Also, if you make these roles direct employees, then you can get into an awkward position wrt 401K contributions, if the delta between your highest and lowest payed employees is too great. My understanding is that this is why Amazon caps salary at 160/185k
That lawsuit single-handedly created an additional layer of intermediaries (whole industry, really), which eats up ~30% of consulting revenue and provides close to zero value.
> – The numbers of hours worked by low-wage workers fell by 3.5 million hours per quarter. This was reflected both in thousands of job losses and reductions in hours worked by those who retained their jobs. > > – The losses were so dramatic that this increase “reduced income paid to low-wage employees of single-location Seattle businesses by roughly $120 million on an annual basis.” On average, low-wage workers lost $125 per month. The minimum wage has always been a lousy income transfer program, but at this level you’d come out ahead just setting a hundred million dollars a year on fire. And that’s before we get into who kept vs lost their jobs.
When laws with one goal achieve the exact opposite, we need to rethink the laws. Unfortunately, pyrrhic victories are rather common in politics.
The lack of access to on-site medical or to cultural events like Take Your Kid To Work Day is presumably to draw a clear line between Vendor and Employee. If a group of vendor workers file a class action suit to be reclassified as employees (with backpay/benefits), a company wants to be able to say "Nope, they were vendors. Look at all the ways we made the distinction clear." If they're treated as employees in every way except the payer of their checks, it's a lot harder to justify why they were classified as vendors and received lesser benefits because of it.
I was a temp at another large company before moving to a full-time role at my current one. My contract was capped at 1 year, because without the cap, there was a perceived risk that I could seek to be retroactively classified as an employee and entitled to the benefits I didn't receive as a vendor.