Yeah, DPD could raise their requirements (or the government could force them to) but they would have to raise their prices, and capitalism says they mustn't do that.
In the UK we've decided nobody should have to choose between seeing a doctor and paying their rent, hence Statutory Sick Pay. An employer can't fine you for sickness. Unfortunately DPD found a way around it with some legal fiction.
Capitalism infers markets with competitors trying to maximize efficiencies.
The US, UPS is the largest and most profitable delivery service. And they have high benefit payouts and a strong employee union. They have higher costs and are more profitable than their closest competitor that uses contract labor. I think it’s overly simple to say capitalism says this is the way it should be. But it’s certainly not pushing UPS to cut employee benefits, mainly because employee benefits from-improved by those benefits- are a competitive advantage.
Really, this is a solved problem. It's called employment and has a bunch of rules and regulations around it to mitigate the extreme power imbalance between the two parties involved (which is vastly lessened in the case of contracting programmers/in demand experts). Technology has given companies the ability to skirt these laws, the laws need to catch up. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/nov/10/uber-lose...
Do you really believe the solution is to create a complicated bureaucratic way of saving up money for lower income workers to pay punitive fines to corporations who wish to avoid following longtstanding employment law?
I’m not sure what the income is for the subject of this story, so unsure if they are low income.
Either way, DPD contractor agreements sound more like employee agreement. They just know the right to substituting (getting someone else to do the work without having to inform employer) is one of HMRC key checks for the contractor/employee relationship.
Obviously, DPD could change to employees and offer sick leave.
But I think the bigger opportunity would be for DPD to add more requirements on their independent contractors to require that they offer sick leave or participate in health savings accounts that can cover these types of fines. The tragedy here is that the company that employed this driver wasn’t able to pay 150 pounds and instead worked the driver into a grave. I’m not sure if the company is just the driver himself as a one person company (pretty common in the US, not sure about UK).
A big risk in contracting is not setting enough aside to pay for benefits and taxes. In the programming space I’ve ran into people who were happy as well as stressed out based on how they structured their cash flow management and set asides for benefits. I had two peers with the same rate ($70/hour x 40/week). One worked out a salary, set aside IRA, healthcare, taxes, vacation. The other just paid out the gross amount and was very stressed about company holidays, vacation and even routine healthcare expenses. It was curious how they functioned like an employee and didn’t have an advisor to help them structure their company. We all sat in the same room and were all 30 year old single people.