Reading between the lines a bit, it seems: 1. Wallace was on Upwork to freelance. 2. Wallace was working for one client so much that he was at risk of becomin

Reading between the lines a bit, it seems: 1. Wallace was on Upwork to freelance. 2. Wallace was working for one client so much that he was at risk of becoming an employment relationship, rather than a freelancing one. 3. At no point was Wallace prevented from freelancing on Upwork; Upwork (as far as is known) presented all valid opportunities to freelance to Wallace. 4. Upwork communicated to the client that if they wanted to keep working with Wallace, they'd need to hire him. 5. The client refused to hire Wallace, and tried to find ways to circumvent labour laws. That seems to me to be a plausible interpretation of the facts from the twitter thread. In which case, the client seems to be the villain here, Upwork has done everything right, and Wallace seems to be a bit confused. In particular: "The marketing company, as confused as I was, pressed @Upwork further. @Upwork would NOT tell them, refused to tell them what those supposed compliance issues were. [...] So for the marketing company to continue assigning me work, they have to enroll in @Upwork's 'payroll service' to do it." This doesn't add up to me. Either Upwork is refusing to tell the client why they can't hire Wallace as a freelancer, OR they're telling the client they need to hire him as an employee. They can't really both be true! I don't know who's lying/confused here (maybe the client's HR dept is lying to Wallace's contact at the client, maybe the client is lying to Wallace, maybe Wallace is just confused), but it seems pretty clear that Upwork is angling for the "payroll service" upsell, and was telling the client very clearly that they need to hire Wallace. (That's not the story they told Wallace, but it doesn't seem like they really had Wallace's best interests at heart here, as they had a wide number of options available to them to fix this.) And: "So @Upwork is insisting the marketing company make me an employee" Yeah, pretty sure that's a legal requirement there buddy. And yes, I understand that both you and the client would like to circumvent it, but that's the point of labour laws; they only apply in cases where people wanted to do something they ban. Minimum wage laws have no impact on the engineer making $120k a year; they impact (for good or ill) the immigrant willing to work for $5/hour. Laws requiring firms to treat people working full time workers as employees were passed explicitly to cover the people who are happy to work full time as contractors.