what happens when you leave everything to "the market" and trust firms to self-police.
Also, this idea that gig work is some balanced freedom on both sides sounds nice in theory but falls apart in practice. I'd go as far as saying that it's naive. The company/platform keeps the power, sets the terms, and the worker carries the instability and everything that derives from that. "You can sign up to multiple apps" is not a real solution to insecure income, it's just telling people to juggle several unreliable income streams at once and hope enough scraps appear each week. And whereas for businesses "losing" means lower profits or no profits (with the worst case scenario being that they have to shut down), for workers this can mean huge financial insecurity, depression, lack of control, and potential destitution. I'd say the latter is markedly more dramatic.
Put differently, it's not meaningful flexibility for most people, more like risk transfer. The business gets labour on demand without commitment, while the worker still has rent, bills, and food costs arriving on a fixed schedule and with the threat of actual death if they end up homeless in the winter.
And on the "hiring risk" point: why should that risk be shifted onto workers, who have far less power, money, and protection than firms? If a company depends on labour to function, employing people properly is not some unfair punishment - it's part of the cost of doing business in a civilised society. The only reason private enterprise is tolerated at all is that it is supposed to produce a social benefit. If a business model only works by making workers permanently disposable and pushing insecurity onto society, then that is a criticism of the business model, not of regulation. And it's probably not worth keeping the private sector either.
Firms are just other people. They take on more and more risk. These days in the UK HR departments they often say you can't let someone go even in their probation period. Think how a experimental and risky a hire is, and how easy it is to quit a job that might not be any good vs how hard it is to get rid of an employee who isn't any good.
Um... no it isn't. Most states are right to work. No, you don't need to give severance. No, you don't need to announce it. And yes, that's all perfectly legal.
Is there a theoretical risk that an employee can try to sue you and burn a bunch of your money? Yes, but that risk always exists. Someone could try to sue you always, doesn't mean they'll win.
In actuality the risk is so incredibly small it's not worth thinking about.
The risks might be different, they might be a bully, they might do bad work, they might be dishonest, or even just screw up (honestly) when under pressure, it's all risk to HR. I decided not to be an employee of such companies 20+ years ago, although I am not in the "commodity employee" set.
Feel free to adopt your own mental models.
I have to disagree with that, I think it's a very American interpretation on the situation.
A business is an organised legal/economic entity with capital, reserves, insurance, legal advice, hiring processes, and the ability to spread risk across many workers and time periods. It can come into (legal) existence and dissolve without anyone automatically becoming destitute or actually dying. In contrast, a worker has but one body, real health to care for, and far less financial buffer. I think that equating businesses and people not only hides the actual power imbalance, but ignores how reality works.
In terms of risks, sure, hiring involves uncertainty, of the financial order, not a life-or-death kind of thing. And it doesn't justify transferring the cost of that uncertainty onto the least protected party. Like I say above, we allow businesses to operate on the premise that the society benefits from their activities; there are risks associated with running businesses, but there's no point to have them if society stands more to lose than to gain by having them. No one is forcing businesses to ever increase their profits (and shift the risks) once they become stable, but it would be hard to argue that people can afford not eating, having a place to live in, or stop rearing children. We simply can't conflate these two entities here and blur the line between life ontology and legal (that is, made up) concepts.
The risk to the employer is that a bad hire can cost money, time, management effort. To the worker that can mean arrears, debt, eviction risk, food insecurity, etc., including death. In fact the very idea of labour law emerged on the basis of unequal bargaining power, which makes "freedom of contract" a fiction in many cases.
As for probation, from what I know is mostly a contractual/process tool in UK practice, not a magic legal lock-in. ACAS guidance does not say "you cannot dismiss in probation"; it says employers should have a valid reason and follow a fair procedure: https://www.acas.org.uk/dismissals
I see no reason to assume that a business model is entitled to be low-commitment; if it depends on labour, then the cost of employing people decently is part of the model. They are forced to accept it in order to be allowed to operate in society. Conversely, if the model only works by making labour disposable, that in itself works as evidence against the model, not against protections.
We should also try not to fall for the false symmetry between quitting and firing, in my view, because "easy to quit" is irrelevant to whether employers should have obligations or not. For the worker quitting a bad job still bears real costs (income gap, search time, stress, potential destitution), whereas when the employer fires someone it continues to retain the enterprise, assets, and ongoing revenue capacity.
This paper presents some useful details as well: https://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/dp2039.pdf
I'm not American, but I don't know. America is 300 million people. Is it worth talking about ideas rather than disparaging people-groups?
> As for probation, from what I know is mostly a contractual/process tool in UK practice, not a magic legal lock-in. ACAS guidance does not say "you cannot dismiss in probation"; it says employers should have a valid reason and follow a fair procedure: https://www.acas.org.uk/dismissals
ACAS is just guidance, as you say. But things spread rapidly in the world of HR and the fashions change rapidly. HR is not big on logic, and is big on fashions. I've worked with amazing HR people, who are very fair and compassionate and logical, but it's very unusual. If the latest HR magazine says to not let people go during probation, then a lot of employers will suddenly start doing that.
