Tolerance and a sense of shared responsibility, perhaps?
If all the participants feel like they took part of the educated decision regardless of outcome - they might be more tolerant towards walking it back. One could argue that would be part of the culture.
You can make more money as a contractor. The deal is contractors get paid more to take in the risk of being fired. If you are ok with this, you get as liquid money the cash that would have gone to benefits.
So I bill for about 200k USD. My wife gets our medical insurance. I take home about 140k after taxes. If I were an employee, I’d only take home 100k after taxes.
There's only a very small group of workers like in it who could benefit from being a contractor. But there is a vast number of lowly paid workers who are devestated because they can't get benefits. How do we trade off these things?
In favour of the vast number of low-paid workers who could really use decent employment benefits.
If the trade-off is that the IT guy billing six-figure sums ends up with a bit less cash in his pocket, because he's required to contribute more to the system that takes care of everyone, well... I won't be losing any sleep over that.
You shouldn’t pervert justice just because someone is poor. If you’re ok with not following justice, but rather an emotional sense of vengeance, then why allow income at all? Let the state provide the needs and have the citizens provide the ability? At some point you either have to admit that you’re ok with theft by the state for the greater good or that you have created some arbitrary line in the sand where theft is not linger okay. The second option is hypocritical, but own that too.
> At some point you either have to admit [...] or that you have created some arbitrary line in the sand
Life in a society is full of arbitrary lines in the sand. When is a person allowed to drink alcohol? Where does your lot of land end and your neighbor's begin? How fast are you allowed to drive on this particular piece of road? Why do you consider the tax rate, of all things, to be so arbitrary?
For a functional society, you have to draw the line somewhere. Ideology instead of pragmatism is a recipe for failure. Being pragmatic is not hypocritical.
I actually want to see most of the lines you cite removed. Property lines are not arbitrary they are contractual. Now where the ruling body politic set those contractual lines might be arbitrary but that is beside the point.
You’ve constructed a straw man. You say your view is practical and mine is idealistic. I say yours is idealistic and mine is practical because mine will allow people to practice more freely.
Equivalently those people on average salaries will tend to think one shouldn't pervert justice to cater for people like us on well above average incomes.
I don’t think so. Denmark or Sweden lacks a minimum wage. People are free to not work with Uber. They are free to work with them. If there is labor that will accept Uber’s terms, let them. Allow competition. Remove the regulations around taxis having medallions that cost 100k.
They have high taxes instead of regulations. In USA companies are forced to provide all of these benefits to its employees, in Sweden you pay taxes and the government provides them instead. The end result is that companies has to do less and workers don't have to worry about companies trying to trick them into not getting those benefits.
You have designated yourself as a moral authority by sheer force of your existence. I simply explained the benefit and risks of being a contractor. You have decided that I should not be allowed to sell my labor at a rate I and my client accepts.
Some people like the flexibility that a contractor role provides. Forcing everyone to become an employee with benefits adds costs that many places will forego by hiring on only a handful of contractors or removing the role entirely.
The point is that the people who end up "reclassified" as employees by these kind of decisions are people who are already de-facto employees in that they do not have the flexibility that genuine contractors do.
No, I have the flexibility, and I have chosen to work for one client. This new unforeseen interpretation of my business contracts (are you even aware of the ramifications for my financial planning, insurance, etc?) is forcing me into things I don't want to do nor my client is interested in, thus making me less flexible, and forces me to pay for things I am absolutely not interested in.
Where are you that has rules that prevents you from being treated as a contractor if you genuinely have the flexibility?
Most places that force these kind of treatments tends to do so only when people have no ability to set their schedule or no realistic prospect of negotiating terms etc. in ways that makes them indistinguishable from employees.
Most of the time there are ways out of this and/or all that ends up being required is for you to be an employee of your own company rather than exploit tax loopholes that were never intended to be used this way. Eg. this is the case in the UK where the dreaded IR35 closed tax loopholes that let people avoid paying themselves a salary for their contracting and instead cut costs by taking out dividends or making their spouses directors etc.. The change did not in any way stop contracting even for a single client, but it prevented people from using it as a way of avoiding tax.
In most of those instances "forcing you pay for things you're not interested in" boils down to not forcing society to take risks on your behalf because people are using contracting as a means to avoid e.g. social service payments and the like.
I'm sure there are places that are exceptions where some people get caught out, and that's a shame, but most of the time these rules benefit far more people, because of the extensive use of "contracting" as a way for employers to get out of obligations with people who have no effective leverage.
I am in Czechia. I am paying less social security (and am getting proportionally less in return) and exactly the same healthcare insurance as everyone else.
If I was to be an employee, I would (or rather, my employer) be forced to do everything based on the employment law, which has severe restrictions on me as well as on my employer and on the kind of relationship we have, which causes extreme loses to me (as I like to be paid proportionally to returns) + paying more for things I don't want and up until now wasn't required to have.
Because I planned and built my life around being a contractor. I have zero use for and zero interest in any of the "benefits", much less from the government; I want the government to leave me alone to do my business as I want - I am not doing anything wrong. I have built my life as I like it, with my own benefits such as flexible lifestyle, my own hardware and office, and financial freedom, and I don't want anyone to trash my hard work. Who will give me back the lost money and time I would've spent with my family? Who will give me back the opportunities I lost? Why is it always me losing something because of some absolutely unrelated issues like Uber drivers, and why is it always handwaved away with "whatever, you have a little less money, cry me a river"?
