Right, but it gets trickier than that because even though you give someone a fixed-length period, if you're the only job a contractor does, and you pick the day

Right, but it gets trickier than that because even though you give someone a fixed-length period, if you're the only job a contractor does, and you pick the days they work, here you are essentially becoming the employer. Don't know what the US employment taxes are, but it was prohibitively expensive for us as a startup. The total employee costs run about 1.4-1.6x net base salary, even if we would outsource through a temp/payrolling agency.