Firms aren't people. They are artificial constructs that we invented to solve an organizational issue a long time ago. Some aspects of natural persons were emulated in corporation law, but a lot of them aren't:
- Firms can't go to jail
- Firms don't naturally pass away
- They have their own taxation
- They can be in more than one jurisdiction at once
- There's more than one type of corporate entity.
It's just a matter of taking the right decisions regarding what rules we think are useful to society.
They appeared because voters want low taxes and they want subsidies. It makes no sense to hold businesses (and buyers in general) responsible for a seller's well being. That should be the role of the government, who has the power to tax.
Holding businesses responsible is convenient for government leaders and the well connected, who can get away with corruption and the government leaders who can point fingers at others. And who is really going to have the manpower to audit all those buyers.
But of course, the voters want lower taxes now no matter what, so it is what it is.
> [regulations] appeared because voters want low taxes and they want subsidies
Says who? If we move beyond opinion here, do we have something more to inform this conclusion? And how exactly do we connect the two here? - without more information it's a non sequitur situation.
I suggest that there are two separate things to look at here and we should not conflate them: tax politics (how states fund support) and labour law history (why employment protections exist).
On the first point, the claim that regulations appeared because voters want low taxes is wholly unsupported. It wouldn't make much sense either: regulations of all kinds existed long before democracy was a thing, as a general rule.
If we look at regulations pertaining to work in particular, labour law exists because the employment relationship has a built-in power imbalance and requires worker protection. It's really as straightforward as that. The ILO's Employment Relationship Recommendation [0] states explicitly that labour law seeks, among other things, to address "an unequal bargaining position" between parties, and it also notes problems caused when contractual arrangements deprive workers of protections or disguise the real employment relationship. It also says that national policy should clarify and adapt laws to guarantee effective protection and combat disguised employment relationships.
In fact, the ILO Constitution itself from 1919 says labour conditions involved "injustice, hardship and privation" on a scale that threatened social peace, and that improvement was urgently required through measures such as regulating hours, unemployment prevention, wage adequacy, protection against sickness/injury, protection of children, and freedom of association. That is a direct historical explanation of why labour regulation was institutionalised internationally.
Then you have the Treaty of Versailles [2] (the labour provisions) which explicitly state that labour should not be treated merely as a commodity, and list urgent principles including freedom of association and wages sufficient for a reasonable standard of life.
But the history of labour regulations is actually old, if you're into that. [3][4][5]
So let's put to rest the completely unfounded assumption that this is a tax-politics explanation and not a social-protection and industrial-order explanation.
> It makes no sense to hold businesses (and buyers in general) responsible for a seller's well being. That should be the role of the government, who has the power to tax.
Again, you misstate what labour regulation is for. Labour law does not generally make firms responsible for a worker's entire "wellbeing" in the abstract. It sets minimum rules inside a specific relationship the firm controls: wages, hours, safety, dismissal, status, notice, and similar conditions. The ILO framework is explicit that labour law exists because employment relationships involve unequal bargaining power and because protections are linked to the existence of that relationship, including where firms try to structure or disguise arrangements to avoid obligations. [0] Otherwise employment would pretty much be a form of slavery; favoured by employers, for sure, but an altogether shitty deal for the employees.
It is also historically (and morally, if you ask me) wrong to reduce this to tax-and-welfare politics. The foundational international labour-law texts explain the emergence of labour regulation in terms of "injustice, hardship and privation," social instability, and the need for social justice, so not as a response to voter demand for low taxes. The ILO Constitution and related early labour principles are very clear on this. [6]
> Holding businesses responsible is convenient for government leaders and the well connected, who can get away with corruption and the government leaders who can point fingers at others.
This is simply no evidence to support this. It's a simplistic comment about political incentives, not a demonstrated explanation of why labour rules exist, why they are wrong etc. Corruption can exist in any regulatory domain, but that does not establish that employer duties are conceptually invalid. At best, we could frame it as an argument about enforcement quality and governance integrity, but it wouldn't refute the underlying rationale for labour standards (power imbalance and prevention of harm in employment relationships).
I'll stop here, because I need my dinner.
[0] https://wecglobal.org/uploads/2019/07/2006_ILO_Recommendatio...
[1] https://www.ilo.org/sites/default/files/2024-04/ILO%20Consti...
[2] https://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/partxiii.asp
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_labour_law
[4] https://law.exeter.ac.uk/v8media/facultysites/hass/law/hamly...
[5] https://formsoflabour.exeter.ac.uk/conference/levels-of-labo...
[6] https://www.ilo.org/resource/other/ilo-constitution
Edit: mixed to order above, but hopefully the points are still clear.
I did not intend to wrap in stuff like minimum ages, maximum hours without supplemental pay, discrimination, sexual harassment, safety, or other quality of life related labor laws.
Only the laws related to the business interaction a labor selling choosing to sell their labor, and a labor buyer choosing to buy labor. It should be as easy as possible, if the goal is to have an efficient market. Which is not antithetical to the goal of also having a society that provides a minimum quality of life.
