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Independent contractors require lower levels of firm-specific knowledge since independence in contracting is derived from the knowledge self-sufficiency of the contractor. By presenting this arrangement through a contractual perspective and a knowledge-based perspective, this chapter is able to describe the independent contractors' market. The chapter also explains the implications of the growth of individual independent contractors, small and micro-businesses, and networks. The trends presented in this chapter suggest that future small businesses will tend to employ fewer people. The chapter explains how the growth of independent contracting generally depends on the externalization of workers, the increasing number of workers in flexihire arrangements, the increasing demand for the supply of services outside the firm, and other such factors.

To save labour costs, many United States employers have externalised all or part of their workforce, turning employees into independent contractors, hiring temporary workers, and relying on subcontracting firms. External workers have jobs in the formal sector, yet they lack many of the legal protections and fringe benefits of standard employment. What do these external workers desire in their jobs, beyond a paycheck? This chapter examines experiences and meanings of work among external contractors in the US. It finds that external workers seek to develop affective ties to their organisation and co-workers in spite of their externalisation. The chapter concludes that belonging and connection are not futile post-Fordist affects. Rather, they continue to provide meaning for workers pushed out of standard employment.

This chapter examines the monumental campaign to raise labor and environmental standards in the trucking industry at the Los Angeles and Long Beach ports. Building on the blue-green coalition launched in the CBA and big-box contexts—and incorporating central lessons from a decade of community–labor organizing in Los Angeles—the Campaign for Clean Trucks emerged as a fight over air quality but ultimately advanced as a local policy struggle over working conditions for roughly sixteen thousand short-haul port truck drivers. For these drivers, the central problem was their misclassification as independent contractors. Misclassification forced drivers to bear all the costs of operation—contributing to poorly maintained dirty diesel trucks causing air pollution—while depriving them of the right to organize unions to improve labor conditions. Restoring drivers to the status of employees was the mutual goal bringing together the labor and environmental movements in this campaign. It rested on a novel legal foundation: The ports, as publicly owned and operated entities, had the power to define the terms of entry for trucking companies through contracts called concession agreements. The campaign—led by LAANE, the Teamsters union, and NRDC—leveraged this contracting power to win passage of the landmark 2008 Clean Truck Program, which committed trucking companies seeking to enter the Los Angeles port to a double conversion: of dirty to clean fuel trucks (thus reducing pollution) and of independent contractor to employee drivers (thus enabling unionization). However, the program’s labor centerpiece—employee conversion—was invalidated by an industry preemption lawsuit that went all the way to the United States Supreme Court. As a result, the policy gains from a blue-green campaign built on mutual interest were split apart and reallocated, resulting in environmental victory but labor setback. Why the coalition won the local policy battle but lost in court—and how the labor movement responded to this legal setback through an innovative strategy to maneuver around preemption—are the central questions this chapter explores.

This chapter charts the emergence of the predominant forms of home care delivery that unions would have to confront for the rest of the century. The welfare wars that rocked the late 1960s and early 1970s generated not only California’s independent provider system but also solidified the vendor model in New York City, both of which allowed governments to transfer employer responsibility by contracting out the work. The presence of a well-organized and vocal independent living movement distinguished the fight in California during Ronald Reagan’s governorship, resulting in the consumer-directed In-Home Supportive Services. But because individuals could hire family members, IHSS served as a form of income support during a period when new federal welfare rules ideologically and administratively separated AFDC from disability and elder assistance. In contrast, New York moved to contract out and privatize services, funding old community development programs through Medicaid monies, in response to both public employee strikes and the militancy of poor women of color who dominated its Home Attendant Program. At each level of government, neoliberalism and privatization emerged as a continually evolving political tactic, part of the politics of welfare, Medicaid, and elder care.

This chapter contains an analysis of the basic concepts used around the world to set the scope of labour law. It includes three separate discussions. The first part focuses on the employee–independent contractor distinction, making proposals regarding the interpretation of the term ‘employee’ in line with the goals of labour law, based on the existence of subordination and dependency. The second part considers the addition of a third (intermediate) category of ‘dependent contractors’. I argue that such a category is warranted, and should be interpreted (where it already exists) based on the existence of dependency even without subordination. The third part asks who should be considered the legal ‘employer’, especially in cases involving a temporary employment agency or a subcontractor. I argue in favour of a ‘joint employer’ solution in many contexts. Some proposals are also made in all three parts for legislative amendments to prevent employer evasion.

