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It should be that if: * All your work is for one firm * You use their tools and/or premises to do the work * You have no realistic opportunity to work some w

by worik 6y ago

It should be that if: * All your work is for one firm * You use their tools and/or premises to do the work * You have no realistic opportunity to work some where else - either a restriction in your contract or due to the hours that you work Then no matter what it says on your contract you are a employee. That used to be the law in Aotearoa for everybody. But when Peter Jackson turned rouge they changed the law, personally for him and Warner Brothers, to take those rights from people working on films. And computer games. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/nz-government-changes-labor-law-33436 https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/nz-government-changes... Treating people as interchangeable parts, like machines, is simply evil.

amanzi 6y ago
I think your third point is key. For the first two points I believe that you can still be a contractor if you are choosing to do all your work for one firm and you're using their tools and premises to do the work.
raylad 6y ago
One effect of your 3rd point is that companies decide to reduce the number of hours they offer to employees to keep them just under whatever threshold is created. This happened in NYC with adjunct professors years ago, according to one of my friends who was working as one. If they wanted to avoid paying benefits they had to reduce the number of hours per semester, and it became uneconomical to keep doing the job for him since the amount of preparation was almost the same but the pay was much reduced.
- Pet_Ant 6y ago
  Wouldn’t a simple fix be to say that if you have two part time positions at the same time for the same skill set you must merge them into a single full time one. Sure, it’s heavy handed, but if they are gonna play games we can’t leave things to trust and common sense.
  - LeifCarrotson 6y ago
    What do you mean by "merge" them? Have two employees (more accurately, 4 part-time 29.5-hour employees doing the work of 3 full-time 40-hour employees) share benefits: "You get health insurance this month and I get it next month, you can contribute to your 401k this month and I can next month" kind of thing? Or prohibit you from hiring more than 3 'unnecessary' part-time employees? I'm abundantly familiar with the sort of antics that are involved. For another example, my wife used to work in childcare. To cover 8 classrooms Monday to Friday from 7:30 to 5:30 with at least one lead and one aide, plus two floaters (900 hours per week) they employed approximately 36 part-time workers (several were high school/college study programs working 16 or 24 hours per week) and no full-time workers. You're suggesting that they should be mandated to instead hire 24 full-time workers and pay benefits? In actuality, every teacher and aide except the owners used to be mandated to work no more than 29.5 hours per week. You often had short stints of working from after nap time at 2pm to 5:30pm just so that you could make hours (which sucked when she was driving 30 minutes at 16mpg to make $10.75/hour with gas at $4/gallon). Some people got scheduled mornings, some got afternoons, but you didn't dare come in for a full day because then they'd have to give benefits. It was amazing how paranoid and irate the front office would get at 5:31pm when couple parents were late for pick-up and they had to keep staff around for more than their scheduled hours. If anyone hit more than 30 hours, they'd shuffle the schedule so they were no longer working afternoon shifts that might go long, and this was all complicated by frequently requested shift trades among the underpaid and underemployed people involved; you weren't allowed to cover for anyone if you'd gone over 30 hours in any of the previous 4 weeks. And it was a nightmare for anyone who tried to have a second job that might need you between 7:30 and 5:30, you wouldn't know for sure until Friday night what you'd be asked to work Monday morning. And they weren't just turning screws in a factory, this also had negative effects on the kids they were teaching when they'd wake up from nap time to find a relative stranger watching them. Given the demographic, they much preferred shuffling around colorful magnets on a calendar to spreadsheets or databases, and there was a lot of shuffling indeed. But I'd hate to imagine what it would be like to code an automated time clock for that byzantine system...it would be generous to call it a game.
  - ghufran_syed 6y ago
    how exactly would you “merge” them?
- clairity 6y ago
  that's why functions in any public policy should be continuous to remove obvious points of stress and leverage used for gaming the system. federal income tax is this way, even as the derivative function, tax rate, is discontinous (bracketed).
stevesearer 6y ago
We employ people that work less than 5 hours/week who get to make their own schedule and work from their homes. Even though all of them have other jobs and use it as a small side hustle, we still classify them as employees. Many people choose to forget that there is such a thing as a part-time employee.
snarf21 6y ago
You missed the ability to negotiate the price of your work and not face consequences for not taking jobs that pay less.
klmadfejno 6y ago
There was a time when janitors were employees. They're not INDEPENDENT contractors, but they're still filling a much shittier niche than in decades prior. Mostly we just need labor protection laws in general and non-employer provided health care I'd say.
lacker 6y ago
You have no realistic opportunity to work some where else - either a restriction in your contract or due to the hours that you work I think this part would need to be more specific. A while ago I worked as a low level employee at the Gap in Boston, and the rules were that nobody could work more than 29 hours per week so that nobody was categorized as full time, but you also had to be available whenever you were scheduled. However, many people had two jobs, despite this restriction. They would be asking other employees to swap shifts every week and sometimes failing but usually making it work. Nowadays, with Uber, it's a lot easier to fill in an extra 15 hours a week that you'd like to work. So who could really claim to have "no realistic opportunity to work somewhere else" if any odd hours could be filled as an Uber driver or similar gig worker? It's important to recognize that the different ways of scheduling part time work are really different. 20 hours a week that is mandated with three days notice by your employer really sucks. 20 hours a week that you choose with the Uber app is far better.
- a_wild_dandan 6y ago
  Yeah, how do we get more specific here? I had a few ideas, but they all seemed similarly nebulous or else might create suspicious discontinuities. [1] I wonder if categorizing contractors v. employees is like recognizing porn. "I know it when I see it" says Justice Stewart. 1. https://danluu.com/discontinuities/ https://danluu.com/discontinuities/
  - lacker 6y ago
    I just think it's a bad idea to treat contractors and employees differently. It's crazy to have someone happily doing X hours of work, wishing they could do X+10 hours of work per week, and their boss also wishes they could do X+10 hours of work per week, but then the position would have to be paid more and they don't have the money. It's just cruel to take someone working a minimum wage job, which sucks enough already, and then make them get TWO minimum wage jobs, two bosses, two schedules to work around, all because they can get a contractor job but not a full time job. So if we say, if you employ someone at a normal 40 hour a week job, you have to provide them with benefit X. Then if you pay a contractor 20 hours a week you should have to provide them with something that's half the cost of benefit X. It just sucks to incentivize companies to hire two thousand 20-hour-a-week positions instead of one thousand 40-hour-a-week positions.
0xfaded 6y ago
This was done in the UK and parts of Europe basically to appease the taxman. See https://www.netlawman.co.uk/ia/ir35 https://www.netlawman.co.uk/ia/ir35 The consequence, as partially intended, is that companies are hesitant to work with individual contractors. The problem is that if you want to start a consultancy, you're going to have a fun time finding your first client. The correct solution is to decouple employment from taxation/benefits/pension/health-care/everything.
JohnGB 6y ago
That is essentially how it works in many European countries, but even stricter. In the Netherlands for example, if 70%+ of your work is for a single employer and the number of hours is above some reasonable threshold, then you're an employee.