>This is simply no evidence to support this. It's a simplistic comment about political incentives, not a demonstrated explanation of why labour rules exist, why they are wrong etc.
My evidence is the ever increasing push for "privatization" and loans instead of subsidies. And voters support it, especially in the US. But I believe it is like that in the UK also. For example, I think the UK has reduced its higher education subsidies so that now 18 year olds in the UK also take out student loans, at least borrow much more than before.
Instead of giving people cash to buy homes (which would increase taxes because that cash has to be accounted for), the voters opt to give people loans underwritten by future taxpayers.
And the underlying dynamic of this is that as a society's median age gets higher and higher, it needs to squeeze its young more and more to deliver on the benefits to its largest and most reliable voting bloc, the old and soon to be old.
> It should be as easy as possible, if the goal is to have an efficient market.
I'd argue that the goal was never to just have an efficient market, for there's absolutely no reason to have a market to begin with, unless society at large benefits from it (not just the employers and the employees, since they don't exist and operate in isolation). The employees, who are real people rather than - or before they are - legal entities, absolutely need protecting. Their bodies can break, their time is limited, and they have tangible and intangible needs that have existed before - and will exist after - businesses were a thing. But once we've adopted this economic model, market efficiency is certainly an aspect to it, agreed. However, it still can't be the most important factor or even one more important than individual rights and their wellbeing.
As such, I'd agree that selling one's own services/skill (labour) should generally be easy, but a fairly long list of failsafes is still unavoidable and necessary simply because businesses are predatory entities by their very nature (a necessary evil, it could be argued), especially after the onset of neoliberalism in the 80s, and there's an inherent imbalance of bargaining power between employers and employees. [0][1][2][3]
Labour is not just a market commodity because the seller is a person embedded in family/community. So I am all for giving employees (but not employers) more control over this relationship (selling labour) for multiple reasons, the two most important being that this is inherently good for democracy and also because what's good for workers/citizens may legitimately override narrow "economic efficiency" metrics. [4][5]
> My evidence is the ever increasing push for "privatization" and loans instead of subsidies. And voters support it, especially in the US. But I believe it is like that in the UK also. For example, I think the UK has reduced its higher education subsidies so that now 18 year olds in the UK also take out student loans, at least borrow much more than before.
I am fairly sure that this push doesn't come from citizens/workers, but from the private business sector, which has all but accaparated the political power in the US and other countries, UK being the closest in terms of mentality and approach (think Thatcher & Reagan). US can now be considered without any exaggeration an oligarchy. It is more or less a consensus among economists and historians that privatisation generally works against the best interest of the citizen and very much to the interest of the wealthy and the business class. [6][7][8][9]
The privatisation of public services and the other mechanisms that you mention have had undeniably negative effects on citizens and workers, and it was very much not a choice they made, but it was forced upon them. US and the UK have been the only two countries that have embraced neoliberalism so fast, blindly, and without guardrails, and it definitely shows. [10][11][12][13][14]
[0] https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/how-economis...
[1] https://www.yesmagazine.org/economy/2020/09/16/failing-globa...
[2] https://www.epi.org/unequalpower/home/
[3] https://bclawreview.bc.edu/articles/3109/files/65b9360509de1...
[4] https://is.muni.cz/el/1423/podzim2016/POL401/um/Pateman_Dahl...
[5] https://economicsociology.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/the...
[6] https://aeon.co/essays/privatisation-is-bad-economics-and-wo...
[7] https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/chiara-cordelli-harms-...
[8] https://truthout.org/articles/the-political-economy-of-preda...
[9] https://weownit.org.uk/privatisation
[10] https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/the-dark-side-of-e...
[11] https://www.eurozine.com/the-us-and-the-uk-after-neoliberali...
[12] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/aug/21/death-...
[13] https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/nov/14/the-fatal-flaw-...
[14] https://www.socialeurope.eu/neoliberalism-still-to-shrug-off...
- They have an employment contract, so are an employee, not a self-employed contractor.
- There are limitations on who else they could work for.
- In practice, if they're called up to work last-minute, they can't say "no."
For most 0-hour contracts, like retail, trying to setup your employees as self-employed contractors doesn't work because it's a blatant violation of the law. HMRC will come after you for employer's NI as you have disguised employees.
Uber is a very different model because the way they setup the working arrangements allows them to keep taxi drivers outside the scope of disguised employees.
[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/zero-hours-contra... (last para.)
That's such a classist term. Surely little working class person cannot have its own business, it's disguised employment! It's like micro agency with resource of 1. But somehow we don't say agencies run "disguised employment", because the profits are going to the rich shareholders instead of filthy unwashed pleb.
Disguised employee is the term used when a person fits into the legal definition of an employee but are contracted, as opposed to being employed. HMRC sets out the conditions it uses to determine this for tax purposes, which you can find on their website.
> But somehow we don't say agencies run "disguised employment",
No, they're not "disguised employment" because the contract terms and working conditions differ to that of an employment contract. It's nothing to do with class.
