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Comment by Stranger43 | Hacker News Reader

Under EU law that would potentially make you an employee rather then a contractor, as a major part of the destruction is control and time management and the more the Company wants to manage your equipment and time the more the balance swings towards employee status.

This is also part of the reason why BYOD is going nowhere as the second the company wants to audit/control setting it's no longer "Your Own Device".

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> Under EU law that would potentially make you an employee rather then a contractor,

That is not going to happen. I'm a freelancer, and I am going to remain a freelancer. It that becomes too hard in EU, then bye bye EU :) I'm already an expat.

I believe GP refers to the fact that by receiving employee status under law, you also receive a set of entitlements in addition to whatever you have agreed to as a freelancer. This is not about you having to change your preferred way of working, but about the fact that by forcing you to give up that much control, they also assume responsibilities that they probably have not assessed and you could take advantage of.

There’s not really blanket “EU law” on contractors, it’s up to the individual countries which all have wildly different tax and employment rules built on a small common base of employer regulation.

No but there is directives that greatly shape the individual member states laws on those subjects.

It's complicated and would probably require an law school Phd. dissertation to fully answer how the whole mess regarding when a single unincorporated freelancer becomes an employee but it's a really really good argument to throw at overly aggressive corporate compliance types trying to push remote control agents onto a freelancers personally owned laptop.

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