by worik 6y ago

amanzi 6y ago

I think your third point is key. For the first two points I believe that you can still be a contractor if you are choosing to do all your work for one firm and you're using their tools and premises to do the work.

raylad 6y ago

One effect of your 3rd point is that companies decide to reduce the number of hours they offer to employees to keep them just under whatever threshold is created. This happened in NYC with adjunct professors years ago, according to one of my friends who was working as one. If they wanted to avoid paying benefits they had to reduce the number of hours per semester, and it became uneconomical to keep doing the job for him since the amount of preparation was almost the same but the pay was much reduced.

Pet_Ant 6y ago
Wouldn’t a simple fix be to say that if you have two part time positions at the same time for the same skill set you must merge them into a single full time one. Sure, it’s heavy handed, but if they are gonna play games we can’t leave things to trust and common sense.
- LeifCarrotson 6y ago
  What do you mean by "merge" them? Have two employees (more accurately, 4 part-time 29.5-hour employees doing the work of 3 full-time 40-hour employees) share benefits: "You get health insurance this month and I get it next month, you can contribute to your 401k this month and I can next month" kind of thing? Or prohibit you from hiring more than 3 'unnecessary' part-time employees? I'm abundantly familiar with the sort of antics that are involved. For another example, my wife used to work in childcare. To cover 8 classrooms Monday to Friday from 7:30 to 5:30 with at least one lead and one aide, plus two floaters (900 hours per week) they employed approximately 36 part-time workers (several were high school/college study programs working 16 or 24 hours per week) and no full-time workers. You're suggesting that they should be mandated to instead hire 24 full-time workers and pay benefits? In actuality, every teacher and aide except the owners used to be mandated to work no more than 29.5 hours per week. You often had short stints of working from after nap time at 2pm to 5:30pm just so that you could make hours (which sucked when she was driving 30 minutes at 16mpg to make $10.75/hour with gas at $4/gallon). Some people got scheduled mornings, some got afternoons, but you didn't dare come in for a full day because then they'd have to give benefits. It was amazing how paranoid and irate the front office would get at 5:31pm when couple parents were late for pick-up and they had to keep staff around for more than their scheduled hours. If anyone hit more than 30 hours, they'd shuffle the schedule so they were no longer working afternoon shifts that might go long, and this was all complicated by frequently requested shift trades among the underpaid and underemployed people involved; you weren't allowed to cover for anyone if you'd gone over 30 hours in any of the previous 4 weeks. And it was a nightmare for anyone who tried to have a second job that might need you between 7:30 and 5:30, you wouldn't know for sure until Friday night what you'd be asked to work Monday morning. And they weren't just turning screws in a factory, this also had negative effects on the kids they were teaching when they'd wake up from nap time to find a relative stranger watching them. Given the demographic, they much preferred shuffling around colorful magnets on a calendar to spreadsheets or databases, and there was a lot of shuffling indeed. But I'd hate to imagine what it would be like to code an automated time clock for that byzantine system...it would be generous to call it a game.
- ghufran_syed 6y ago
  how exactly would you “merge” them?
clairity 6y ago
that's why functions in any public policy should be continuous to remove obvious points of stress and leverage used for gaming the system. federal income tax is this way, even as the derivative function, tax rate, is discontinous (bracketed).