Plumbers, electricians and joiners will typically run self-employed or private limited companies for their work. We don't call them disguised employees because they're not, they're independent contractors. Because "disguised employee" is nothing to do with class.
The rule set was sharpened the moment skilled workers realised the agency / consultancy was charging £2k a day for their labour while paying them £60k a year, and decided to leave on Friday and invoice on Monday. Same desk. Same client. Same work. The only difference was that the margin stayed with the person producing the value instead of flowing to partners and shareholders.
That is when it became “disguised employment”.
When a multinational intermediary inserts itself and captures the spread, that is respectable commerce. When a one-person company does the same and keeps the surplus, it is suddenly suspicious and requires a special anti-avoidance regime.
You can hide behind control tests and contractual nuances, but the economic reality is identical. The variable that changes is who captures profit.
If a rule only becomes urgent when labour tries to behave like capital, that is not some sterile legal tidying exercise. That is class politics dressed up as “compliance”.
Right, so you're talking about IR35 specifically. This has nothing to do with "Uberisation" at all because the working arrangement and contract structure are completely different. It's also got fuck all to do with "classism" because it's 100% about tax.
First off, IR35 does not apply to self-employed workers, it only applies to a worker contracting via a limited company.
Second, it looks at how many "clients" you have. A limited company of 1 contracting to multiple clients is outside the scope of IR35 because, like your plumber, they are a business and not an employee trying to reduce the amount of tax they pay.
Thirdly, IR35 companies are allowed but they must operate in a specific way (that makes them not worth the hassle for the most part).
> That is class politics dressed up as “compliance”.
No, it's just about tax law.
I don't know why you needed to write 6 paragraphs when a simple "I don't know what the fuck I'm talking about" would have been much quicker for you to write and for me to read.
You are using class-loaded language. Nobody says a worker is “operating via” a Big Four consultancy, but when it is a one-person company, suddenly it is framed as some artificial wrapper.
It is a recognised form of self-employment under UK law, where a person runs their own company to contract for work in their own right, on the same legal footing as any other incorporated business.
And IR35 is not confined to one-person outfits either. Its scope extends beyond the caricature of a lone contractor “gaming” the system.
IR35 is not determined by how many clients you have. It is driven by the ownership structure of the company providing the services. The legislation applies where the individual delivering the work has a material interest in that company, typically 5% or more.
> Thirdly, IR35 companies are allowed but they must operate in a specific way (that makes them not worth the hassle for the most part).
It amounts to saying you are free to run your own company, right up to the point where doing so allows you to retain the full commercial value of your labour rather than routing it through an approved intermediary.
Those restrictions are designed around companies owned by the worker delivering the service. The same structural suspicion is not applied to firms owned by external shareholders supplying labour in similar conditions.
When the rule set specifically constrains worker-owned businesses while leaving non-worker-owned ones operating freely, that is not accidental. It is a deliberate design choice that limits upward social mobility.
It is also not accurate to say IR35 has nothing to do with wider labour trends, because tax rules shape how work is structured in practice; many gig and platform workers are required to set up limited companies, and once labour is channelled into that model, the IR35 framework directly affects them, so drawing a hard line between “tax” and “Uberisation” ignores how policy design influences the real-world organisation of work.
This is not classist, you're conflating 2 very different things.
A one-person company who consults for multiple clients, provides their own equipment and sets their own working hours (I have literally worked with people like this) do not fall into IR35. Whether they speak in RP, Cockney, Geordie or Scouse has no bearing on this. How much money they earn has no bearing on whether they fall into the scope of IR35.
> IR35 is not determined by how many clients you have. It is driven by the ownership structure of the company providing the services. The legislation applies where the individual delivering the work has a material interest in that company, typically 5% or more.
This is only part of it. Other criteria include right of substitution, ability to set working hours and location. Clearly a consultancy firm that provides services by multiple workers for multiple clients is very different from an individual who:
- Provides services to one client for 4 years
- Has to (in your own words) sit at the same desk as an employee
- Has to follow set hours
- Has to use equipment provided by the client
- Cannot ask another person to take over their work.
When the facts are different, the rules that are applied are different.
> Those restrictions are designed around companies owned by the worker delivering the service. The same structural suspicion is not applied to firms owned by external shareholders supplying labour in similar conditions.
Because they're two completely different types of contract and working arrangements.
> It is also not accurate to say IR35 has nothing to do with wider labour trends, because tax rules shape how work is structured in practice
I didn't say that they don't. Law and working arrangements obviously feed back into each other, it's the reason IR35 came about in the first place.
> many gig and platform workers are required to set up limited companies, and once labour is channelled into that model, the IR35 framework directly affects them, so drawing a hard line between “tax” and “Uberisation”
They're two different topics that sometimes have overlap, depending on the nature of the working arrangements.