In recent years, a controversy has erupted over the distinction between employees and independent contractors. Commentators have argued that in the modern “gig economy,” many people traditionally classified as independent contractors are as vulnerable as employees and should be granted the legal protections that employees alone normally enjoy. However, the distinction between the two categories remains inescapable, and the theoretical basis for it has not been identified. A better approach derives the distinction from market structure. Employees are workers who, because they must make relationship-specific investments in a single firm, are subject to labor monopsony. Independent contractors do not make such relationship-specific investments, and hence normally operate in a competitive labor market. Employment and labor law may be explained as a method for protecting workers from labor monopsony; because independent contracts are not subject to labor monopsony, they do not require such protection.

Cam models are independent contractors, but they are not free agents in an open capitalist market. Instead, cam models work in a global network of pornographic industries, which sex entrepreneurs own and control, and moral entrepreneurs regulate. This chapter examines the relationship between sex entrepreneurs such as cam-site and studio owners, moral entrepreneurs such as politicians, legislators, and other rescue-industry agents, and cam models in structuring the camming industry. Moral entrepreneurs dictate the policies that regulate the camming industry. Sex entrepreneurs exploit cam models—all cam sites take a substantial portion of cam model’s sales and pay relatively low commissions. Various overlapping systems of oppression shape the camming industry and affect the wage outcomes and experiences of cam models. Cam models must work hard—but cam models who are thin, White, cisgender, in their 20s, from the United States, and do not work for studios are privileged by various systems of inequality that they have no control over. Far from a feminist, queer, or socialist utopia, the camming industry, while it sometimes provides decent wages to workers, operates via and reproduces the same inequities that exist in any capitalist workplace.

Chapter 3 describes the principle of primacy of reality in Latin America, namely, in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay. The principle is also contained in the International Labor Organization’s Recommendation 198. The principle posits that facts must be given preference over what parties, particularly employers, state in legal texts, documents, and agreements. It is particularly important when determining threshold questions in labor law, such as employee and employer status. While employers might deny an employment relationship given a formal agreement to hire workers as independent contractors, the facts might show otherwise. However, the chapter also argues that primacy of reality depends on the principle of protection and in dubio pro operario to resolve questions when the facts are not dispositive given vague or missing rules. The chapter then searches primacy of reality in the United States and finds it in various employment tests, such as the common law control test. It is also finds it in employer tests of joint employer status. However, many of those tests remain vague, requiring supplementation with the U.S. versions of in dubio pro operario, i.e., liberal construction of the statutes that derogate the common law, and with legislative purpose. Primacy of reality makes it even more important for legal operators to be cognizant of labor law principles and, principally, the protective principle.

This chapter charts the origins of the campaign for clean trucks, showing how activism around port expansion at the community level became intertwined with environmental challenges to pollution and labor movement strategies to reform the port trucking industry.

Chapter 5 delves into the unionization efforts by former UFC fighter Leslie Smith and the fighters’ association she cofounded, Project Spearhead. Smith has legally challenged the UFC’s classification of fighters as underpaid independent contractors--a classification that makes these athletes a relatively inexpensive and expendable investment for the UFC. The chapter considers potential solutions for gendered labor inequity in sports media by centering political visibility as a viable avenue for illuminating labor inequalities and improving workers’ rights within the UFC. While a union might benefit all fighters, those who stand to gain the most from a fighters’ union are White women and women of color because historically the most disenfranchised identities recuperate the most rights when unions collectively advocate for the equal treatment of all workers.

The introduction considers the increased visibility of female athletes in MMA--a phenomenon enabled by a 21st century media context that increasingly seeks out representations of difference, including gendered, racial, and sexual difference, on a variety of media platforms. Sports media brands are now beginning to align with other media entities to promote diverse representations as a method of increasing viewership, which makes branded difference a lucrative branding and marketing strategy. This chapter cautions, however, that the increased visibility of difference in the UFC ignores a labor model that allows the brand to profit on its diverse athletes who fight for low pay and few benefits as independent contractors in a gig economy.

Watson critically engages with the often-repeated argument that “sex work is work like any other form of work.” Advocates of this argument rely upon it as a basis for either decriminalization or legalization. Watson dismantles this claim by showing that where sex is the “service,” occupational health and safety standards applicable to every other form of work cannot be met. Further, the various ways in which persons in prostitution may be thought of as “workers” is explored and arguments are given that relevant legal standards in the context of discrimination laws and employment laws cannot be met in the context of “sex work.” Thus, the burden of argument falls on advocates of decriminalization to legalization to argue for a series of exemptions from generally applicable laws. However, such exemptions are unwarranted, do not achieve their aims, and would require institutionalizing inequality for persons in prostitution.

