But I do agree with you on everything else. I think that companies who want to hire contractors, should treat them as such, and not as employees for which they can reap the rewards of a contractor classification.
Of all forums, on HN I feel I ought to be able to make a precise logical statement, meaning no more or less than I said, and be understood correctly. I like to think that most readers did, and the commenters (you less so, I'll grant) trying to draw obviously stupid conclusions from my careful wording are the minority.
You can still do this, it's called three hots and a cot. The police will direct you how to sign up.
If there are people desperate enough to go to prison to eat and have shelter, we should probably find a solution for those people within society. That likely means there is some point between what we currently offer and what prison offers where those people would be better off. Without those (shitty) jobs, you have a binary choice between good job or the streets.
Honestly, I think a lot of this comes back to housing policy and healthcare. You can't build boarding houses anymore. Zoning laws basically make it so you can be homeless or pay $1k / month (metro city). There's a lot of room in the middle there. The healthcare system is so bloated and broken that I do not think we will bring costs down, so the only solution there is state funded then using state leverage.
Setting a floor for voluntary agreements sounds very humane, but it also means that anyone who can't reach that floor is open to abuse. The same goes for immigrant labor. We don't clamp down on it because doing so sounds racist, but it creates a system where people can be easily exploited.
Do we though? If UBI and universal healthcare were a thing, I would be OK green-lighting ALL voluntary agreements. What am I missing?
What are the working conditions that cause something to be literal slavery as opposed to contract labor?
Would individual contracts with a nation's armed forces count as slavery? Why or why not?
In this particular case, the important thing to me is the focus on honesty about the nature of the job. If they tell you, while you're voluntarily entering an agreement, that you'll have a certain degree of flexibility, and in practice they try not to let you have that, you've been lured into the deal on false premises. Usually we call that fraud, and in any case it should be uncontroversial that it's immoral.
After reading the comments here I was prepared to be disappointed by the policy direction, but instead I'm only disappointed I didn't see any specific enforcement teeth mentioned. Demanding transparency and that companies treat their contractors as contractors is IMO the correct direction; it's certainly better than retroactively classifying as employees people who never wanted to be such, as we sometimes see.