You are misunderstanding what IR35 is: the rules bite because the person doing the work has a material interest in the company that contracts to provide it, and then each engagement is assessed in isolation for deemed-employment status; you are conflating that trigger with the status test itself, and “multiple clients / own equipment / flexible hours” is not some automatic escape hatch, nor does the number of clients change the outcome of a given engagement’s assessment.
> This is only part of it. Other criteria include right of substitution, ability to set working hours and location. Clearly a consultancy firm that provides services by multiple workers for multiple clients is very different from an individual who:
Large consultancies routinely embed the same named individuals at the same client for years, on client kit, during client hours, with no practical substitution, and no one performs a hypothetical employment test on the firm itself. The difference is not the day-to-day reality of the work, which can be identical. The difference is that IR35 is only activated when the company supplying the labour is owned by the person doing the labour. That asymmetry is deliberate.
> Because they're two completely different types of contract and working arrangements.
They are not “completely different” in substance. You can have the same embedded role, same hours, same client equipment, same multi-year engagement. The decisive difference is ownership of the supplying company. The regime is constructed so that when the worker owns the company, a deemed-employment test is imposed; when external shareholders own it, it is not.
I never said the escape hatch was automatic. The number of questions in the HMRC questionnaire make it clear that there's no 1 trigger either way.
> Large consultancies routinely embed the same named individuals at the same client for years, on client kit, during client hours, with no practical substitution, and no one performs a hypothetical employment test on the firm itself.
Because both the contract and working arrangements are different. The consultancy absolutely can substitute one worker with another of equivalent qualifications.
> The difference is that IR35 is only activated when the company supplying the labour is owned by the person doing the labour. That asymmetry is deliberate.
It's deliberate because the nature of the working and contractual relationship is different. I really don't get what's so difficult about this so let me break it down.
In an IR35 in-scope arrangement, the one-person limited company would otherwise pay themselves up to the income tax exemption threshold. They would then take a dividend for the rest of the payment, which isn't subject to NI payments, reducing revenue intake to the government.
In a large consultancy that's contracting staff to work at companies, there are two clear relationships that are different:
1. The contract with the client, where a fee is paid to the consultancy for the work of their employees.
2. The employment contract with the person embedded in the client. This person is paid their salary and, as such already pay income tax and NI.
Can you see how it makes no sense for the consulting company to pay extra tax and NI for the contract with the client?
If you can't understand the difference, and insist that it's based on some class warfare, I really don't think any human on earth has the words to convince you of something so simple, my accountant explained it to me in about 2 minutes when I first asked him about IR35.
Now the tax argument. Picture three people sitting next to each other doing the same job at the same client. One is employed directly on £70k. One works for a large consultancy, earns £60k, and has no idea the consultancy charges £2k a day for their labour. One runs their own company and charges £600 a day. The employee pays income tax and NI on £70k. The consultancy worker pays income tax and NI on £60k, while the consultancy captures the spread and, being a multinational, routes the margin offshore paying little or no UK tax. The small business owner pays themselves a salary, corporation tax on profits, and dividend tax on what they take out - and spends the margin locally.
From a pure tax yield perspective, the small business owner generates the most revenue for the Treasury and the most benefit for the local economy. The large consultancy generates the least. Yet the entire framing of IR35 is designed to make the two employed workers resent the business owner for “not paying their fair share,” while the consultancy quietly extracting the largest margin and contributing the least tax is never part of the conversation. Paying through dividends and salary is not avoidance, it is the normal mechanics of running a limited company, which exists precisely because PAYE was not designed for how independent businesses operate.
If a large consultancy places a single named worker at one client, on client equipment, during client hours, for four years, with no practical substitution ever exercised, why is that firm not subjected to the same deemed-employment assessment that a one-person company would be in identical circumstances? Because the legislation is scoped by ownership. It activates when the person doing the work also owns the business providing it. A worker who builds and runs their own company is treated as inherently suspect. A separate corporate entity extracting the same margin from the same labour is not.
If you think that framing is wrong, explain why the ownership trigger exists rather than a universal status test applied equally to all companies supplying labour. That is the question.
It's a good thing that HMRC don't apply this as the only test then.
> From a pure tax yield perspective,
This is totally irrelevant to the discussion. In fact, the rest of this paragraph is irrelevant because it's just you going off on some rant you derived from a Communist Party pamphlet or something.
> Because the legislation is scoped by ownership.
Not only ownership, it's a mixture of factors. I've worked with other IT workers who fall outside the scope of IR35.
Plumbers and electricians fall outside the scope of IR35 in most situations, despite being single person limited companies. You say it's triggered by ownership structure, yet these businesses follow the same ownership structure without triggering IR35. If it's triggered by ownership structure and classism, how does this fit into your thesis?
> If you think that framing is wrong, explain why the ownership trigger exists rather than a universal status test applied equally to all companies supplying labour. That is the question.
I already did and so did you right here:
> Picture three people sitting next to each other doing the same job at the same client. One is employed directly on £70k. One works for a large consultancy, earns £60k, and has no idea the consultancy charges £2k a day for their labour. One runs their own company and charges £600 a day. The employee pays income tax and NI on £70k. The consultancy worker pays income tax and NI on £60k
These three situations create three completely different contracts, working structures and, thus, tax arrangements! It's wild how you seem to get it but your brain won't allow you to see the answer that's staring you in the face.
