This is all due to Microsoft contractors (who were treated like regular employees in the 80s and 90s) winning a lawsuit that retroactively forced Microsoft to give them a ton of stock.
Companies now have to be rude to contractors to avoid a similar lawsuit.
Or they could hire them as employees. This is not temporary work, they only use agencies to save money and circumvent workers protections.
I get that there are freelancers who like not being employees but that's not the case here. I bet most Temps at Google would love getting employee status and there's no reason most of them shouldn't. It's not like Google couldn't afford the extra payroll.
It's not that they could not afford doing it. It's that it's more affordable to not do it. Companies are not people, they have no ethics, they have no morality, they have only simple stimulus-and-response behavior, based on profit.
Make it more expensive to have long-term 'temporary' contractors, and they'll transform them all into employees overnight.
They They could hire a smaller of more qualified and invest more into automation.
The only reason Google is doing this is because they don't want to spend the same amount on benefits and other overhead on 15$ per hour worker as they do for a 30$ per hour one.
They have the $15/hour contractors lugging batteries, hell yea they should invest in automation, but unfortunately as you point out the legal environment does not incentivize them to do so.
> some people don't want to be employees, they want to be contractors.
Highly educated, well-paid people much more likely than people doing physical jobs. If you can negotiate your rates, your projects and can skip some corporate bullshit that fits some people. With a physical job where the wage is hardly enough until next pay day, I doubt that is a preferred option for many.
I've done the 1099 thing before. I had an accountant and my own LLC. I made sure to have a separate bank account that I dumped 30% of my billable time into. Each tax season I'd cut a giant check to the IRS.
I mean no disrespect to the "gig economy" people, but 1099 requires a lot of discipline. Most of them probably don't need to pay estimated taxes and instead will be cutting giant checks to the IRS each year. It requires a hell of a lot of discipline to stare at thousands of dollars of money sitting in your own bank account knowing you cannot spend that no matter what--that is uncle sam's money.
I wonder how many gig economy people wind up owing the IRS a ton of money. Especially when they have to pay self-employment tax on top of normal tax.
Plus I bet very good money 99% of them aren't paying state or municipal taxes. As a 1099 I had to pay Washington State B&O tax every year as well as some token amount to Seattle.
But this argument presupposes that employee v. contractor is a choice that the worker or the company is allowed to make. It's emphatically, objectively not. It's a tax designation. There are lines and rules that define which of those you are.
> This is all due to Microsoft contractors (who were treated like regular employees in the 80s and 90s) winning a lawsuit that retroactively forced Microsoft to give them a ton of stock.
This is all due to Microsoft who used contractors like regular employees in the 80s and 90s but did not compensate them like regular employees. It's not the workers fault.
The Microsoft contractors double-dipped. They got higher-than-employee wages during their contracts, and later got all the stock options they gave up by being contractors. Nice work if you can get it.
I don't know the exact numbers for this case, but contractors always appear to be overpaid. What most people who call them overpaid miss is that contractors have to pay their own employment taxes, as well as any health benefits (including vacation time) they want out of that income.
If you consider those, the cost of your average employee to the company employing them is roughly 1.6x to 2x their gross income. An overpaid contractor would have to make well over 2x that of a normal employee.
And the point of the person above you is that after the lawsuit, they had all those things retroactively paid for, so they ended up making more than they would have as employees.
The parent makes no such claims. They claim that prior to the lawsuit they were being paid "higher wages", and stock options after. There is no mention of taxes, health care, vacation, etc.
I once knew a guy who was paid $1500 US dollars per day working for the government as a contractor. He was an SAP Developer.
For the first 6 weeks of his contract with the government, he didn't have a computer at his desk. So he sat there reading manuals and stuff.
I don't think the government will ever want to reform the system of "contractors should be employees". The government too benefits from contractors. Bigly.
I get that there are freelancers who like not being employees but that's not the case here. I bet most Temps at Google would love getting employee status and there's no reason most of them shouldn't. It's not like Google couldn't afford the extra payroll.