If the feds said you had to insult someone every time you bought printer ink, and then lots of people started getting insulted, I would lean towards blaming the feds for that outcome rather than blaming the people who buy printer ink.
Of course, it could separately be the case that people buy too much printer ink, and that we have good reasons for asking them to buy less. In which case our feelings about these new insults might be complicated. But if the goal of a regulation is "do less X", and the chosen mechanism is "you must insult other people when you do X", I'd call that questionable policy design.
Coming back from the metaphor, it seems more accurate to say that this regulatory situation with contractors wasn't explicitly designed at all, but rather "emerged" out of previous policies and court decisions. So maybe asking whether it was designed well or poorly is beside the point.
This isn't printer ink, this is somebody working for you full time who you don't want to call an employee because it's cheaper not to.
The idea is that if you treat somebody like an employee, they're an employee, and that idea was allowed to be hollowed out. If companies participate in certain shunning rituals they're allowed to keep those same cheap employees.
The purpose of the ruling wasn't to allow companies to operate in an identical way with identical costs, just meaner. It's not even a perverse incentive resulting from the ruling. It's that we've decided that only superficial, administrative features define an employment relationship, and so long as those rituals are adhered to, the fact that you work full time completely under the control of someone for years on end is not sufficient. There's no limit to the indirection, you may not have ever met your "actual" employer.
This is not an accidental outcome, this is an efficient outcome. It could be ended by government, but for the people who pay the people who work in government, it's ideal.
> The idea is that if you treat somebody like an employee, they're an employee, and that idea was allowed to be hollowed out.
Other way around. The status quo was that you could treat a contractor like an employee in everything but pay and benefits (like healthcare), and they were still a contractor.
A court ruling decreed that was no longer the case, so now for companies to have contractors at all they must draw a bright-line demarcation in perks between FTEs and TVCs. A line that is frequently dehumanizing, because dehumanizing is visible and easy to argue in a court of law.
Anyone who predicted any other outcome was naive, and those of us who want this silly pageant to end should be agitating for a law that functionally bans contracting.
Contractors are not normally cheaper than employees. All the overheads of an employee need to be paid for in the contract, plus profit, so if it comes out less than an employee, something isn't right.
Contractors offer flexibility. Contractors can be engaged and disengaged without labour law complications.
This is 100% on the companies who are working loopholes to avoid providing the same benefits and protections to some of their employees. The government would have zero issue with Google hiring everyone as an employee, but Google is choosing to twist the system to their own selfish benefit.
So... Google is legally required to treat contractors as second class citizens to afford them the privilege of being able to mistreat them and fire them at the drop of a pin.
We understand the """"purpose"""" of having contractors.
Not unlike how the GDPR resulted in banners everywhere, because the law stops short of banning contracting, companies have, of course, sought the optimal just-up-to-the-edge balance.
The biggest two reasons it matters (i.e. two biggest disincentives from just hiring contractors) are healthcare and quarterly reports. Healthcare provision is very expensive, even amortized across the employees in a company, and TVCs get no healthcare from the client company. And the client company can grow and shrink TVC contracts all day long without having to tell shareholders they went through a mass hiring cycle or a layoff cycle.
It's weird that we look down on people acting like massive pricks to save money in their personal lives. But once you wrap a business around them then most people don't seem to care.
As I grow older it bothers me more. Some classes of people have a facade where it's socially acceptable to be assholes, but other people, well, that's a moral failing. The US has a new religion, and it's worse than the last one.
Federal policy just says that if you don't distinguish between regular employees and contractors, the contractors are considered regular employees.
It doesn't say you are not allowed to hire those people as regular employees and treat them like regular employees.