You dismissed the tax yield comparison as "a Communist Party pamphlet." That is not a rebuttal. If the stated purpose of IR35 is protecting tax revenue, and the structure generating the most tax for the Treasury is the one being constrained while the structure generating the least is left untouched, then the policy is not achieving what it claims to achieve. You have not addressed this because you cannot. You say the three workers create "completely different contracts, working structures and tax arrangements" and that my "brain won't allow me to see the answer." The working structure is identical. The contracts differ because the law requires them to differ depending on who owns the supplying company. The tax arrangements follow from that. You keep pointing at the consequences of the policy and presenting them as the justification for it. That is circular reasoning.
You have repeatedly described how you think IR35 works, inaccurately in several places, while avoiding the question I am actually asking. I am not asking about the mechanics. I am asking about the design. Why does the deemed-employment test activate based on who owns the company supplying the labour, rather than being applied universally to all companies supplying labour in identical working conditions?
Resorting to personal attacks and dismissing inconvenient arguments as "rants" is not the same as answering the question.
> But if that same plumber were delivering services to a corporation meeting Chapter 10 criteria, the client would have to perform a status determination
So? You’ve spent 2 days arguing it’s about ownership structure and something about classism and now suddenly you agree with me that it’s actually about the specific nature of the contract? Make up your mind instead of just deciding what undermines my argument. You don’t even seem to understand your own.
> You dismissed the tax yield comparison
Because it’s irrelevant to what the law is trying to achieve which is to ensure an employer/employee cannot reduce the tax they pay. Whether it’s the optimal tax strategy is a different question. Given you have no clue about your own argument, I’m not going to take your word that it’s actually better to allow Inside IR35 to pay less tax.
> The working structure is identical.
There are literally three different types of contract, which creates different working structures.
> You have repeatedly described how you think IR35 works, inaccurately in several places
And yet at no point have you actually pointed out where. Instead you run victory laps.
Where you have been inaccurate, since you asked: you claimed IR35 does not apply to self-employed workers as though that were a meaningful distinction. You claimed number of clients determines IR35 status. It does not. Each engagement is assessed individually. You presented plumbers as categorically outside IR35 by nature of their trade. They are not, as above. You have consistently described IR35 as a simple checklist when it is an engagement-by-engagement assessment triggered by the ownership structure of the supplying company.
You say "three different types of contract create different working structures." The working structure is the day-to-day reality of how the work is performed. Three people doing the same work, at the same desk, on the same equipment, during the same hours, for the same client, have the same working structure. They have different contracts because the law imposes different requirements depending on who owns the company supplying the labour. The contract is the product of the legal framework, not the other way around.
You say the law is trying to "ensure an employer/employee cannot reduce the tax they pay." A worker running their own company is not an employee reducing anything. They are a business owner retaining the value of their own labour. The legislation starts from the assumption that a worker's natural state is employment and their company is an artificial structure to be looked through. That assumption is never applied to any other type of business. Nobody asks whether a consultancy's corporate structure is artificial, or whether its employees would be the client's employees "if engaged directly." The question is only asked when the worker owns the business, because the underlying assumption is that workers do not legitimately own businesses - they merely operate through them. That is the class assumption I have been describing from the start.
Same question, still unanswered: why is the test scoped by ownership of the supplying company rather than applied universally?
No I didn’t. I wouldn’t make this claim because I asked an accountant exactly this question 8 years ago, so I know this is not the case. Clearly you can’t read so it’s a waste of my Friday night trying to argue with someone who insists on being wrong and displays no reading comprehension.
> Same question, still unanswered: why is the test scoped by ownership of the supplying company rather than applied universally?
One last time: because it’s not. We have literally just discussed the plumber example where, depending on the customer, working contract, etc. you agreed with me that IR35 scope is not applied based solely on the ownership of the company. I really do not know what to say any more. You are asserting two opposing things are true at the same time.
On the plumber: I did not agree with you. The plumber's company is in scope of IR35 precisely because the plumber owns it. That is the ownership trigger I have been describing throughout. Who they deliver services to determines whether they can self-declare their status or whether the client performs the determination. That is a procedural question about who makes the assessment, not about whether the regime applies. The regime applies because of ownership. A large plumbing company sending an employee to do the same job, at the same location, under the same conditions, never enters this framework at all.
These are not two opposing things. The ownership structure is what brings the regime into existence. The nature of the client determines who performs the status assessment. You are confusing the two and presenting that confusion as a contradiction in my argument.
You have now resorted to questioning my reading comprehension rather than answering the question. The question remains: why does this regime target worker-owned companies specifically, rather than applying a universal status test to all companies supplying labour in identical conditions?
