I’m a big fan of Dave Ramsey. In one of his recent shows he took a caller whose parents were wanting to change his status from employee in the family business to contractor. Dave’s response surprised me. It was illegal in his case and constituted tax fraud. Wait…WHAT?!?
The thought never crossed my mind. I just took job classifications at face value. They either want someone short term or they don’t. After realizing this, it is apparent that many web analysts are getting cheated. Cheated out of health coverage, retirement, etc.
Believe it or not, the IRS makes it clear what defines a contractor vs. and employee. The one point that I think is really the issue in our industry is the location of work performed. I’ve taken so many calls for short-term web analytics contracts that required the analyst to be on site when there clearly was no technical reason he or she couldn’t perform the lion’s share of the work at home. Face it, I am an employee of one of the largest brands in the world (IBM) and yet I perform all of my work from home. I also did so when employed by Sun Microsystems. If these massive companies can manage to make it technically possible for me to perform my obligations from home as an employee, then so can these much small, trying-to-cut-costs companies.
Honestly, I’m not asking for all these contracts to be reclassified as employed positions. I like the contracts. Let’s just get real. You don’t need a web analyst in the short cube next to you. There’s lots of talk about how amazing technology is these days. So let’s use it! Get on Skype! If the analyst needs to present data, then I’m sure she won’t mind visiting on site for a couple hours. You like the flexibility of contractors and contractors like the flexibility of being one. Being able to control their location is part of what defines their role and allows them to be more successful.
A final added bonus to letting contractors be contractors is that your candidate pool just grew exponentially! Your welcome.
