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Comment by yibg | Hacker News Reader

Isn't the solution here to turn contractor vs employee issue into a question of choice and benefit for the employee vs the employer? If retirement, time off and health benefits are also equally available to contractors then people can make the choice for the type of work they want without being disadvantaged.

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What does "time off" mean for someone who is unambiguously a contractor (such as a one-person plumber, handyman, maid, babysitter, landscaper, CPA, lawyer, etc)?

They already have as much time off as they choose to have. It's all (obviously) unpaid as "who would pay them?"

Yea time off is a bit iffy here. Some of the gig companies currently (due to covid) provides some level of "paid" sick days. But yea as a contractor it's probably less relevant than retirement and healthcare.

Time off is one of the greatest scams in the modern economy. Unless you work a position where the time increment of your work is less than the amount of time you take off, ultimately you end up being pushed to do the same amount of work in less time. You might as well have skipped your vacation or planned your PTO during a less busy time.

Really all PTO is for most salary exempt positions anymore is ability to delay work without getting fired. Now if you work in a position where you churn out things on a daily basis or less and someone will fill in for you while you're gone, PTO is actually PTO.

An agreement to be able to delay work without getting fired doesn't seem entirely like a scam.

It is when you call it vacation or paid time off. Call it "work delay credits" or something of that nature.

There's an implication from PTO of a different era where you weren't required to makeup work you missed while on PTO. Much of that has disappeared. That's fine for most salary exempt positions assuming you aren't fed a constant queue of work to keep you pushing 50+ hour weeks regularly and it's OK to do 20 hour work weeks and some 50 hour work weeks.

Maybe I'm just old and people don't care that they do more for less TC than they did in years past.

If you make it a choice, it effectively becomes no choice because employers will never agree to classify a worker as an employee because it would increase their costs and they have the ability to seek out another worker who would agree to the independent contractor status against their own interest because they need the job to keep a rood over their head and food on the table. It would give employers the ability to make it a race to the bottom for employees, like what would happen if minimum wage laws were removed.

> against their own interest

And how exactly would you reach this conclusion? How would you know what's better for someone, better than they do? At least in CA, the decision was clear that it wasn't against people's interest.

In CA, the voters were duped by a massive marketing campaign underwritten by employers with interests in the outcome, with perhaps a small amount of "gosh I don't want Uber to cost more" personal interest.

Sometimes employer's interest coincides with the public, but I guess even voting isn't enough to convince some people of that.

If you are defined as an employee (under the current standard) it has do to with a number of factors, so if you are giving up all those factors to the employer but not receiving the employee benefits it by definition is against everyone's interest.

Basically imagine you have Job A all things being equal you can have the Job A and all the benefits of being an employee or you can have Job A and none of the benefits of being an employee. How is it possible it is in anyone's interest to take Job A and not receive the benefits they are legally entitled to?

Why would employers pay or reward two exact positions differently? Obviously if you don't get benefits, you are more on the outside of the company, and get to leave whenever you want without a problem. Full time employees can't just walk away like temp positions or gig workers, at least not without hurting reputation. The responsibilities of full-timers with all the benefits are way more than their temp counter-parts. At the end of the day it's just another type of exchange... a simple one where there is less commitment, and a complicated one with more commitments and responsibilities. Why force companies to only have one of those options, pretending people are so dumb they don't see what the exchange is? Most people understand, if they want benefits, you need to go through long process of hiring, and you become part of the company in a formal sense, and to many that is not appealing.

> At least in CA, the decision was clear that it wasn't against people's interest.

This must be why Uber incessantly spammed their workers with Prop 22 propaganda via push notifications[1] on their phones and tablets.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2020/10/15/21517316/uber-spamming-u...

There is all kinds of marketing for every prop on the ballot. I just want people to have more options on the table. I don't assume people are helpless making these decisions on their own, which is patronizing IMHO. I'd rather give people more choices, then take them away.

Uber workers didn't make this decision, the people of California did. I can't think of anything more patronizing than a company like Uber telling their workers that everyone else gets to decide the terms of their labor relations, or telling millions of Californians how to vote, or spamming their workers with propaganda. Surely Uber workers can make their own decisions without Big Brother/Uber spamming their phones to tell them what's best for them.

Prop 22 actually removes options from the table, making it almost impossible to modify, repeal or replace the proposition. Surely if you and Uber cared about giving people options, then you'd recognize that labor law needs to adapt with the needs of workers, instead of being cemented in time in a manner that benefits some employers over everyone else.

If it's a scenario where it even remotely makes sense to do something like that, they probably should be employees.

There's a lot of jobs where work simply is not with a regular customer -- i.e. tradesmen, independent consultants, musicians, etc.

If a person mows lawns for 25 different customers in a given week, who gives them their vacation/retirement/health benefits?

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