[jfengel]

Isn't that exactly what you get to do with contractors? One of your criteria in picking a contractor is showing up. Kind of a problem, I'm told, with housing contractors.

And as with housing contractors, the best way to get them to show up is to offer more money than their other offers.

[mattkrause]

There’s a subtle difference.

Contractors are supposed to be relatively independent. You give them the outcome (a new deck), a deadline (June 1st), and any stipulations (no work after 9pm) and they organize the work however they see fit. One guy could work steadily for two weeks, or a bunch of staff could show up and knock out the deck in two days.

Employees are supposed to take more direction. You can tell an employee that she must start at 8am each day. She will dig holes for the footings on the north and west sides first, then start cutting stringers while the other guy finishes the south and east sides.

[woah]

Yea, the definition of contractor that often gets thrown around in these discussions seems to exclude most real world contractors. I’ve worked as a construction contractor and a software contractor, and I did not get to set my hours in either one. It seems like the legal system is out of touch with the world of business.

The real definition of a contractor may be “an employment relationship in which the worker does not want to assert employee rights”. In my case I did not want to be an employee because contractors got paid more for the same work, and I liked taking time off between gigs.

[mattkrause]

The ability to set hours isn’t the only distinction, but it’s an easy and obvious one to test. Using your own tools is another one: it’s a rare deck builder who shows up and asks to borrow your saw.

That said, there is a lot of grey area and it’s also true that a lot of jobs are misclassified. That doesn’t make the classification meaningless though, and I would thrilled if governments were more proactive about making sure people go the rights they’re entitled to.

[eropple]

You can't make those stipulations on contractors whose entire relationship with the company is built on on-demand providing of on-demand rides.

You can attempt to rewrite the contracts to change the allowed and encouraged behaviors, but the more restrictions added, the more it starts to smell like an employer-employee relationship--and that will kill Uber and Lyft stone dead.