I agree a company like Uber and their workers' incentives do end up misaligned in certain ways, and when that happens the contractors often end up losing. But t

I agree a company like Uber and their workers' incentives do end up misaligned in certain ways, and when that happens the contractors often end up losing. But that is all because of this system that we continue to perpetuate, for really no good reason imo. As I heard it phrased by an economist once, why do we look to the government to create jobs and look to private corporations to protect workers? Surely the incentives & competencies would be better aligned the other way around. If all of the basic, expected workers' rights that we've come to expect were decoupled from full-time employment, surely removing that friction from both workers and companies would be beneficial to the economy. A couple years ago I left a full-time job to work on a new startup and the overhead was surprisingly stressful - making sure to set up COBRA correctly because it's all but impossible to find good health insurance as 3-person company, and if you do the process wrong you just won't have health insurance for the year. Your 401k was tied to your job so you can't keep contributing without setting up some other system. And this was just transitioning to a new, funded company, I imagine quitting to become a freelancer or independent contractor would be even more confusing. I suppose it's in companies' best interests to keep this stuff convoluted and keep themselves in the position of power by having built up the knowledge of understanding this stuff. But if we passed laws to change these expectations (Obamacare is at least a step in this direction) so that companies just paid cash and it was reasonable to set up these things yourself, it would make workers' lives so much simpler. And our society wouldn't have to keep having this argument, plus all the lawsuits that stem from it, about whether or not Uber or anyone else should be covering more of these "benefits" for their employees.