stevesearer 6y ago

We employ people that work less than 5 hours/week who get to make their own schedule and work from their homes. Even though all of them have other jobs and use it as a small side hustle, we still classify them as employees. Many people choose to forget that there is such a thing as a part-time employee.

snarf21 6y ago

You missed the ability to negotiate the price of your work and not face consequences for not taking jobs that pay less.

klmadfejno 6y ago

There was a time when janitors were employees. They're not INDEPENDENT contractors, but they're still filling a much shittier niche than in decades prior. Mostly we just need labor protection laws in general and non-employer provided health care I'd say.

lacker 6y ago

You have no realistic opportunity to work some where else - either a restriction in your contract or due to the hours that you work I think this part would need to be more specific. A while ago I worked as a low level employee at the Gap in Boston, and the rules were that nobody could work more than 29 hours per week so that nobody was categorized as full time, but you also had to be available whenever you were scheduled. However, many people had two jobs, despite this restriction. They would be asking other employees to swap shifts every week and sometimes failing but usually making it work. Nowadays, with Uber, it's a lot easier to fill in an extra 15 hours a week that you'd like to work. So who could really claim to have "no realistic opportunity to work somewhere else" if any odd hours could be filled as an Uber driver or similar gig worker? It's important to recognize that the different ways of scheduling part time work are really different. 20 hours a week that is mandated with three days notice by your employer really sucks. 20 hours a week that you choose with the Uber app is far better.

a_wild_dandan 6y ago
Yeah, how do we get more specific here? I had a few ideas, but they all seemed similarly nebulous or else might create suspicious discontinuities. [1] I wonder if categorizing contractors v. employees is like recognizing porn. "I know it when I see it" says Justice Stewart. 1. https://danluu.com/discontinuities/ https://danluu.com/discontinuities/
- lacker 6y ago
  I just think it's a bad idea to treat contractors and employees differently. It's crazy to have someone happily doing X hours of work, wishing they could do X+10 hours of work per week, and their boss also wishes they could do X+10 hours of work per week, but then the position would have to be paid more and they don't have the money. It's just cruel to take someone working a minimum wage job, which sucks enough already, and then make them get TWO minimum wage jobs, two bosses, two schedules to work around, all because they can get a contractor job but not a full time job. So if we say, if you employ someone at a normal 40 hour a week job, you have to provide them with benefit X. Then if you pay a contractor 20 hours a week you should have to provide them with something that's half the cost of benefit X. It just sucks to incentivize companies to hire two thousand 20-hour-a-week positions instead of one thousand 40-hour-a-week positions.

0xfaded 6y ago

This was done in the UK and parts of Europe basically to appease the taxman. See https://www.netlawman.co.uk/ia/ir35 https://www.netlawman.co.uk/ia/ir35 The consequence, as partially intended, is that companies are hesitant to work with individual contractors. The problem is that if you want to start a consultancy, you're going to have a fun time finding your first client. The correct solution is to decouple employment from taxation/benefits/pension/health-care/everything.

JohnGB 6y ago

That is essentially how it works in many European countries, but even stricter. In the Netherlands for example, if 70%+ of your work is for a single employer and the number of hours is above some reasonable threshold, then you're an employee.