[ballark]

Are you going to legislate away all contractor work? Because every medium to large company and even government agencies utilize contractors.

You can't build and develop subject matter expertise on everything. And besides that, contractors are often used to scale when you have demand that you can't necessarily meet with your current capabilities.

I guess I don't understand how your "solution" to this problem scales to the regulatory world outside of Amazon.

[r00fus]

Contractors that are given tasks or objectives and set their own hours are fine.

Contractors that are all but employees in name (ie, their routes picked, hours required) are not.

[lutorm]

That's not even nearly what I said. I said that if someone is consistently told how, when, where, and what to do, or what to wear, then they're an employee.

If, on the other hand, they're asked to do something and have the freedom to set the price for the task, to accept or reject the task as they see fit, and perform it at a time, place, and manner of their choosing, and they perform this task for several different clients, then it's perfectly reasonable to consider them a contractor. Which pretty much is what the IRS says, as well, as linked by jcranmer above.

[RaceWon]

> I said that if someone is consistently told how, when, where, and what to do, or what to wear, then they're an employee.

I'm sorry this is simply not true. I work for one of the largest Health and Hospital Corporations in the States (They own 25 hospitals and have 60,000 employees) and sub-contractors Are Always told "how, when, where, and what to do, or what to wear,". Always and Without Execption.

[tracer4201]

I contracted for 8 years in the energy industry. How, when, where, and what were standard requirements defined by the company I worked at. The main difference day to day was I didn’t attend some company town halls or have access to the wellness facilities.

Are you proposing a massive overhaul to the legal framework around contractors or just wanting to target Amazon?

[lutorm]

No, but I think you and the other commenter would not have been allowed to be contractors if the IRS rules were actually enforced. Have you read them?