A bunch of delivery companies did this in Germany around 10-15 years ago, basically helping people to start their own companies and then hiring them back via an

A bunch of delivery companies did this in Germany around 10-15 years ago, basically helping people to start their own companies and then hiring them back via an exclusive business partnership to do deliveries for them. By doing that they conveniently transferred all the risk and hidden costs like depreciation of the delivery vehicle, maintenance, sick & holiday pay as well as social security & retirement fees to their "business partners", which were often not able to properly understand what they got themselves into. This practice also spread to other industries like cleaning and building maintenance and became so abusive that a new law was introduced to counteract it, giving rise to a new legal term: Scheinselbständigkeit (false self-employment). The law basically states that if you are a one-man business that operates exclusively for a single client over an extended period of time you will gain the status of an employee of that company. Hence I'm not surprised Amazon is trying to pull this off as well, I don't think they'll have much success with it though, at least in Europe (I hope).