[ahelwer]

I also had to engage with this bodyshop arrangement. Heard a fellow contractor referring to it as "paying the pimp", which I guess has some similarities.

It's worth noting that you can usually contract directly with a company as long as you maintain scoped part-time contracts with multiple companies, instead of a single open-ended long-term contract with a single company. It's true that independent contractors are somewhat disadvantaged by this whole setup, but we should also recognize that voluntary independent freelance contracting of this type is quite a privileged position and it's good our desired style of work isn't being used to undermine the rights of W-2 employees.

[im_down_w_otp]

Isn't it? Isn't that what the "bodyshop" is for? To protect the dynamic the buyer exploited previously, but now with a rent-seeker in the middle? It doesn't seem like the workers on either end are better protected as a result.

Honestly asking.

[ahelwer]

You're mostly right, although the way I see it is this: there are a few subclasses of independent contractor. At the top are people with high hourly rates who have niche skillsets and want to work on their own with minimal involvement in the company with which they have a contract. In the middle are the perma-temps involved in the Microsoft lawsuit or at H-1B shops, usually fairly well-paid but lacking many benefits like stock grants. At the bottom are the precarious underclass of people outlined in the article who make close to minimum wage. Then of course you have the gig workers (Uber, Instacart, etc.) who are paid piecemeal.

It used to be the people at the top could have their cake & eat it too, where sometimes they'd have long open-ended contracts with a company directly - maintaining independence but also getting a steady paycheck. Now they have to shack up with one of these bodyshops that gets a fat cut of their labor, which disincentivizes the setup. I was certainly glad to get out of it; the whole operation felt shady from start to finish. Politically, this class of people used to be available as cover for the entirety of the contracting workforce. Did lawmakers really want to rob these All-American Mavericks of their Freedom? Anything that further disincentivizes the mock W-2 job route is a good thing IMO. The current situation of course is not sufficient but it's better than the free-for-all it used to be. I guess you could say it has hightened the contradictions.

Some might say given the reality of these distinctions within independent contractors, we should segregate protections based on income. I don't think that'll work. Any policy targeted at helping only those of lower means will quickly become a policy to be watered down further and further and further as all the incentives in the system are aligned toward greater exploitation. By including all classes of independent contractor in any legislation, we make it stronger against attacks that would land hardest on the worst off. If that shuts down some avenues of employment for people at the top, well, so be it. I don't think scoped contracts will ever go away.

Worth noting this entire thing is to some degree a sideshow of the larger debate about health insurance and how it's tied to employment. If medicare for all were passed, a lot of these issues would just go away.

[coryking]

> health insurance and how it's tied to employment

Without getting too political, I really feel like untying health insurance from employment would transform the labor market and encourage far more entrepreneurial endeavors. People could take more risks if they didn't have to worry about losing healthcare coverage.

There are obvious tradeoffs involved, but I really never see this aspect considered in public debate. Making healthcare independent of employment really empowers people to do their own thing.

[lotsofpulp]

> There are obvious tradeoffs involved, but I really never see this aspect considered in public debate.

It was a big aspect in 2009/2010 when ACA was being passed.

The reason people want insurance tied to employment is because they benefit from lower premiums because their risk pool experiences less healthcare costs than the general public.

If everyone was dumped into one marketplace and risk pool, then the insurance premiums would have to rise for those working in white collar businesses who had previously been able to enjoy lower premiums since the nature of employment as a requirement precludes many sick people experiencing healthcare costs.

So when people complain that ACA increased their healthcare costs, what they are actually complaining about is having to now share risk pools with sicker people who previously were not getting healthcare period.

The optimal way this would work is if everyone was dumped onto healthcare.gov, and they picked whatever health insurance plan they want, and then naturally the premiums would balance out over time so that the costs are spread amongst the whole population.

Basically, taxpayer funded healthcare, except instead of one managed care organization (the US federal government) you have multiple (United Health, Anthem, Kaiser, CVS, Humana, etc).

[ahelwer]

Why continue to allow the existence of these various parasitic middlemen health insurance companies with their redundant bureaucracies and the N x N billing problems, networks, etc. they introduce?

[lotsofpulp]

Because there are insufficient votes in Congress to change it. Even the current implementation of various managed care organizations and mandatory coverage with limits on premiums and out of pocket maximums BARELY passed.

And it was gutted pretty quickly when the most important part of it, mandatory purchasing of insurance (I.e. a tax), was repealed in 2017.

[908B64B197]

That's one of the reasons a lot of businesses in tech are founded while still in school: You get to keep your (low premium) coverage.

[pkaye]

Isn't a lot of Europe like this? Do they have more entrepreneurial endeavors than the US?

[idiotsecant]

Yes, in some places. In the US the entrepreneurship rate measuring the % of the population involved in that kind of activity hovers around 14%-ish. There are European countries like Estonia and others in the north and baltic regions that beat that rate while still providing high quality universal healthcare. As a rule, though, it seems like western European countries are significantly less entrepreneurial.

I think the entrepreneurial rate has a lot more to do with cultural attitudes around risk and individual success. Some countries like Italy, for example, have rates in the very low single digits. I'm not sure you can overall make a case for universal healthcare increasing entrepreneurial enterprise. Whether it might increase it specifically in the US might be a different question, though.