Apologies, I misread and thought you said I claimed IR35 does apply, which is why I answered the opposite. In which case, let me state my position clearly:
IR35 is not applicable to a self-employed individual because they are not a limited company. There is no field on the Self Assessment Tax Return to declare yourself in-scope of IR35, which I can confirm having filled out SA forms since 2018. I have no idea why you think it can be applied. It just can't.
> The plumber's company is in scope of IR35 precisely because the plumber owns it.
That is not what "In Scope of IR35" means at all. In Scope is, as we have both said above, based on the contract and work arrangements, which would either be "In Scope" because the arrangement mirrors an employment, or "Out of Scope" because the plumber is functionally self-employed, just contracting from within a limited company.
Also, this is part of why I say you're speaking out of both sides of your mouth. You say it's nothing to do with ownership structure and everything to do with ownership structure at the same time!
> The ownership structure is what brings the regime into existence.
This is what would trigger the test but it does not mean a company or arrangement is in or out of scope. That has to be applied based on the contract and working arrangements.
> why does this regime target worker-owned companies specifically, rather than applying a universal status test to all companies supplying labour in identical conditions?
You're basically asking "why does IR35 exist?" and the answer can be found by literally Googling it: it targets contracted workers who would pay less tax than an employee in exactly the same working arrangements. That is the top and bottom of it and has always been the case.
Why doesn't it target consulting companies? Because their employees are already employed! They already pay the full Income Tax and National Insurance!
I question your reading comprehension because I already fucking answered this question above:
> In an IR35 in-scope arrangement, the one-person limited company would otherwise pay themselves up to the income tax exemption threshold. They would then take a dividend for the rest of the payment, which isn't subject to NI payments, reducing revenue intake to the government.
The worker is not an employee. They are a business owner. Every limited company in the country pays its directors a combination of salary and dividends, and pays corporation tax on profits. That is not a loophole. That is how companies work. The only reason it is treated as a problem is that the person who owns this particular company also does the work, and the assumption is that a person who does work cannot legitimately own a business - they are merely disguising employment.
That assumption flips every principle of good business on its head. For any normal business, having repeat customers is a sign of quality and reliability. For a worker-owned business, it is evidence of disguised employment. For any normal business, long-term client relationships are commercially valuable. For a worker-owned business, they are suspicious. The entire framework starts from the premise that the business is not real and works backwards from there.
You say the consultancy's employees "already pay full Income Tax and National Insurance" as though that settles it. The small business owner earning more than both the employee and the consultancy worker will pay more tax, because they earn more and do not have the instruments available to larger companies exempt from this regime to reduce their tax burden - transfer pricing, offshore margin routing, intercompany structures. The framing asks you to compare only the worker's personal tax position to an employee's, while ignoring that the entity capturing the surplus in the consultancy model contributes far less to the Treasury. That is designed to make employees resent the business owner while the consultancy extracting more value and contributing less tax is never part of the conversation. You have just demonstrated this perfectly.
You say I am speaking out of both sides of my mouth. I am not. The ownership structure triggers the regime. The contract and working arrangements determine the outcome of the assessment within that regime. These are two separate stages. The first stage - who gets subjected to this test at all - is determined by ownership. A large plumbing company sending an employee to the same job under the same conditions is never tested. That is the asymmetry. You keep describing the second stage as though it answers my question about the first.
Yes they are. That’s the point of IR35 and why it’s not a class issue. If the person wants to be a business owner, then operate as a self-employed contractor and not an employee.
It’s nothing to do with class.
> For any normal business, having repeat customers is a sign of quality
They’re not a “repeat customer,” they’re the only “customer.” I gave examples of real business, this includes many IT contractors that I’ve worked with. I pointed out many other trades do not typically fall into IR35 because they operate as self-employed business owners.
> The small business owner earning more than both the employee and the consultancy worker
You’re comparing two different sized paycheques, it’s apples and oranges. I don’t accept your assertion that one always gets paid more than the other.
> The framing asks you to compare only the worker's personal tax position to an employee's
Because that’s what IR35 is targeting for the reason I stated, not because of class.
> while ignoring that the entity capturing the surplus
Irrelevant. They’re completely different types of work and working arrangement. The employee embedded in the company is acting like an employee and are taxed as one.
> The ownership structure triggers the regime.
It triggers the test, it does not determine the outcome. The outcome is, fundamentally, based on whether the worker acts as an employee or a self employed contractor. Class doesn’t come into it.
You say "they're not a repeat customer, they're the only customer." A business with one large account is still a business. Plenty of legitimate companies derive the majority of their revenue from a single client. No one questions their legitimacy. A defence contractor with one government contract is not told it is disguised employment. A law firm with one anchor client is not subjected to a status test. This suspicion is reserved exclusively for worker-owned companies.
You say the consultancy comparison is "irrelevant" and "completely different types of work and working arrangement." You keep asserting this. I keep asking you to explain what is different about the work when the person is at the same desk, same hours, same equipment, same client, same duration. You have never answered this. You answer with "the contracts are different," which is the product of the legal framework, not an independent fact.
