Yeah I noticed that one as well. Fedex's requirements were absurdly detailed, eg drivers had to keep their keys on the pinky finger of the non-writing hand while outside the truck. The court figuratively rolled its eyes at the claim that the drivers were not employees, and I thought the exact same thing when I saw Homejoy's disclaimer.
Sure, you can put a bold disclaimer like this in your terms of service, in big capital letters so your customers can't say they missed it. But in the event of a legal dispute, courts will consider how you act as well as what you boldly assert. To quote the Homejoy regional manager interview for the article: “Finding qualified talent, individuals who have experience working in this industry, bringing them in to interview and onboarding them — all that takes more time than it takes for a client to go online and book [...]” and it is these services, presumably, for which HomeJoy takes a cut of what the client pays.
And therein lies Homejoy's future legal problem, in my amateur (non lawyer) opinion. It's not the fact of brokering home cleaning services or even making some money out of it - if they were to charge cleaning providers a fixed fee such a monthly listing charge or even a fixed per-job administrative charge for taking care of the billing, then this claim would be easily sustainable. But Homejoy is taking a fairly substantial chunk of change for their expertise; if we take the example of Mr. Walker, who can make $2000 in a good month and has excellent ratings, over a year he might pull in $20,000. It seems like Homejoy would make $7,500 - $10,000 suing the figures in the article, although Homejoy says it's 20% (http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_23983355/homejoy-ceo-...).
Now there's certainly a skill in recruiting and qualifying potential independent contractors - we'll leave aside the question of whether this is something an employer does - but since they don't engage in any sort of training or professional development for their cleaning people, that recruitment and qualification process is fixed cost, whose market value can be assessed - and which I suspect tops out at $1-2000, even including expensive outside services like criminal background checks and so on. Then there are the ongoing expenses of carrying insurance, amortized costs of arbitration providers, payment process, and backend operations...perhaps another $2000 a year, since I'm assuming Homejoy uses the very best products and services the market has to offer.
Even after these generous evaluations of costs incurred per independent contractor, Homejoy seems to be taking a large brokerage fee. By contrast, when I look at the rate structures of online securities brokers (who are by definition matching buyers and sellers, as well as offering a rather more complex software platform to trading clients), they just have some minimal account liquidity requirements and fixed fees of about $10/trade. Homejoy's clients and cleaners might reasonably ask just what it is they're paying such a large amount of cash to Homejoy for over time, because while it's a growing business and they presumably intend to endlessly expand the range, reach, and quality of their services, that's not likely to translate into expanding income for the people who do the cleaning, as there's an upper limit on the amount of money people are willing to spend on residential cleaning services.
Eventually, though, he’d rather be in the position of the bright young staff on laptops whom he had met when he was taking his cleaning test, one of the last times he’d see anyone from Homejoy in person. “I sidled up to them and said, ‘How do I get to where you are?’”
Oh, Mr Walker, what a silly question! Just go to business and/or computer school, after you've paid for the cost of your transit, communications, cleaning supplies, and both the employer and employee share of social security on your self-employment income. You can start by familiarizing yourself with IRS procedures for determining whether someone is an employee or an independent contractor: http://www.irs.gov/Businesses/Small-Businesses-&-Self-Employ... Alternatively, you could work as a customer service representative, where you'll only make $13/hour but you will get awesome benefits, from free food to paid holidays to a pension scheme: https://www.homejoy.com/job-listings?gh_jid=15535#openings-b...