IANAL in the UK we have laws that protect people who are really employees but are classed as independent contractors (this also protects HMRC from bogus work arrangements to dodge tax, see IR35) if you really see Uber as offering that flexibility, that's great! If you're working 40 hours a week, every week for uber, you're an employee.

that might sound great, but what about people who want to accept the trade-off that being a contractor provides? You waive your employee rights (and take up a B2B contract instead) in exchange for receiving a much larger share of your total cost of employment.

It's not like HMRC misses out on tax under this arrangement, as the contractor's business pays employer taxes (plus any corp tax from cap gains) and the contractor pays their employee taxes.

It is to protect the majority of the people. I've seen a lot of cases in the news where people are forced to change into a contracting role.

A lot of these 'share' companies often don't do anything to inform the tax authority what work these contractors did for them, thereby making tax evasion way too easy.

If you're a contractor you really need to know what you're doing. Meaning: a lot of things you'll need to budget for because it is your responsibility. If a lot of people don't grasp that, then the problem becomes a government problem.

I'm an employee and have pretty flexible working times. I don't see why I'd ever want to be a contractor where as only benefit you have more flexible working hours. That's not a change!

I am a contractor, and I find a lot of benefit in working under this paradigm. I think the idea that the government should protect people from their own choices is quite an unpleasant one, as someone can always switch from a contractor back to an employee if they find it unsavoury.

Benefits I enjoy from contracting:

- B2B transactions mean I can retain some cash in the business for investment while paying myself a good salary.

- My performance is more important to my role because I can be easily let go - I prefer to align my interests with those of my employer in this way.

- Being a contractor also means being a consultant to an extent. I am trusted to bring in expertise to improve processes and I enjoy having a positive impact in this way.

I agree that the ongoing issue with labour exploitation with things like zero-hours contracts, forced contracting and using apprenticeships to force lower-than-minimum wages are bad, but they don't take away from the value of contracting itself. In an attempt to address labour exploitation, IR35 and other measures are also becoming major problems for legitimate contractors too.

> I think the idea that the government should protect people from their own choices is quite an unpleasant one

If the government doesn't protect people against immoral companies, who will? If an employee doesn't understand their obligations to pay extra taxes and cover their own forms of insurance, and doesn't ask for enough money up front to cover those costs, they'll go to jail and/or be bankrupt. That creates costs for taxpayers and corporations, the net loss likely higher than the cost of a bit of regulation and education.

Why not educate those employees (or ensure that they can't get stiffed for a lack of education) instead of allowing them to be funneled (or scammed) into an unproductive dead end? As a taxpayer, I'd rather see them protected and productive than unproductive and bankrupt.

I think the sticking point here is that you're talking from a viewpoint of companies pressuring employees to convert from full-time to contract. I don't know if that happens, and it's not the viewpoint I'm talking from - I don't think a company should be able to pressure an employee to do anything outside of their employment agreement and there certainly isn't legal grounds for them to be able to enforce something like that. Harming legitimate contractors in an attempt to solve this issue by proxy is illogical.

oh they do miss out on a lot of tax that's why HMRC is so hot on disguised employment - though strangely "self employed" lawyers are not caught by this even if they are working on the same case for years

working on the same case for years does not disqualify a relationship from being a B2B one - service companies do this all the time. Having a service company with 1 employee does not suddenly make that relationship invalid.

Tell that to 99.9% of IT contractors caught by ir35 and you will get a bitter laugh

I am an IT contractor, I'm well aware of this. My point is that what HMRC is doing is going after legitimate business relationships completely in spite of the problem they're trying to solve.

  I think we had the same issue in the UK, when uber drivers wanted
  to be classified as full time workers.

Yep, the drivers won that tribunal in 2016 [1].

Courier company City Sprint also lost a case this year, where the judge described their contractual arrangements as "contorted, indecipherable and window-dressing" [2].

HMRC are investigating parcel delivery company Hermes for similarly classifying drivers as self-employed, and there's a potential case from the GMB Union (who won the case against Uber) [2] [3].

In the UK, the gig economy isn't as simple as companies insisting "you're self-employed because we say you are".

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/oct/28/uber-uk-t...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/jan/06/courier-win...

[3] https://www.theguardian.com/law/2016/oct/20/hermes-couriers-...

[4] http://www.itv.com/news/2017-01-25/hermes-gmb-taking-legal-a...

In the UK some of them won those rights, because Uber had put a lot of pressure on them to work specific hours (not just through pricing but various forms of cajoling) so they were deemed to be employed.

I'm not following this particular settlement so I'm not sure if it has to do specifically with full-time employment vs contractors, but in general the main advantages of full-time are things like paid time-off (including sick leave) and medical insurance.

https://www.dol.gov/general/topic/workhours/full-time

Contractors are one of the types of workers not covered by the NLRA, so there are a variety of protections that do not include them.

I'd also add that Uber's software contains many restrictions on how drivers must perform, how frequently and quickly they must respond, etc. It's not without restrictions just because they set their own hours.