You say "class doesn't come into it" and "it triggers the test, it does not determine the outcome." I have not claimed ownership determines the outcome. I have asked, repeatedly, why ownership determines who gets tested. You have now acknowledged that it does. A large company supplying a worker in identical conditions is never tested. You say that is because their worker is "already an employee." Right - employed by a company that captures the margin. When the worker owns the company and keeps the margin themselves, suddenly a test is needed. The variable is not the nature of the work. The variable is who keeps the profit. That is a class distinction.
In practice zero hour contracts mean that if a company wants you to work you often need to work because if you don't they can simply not give you any more hours in future. I.e., the big difference between a zero hour contract and gig work is that in that the company controls the hours, not you.
And this isn't just because the companies are scummy, but for somewhat sensible operational reasons. Zero hour contracts are common in places like supermarkets because they allow companies to flex their staffing levels with, for example, seasonal demand (although there are other solutions to that problem that are better for employees!). On d day to day basis they might still need more shop floor workers on a busy Saturday than on a quiet Monday, so it means they need to be able to control the scheduling rather than workers controlling the scheduling to ensure they always have appropriate staffing levels. If you gave complete control to workers you'd regularly find you had too many people working at quiet times and too few at busy, and even if you put controls in place to avoid too many workers at a time, you'd never be able to guarantee that you'd have enough at busy times which wouldn't really be an acceptable outcome for anyone.
But going back to your point of misunderstanding: zero contracts are perhaps more like the worst aspects of gig employment married to the worst aspects of non-gig employment, which means that they operate quite differently to gig employment.
gig work should have a higher minimum wage. double from normal at least. if minimum wage is $12 per hour. then gig-minimum should be $24 per hour. and there should be minimum hours of work guaranteed. these may be negotiable, but the big issue is that gig workers don't have the negotiation power and competence to work this out on their own. that's the whole reason why we have laws to protect employees in the first place.
as a freelancer i have no protection, but i knew that going in and made a choice. gig-workers don't know that, and they often do gig work as a last resort, so they have no choice. laws haven't caught up yet to protect them.
A labour union in Finland interviewed some Wolt gig workers and found that after discounting for time waited for delivery and expenses their effective take home pay was around 2.5€ per hour.
We can expect this to spread more and more from taxis and delivery service to wider spectrums.
It makes no sense for these to be the responsibility of a buyer. Let people buy and sell products and services, and let the government collect tax and provide subsidies.
The key point is that it's just a tax. The government should still be the one doing unemployment, although they're not, but that would be the ideal.
So maybe if you have, say, a dangerous business you pay more healthcare tax or something. That could work instead of letting companies provide health insurance.
If you as a buyer of labor can't afford the cost it takes for that labor to exist, you are a zombie company and should be shut down. You can't expect to buy business inputs for less than those inputs cost as a business model. Yet because people still have to figure out how to live even when the numbers don't work, business thinks it's a reasonable model to expect from humans. It's not. And the system WILL break if business keeps this up.
Which is why it is stupid to have government policy that requires buyers to be responsible for these things. Serf-dom is a bad thing. Today, we have democracy, so the people should vote for the government, made up of the people, by the people, to provide those things.
If we want no protections in business relationships, no special treatment, start with the very special protection/treatment/made up rule that is the fictional corporate 'entity'.
Or do some people (company owners) deserve special government labels/treatment/protections while others (zero hour workers) don't? If you don't want these rules, let's start at the start. No more corporate entities as they are just special protections and special protections in business are bad and create mis-incentives. Government shouldn't be in the business of giving people 'special protections' when it comes to business, right?
>Or do some people (company owners) deserve special government labels/treatment/protections while others (zero hour workers) don't?
Obviously not, but I have no idea what you are referring to in the context of this discussion. A "corporation" has always been free to stop buying something from another "corporation" anytime.
Corporations only exist because society creates a pretend entity called a corporation via laws/rules/regulations. If we want to get rid of business laws we might as well just get rid of corporations, especially if we are getting rid of policies that create an un-even relationship in business. No reason to have laws that give special protections, it just gets in the way of business.
So much of thought put forward on this site is 'ignore the hundreds of years of policy and discussion and causes that led to the creation of something I don't like, throw it all out' be it labor laws, intellectual property rights, financial policy. Meanwhile the same tech minds couldn't even deliver on the tech-optimist world promised in the early 2000s that was brand new, created form the ground up and instead delivered an enshitified tech world.
Routinely, the solution to problems is "idk just burn it down lol" and these people say it without an ounce of irony.
If you remove regulations without preventing the reason we built those regulations in the first place, then you'll just get them again.
People do not do things because they're stupid or just for kicks or whatever. No, they have reasons. We have tried alternatives. Turns out they suck major donkey dick and nobody likes them. That's why we don't do them anymore.
We tried the whole no regulation things. That's literally the sole reason we have regulation. Do we not understand basic cause and effect?
Isn't "non-employing business" an euphemism of sorts for "Uber driver"? No idea though if the UK is already forcing Uber to hire drivers and couriers as employees or not yet.
It was older than Uber. But it includes Uber drivers now.