This book begins with a discussion of the right of firms to the intellectual property produced by their employees, which is a foundation of the modern intellectual property regime, and of the business strategy of innovative firms throughout the economy. Today's corporate employer typically insists on contracts claiming the copyrights and patents to works produced both during and after a term of employment by employees and independent contractors. In addition, under the law of trade secrets, firms control current and former employees' use of a wide range of unpatented information, and employers can buttress the protection offered by trade secret law through a noncompete or nondisclosure agreement preventing the employee from working in certain occupations or from using or disclosing certain knowledge. Through the contract of hiring, workers are deemed to sell not only their physical labor and its products but also their intellectual labor and its products, and sometimes even the products of intellectual labor done after the term of employment.

Throughout the 1930s, the California Perfume Company expanded in both numbers of representatives and sales. It introduced the Avon brand of cosmetics and toiletries in 1929 and created new sales strategies, such as two-for-one campaigns, and efficiency measures, such as reducing the sales cycle from four weeks to three. David McConnell’s son and a new management team led by John Ewald, who remained as CEO well into the 1960s, created the company’s first national advertising campaign and a plan to develop city markets. They also spearheaded the efforts by the National Association of Direct Sales Companies to write independent contractor legislation to protect them against new minimum wage and unemployment regulations. The company officially changed its name to Avon in 1939, cementing its place as a leader in direct selling committed to developing women’s entrepreneurial opportunities.

Jobs recovered slowly under George W. Bush after the 2001 recession. Growth was boosted by easy credit and a housing boom, but the seeds of the Great Recession were being sown as working-class incomes stayed down. The system crashed in 2008 and unemployment soared. Barack Obama organized deficit spending and job creation, while the Federal Reserve injected trillions of dollars into the economy. Republican resistance and Democratic timidity meant that the federal stimulus was too little by half. The top 10 percent of households recovered faster than the bottom 50 percent. This chapter includes stories of individuals struggling with the loss of jobs and housing. It describes long-term changes that intensify employee insecurity. More jobs are non-union and more employees receive no benefits, face arbitrary schedules, and are classified as independent contractors.

Many people are worried about the fragmentation of labor markets, as firms replace employees with independent contractors. Another common worry is that low-skill work, and ultimately nearly all forms of work, will be replaced by robots as artificial intelligence advances. Labor market fragmentation is not a new phenomenon and can be addressed with stronger classification laws supplemented by antitrust enforcement. In fact, the gig economy has many attractive elements, and there is no reason to fear it as long as existing laws are enforced. Over the long run, artificial intelligence may replace much of the work currently performed by human beings. If it does, the appropriate response is not antitrust or employment regulation but policy that ensures the social surplus is fairly divided.

The National Health Service was created at the end of the Second World War. Its structure has remained relatively stable until the 1970s. Since then, politicians have continued to reform it at an ever-increasing rate and, in 2012, the biggest change to the English NHS structure was implemented (Reynolds and McKee 2012). The question as to why the reforms are being undertaken is crucial. Growing demands, changing epidemiology, better understanding of the determinants of health, and evolving societal values have all influenced the process. Perhaps most crucial is the latter. It is probably more appropriate to describe the current NHS as four differing NHS care systems that are coterminous with the legislative bodies that exist within the UK, namely England, Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. Not only are the planning arrangements becoming more divergent, but also the philosophical approach underpinning each system is beginning to follow very different paths. The NHS has almost never taken a typical theoretical planning approach but rather has evolved due to the wide range of factors and influences involved. These include the changing power of health care professions, the need to ration services, adoption of economic theory (market forces and the internal market), and, not least, changing governments with differing political stances. The importance of understanding the history of the service and the lessons of the past are that they inform the present and can provide an indication of how the future may look. This chapter outlines the major influences on the NHS since its inception, describes the major problems currently faced by the NHS, and provides an overview of the ways in which clinical services are currently delivered. It will not give a detailed description of the structure of the health service, not least as by the time the book is published a new structure will exist. The current structure of the health service in each of the four countries of the UK will be available on this book’s website, and updated as changes occur.

This chapter analyzes how the mentalities of Hollywood casting directors have shifted as the field has moved from above-the-line executive status to below-the-line independent contractor status in the current production climate. Female labor, particularly, have come to dominate the ways in which casting directors understand the work they do in a field where men were historically prevalent. The chapter argues that with the field's position altered, not only are more women brought into its ranks, but also the work of casting directors was redefined in stereotypically gendered terms that focused on emotional and interpersonal management activities. This change proved essential to the field's sustainability, but also diminished its stature.