About a month ago in the SFGate (San Francisco Chronicle) a blog post seemed to conjure up some heated emotions on my favorite topic, worker misclassification. It all started with a response to a blog that ran in the Wall Street Journal, which in turn the SFGate published: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/gettowork/detail?entry_id=50533. I’ll admit that when I first started reading the comments, I got all geeked up that people were so passionate about worker misclassification as much as I and my fellow Secure Talents colleagues. It was like having your children all grown up and making you proud … so I’ve heard.
Anyways, when I continued reading the comments from some readers I realized that these folks were getting themselves all worked up over the “temporary worker” tag more than the actual worker misclassification. Could this small population of blog readers/commenters represent a much bigger number? Chances are that’s probably the case.
It seems that one half of the people felt that worker misclassification is wrong because you’re an independent contractor performing the same job as an employee. Another half felt that being a temporary worker was wrong because you perform the same duties as an employee for a company what can cut you loose at any time. So who’s right?
Those who work through temporary agencies are typically paid on a W-2 therefore they’re someone’s employee. Granted co-employment may exist in many of those situations, it can be remedied. The same cannot be said for employee misclassification since the worker is not anyone’s employee therefore treating him/her as a W2 without paying benefits or employer taxes is illegal.
Now I’m not insinuating that bringing temporary workers onboard as a long term remedy instead of hiring them as W2’s does not go without it’s own shame (can you hear me Redmond, Washington?). I myself was a long term temporary straight out of college when I was working for a telecom firm through a staffing agency for a long period of time. Back then I wondered if a permanent position was ever possible. Lucky for me my temporay status ended after a lengthy 3 year tenure. In fact, the landscape for long term temporaries changed after a very well known software giant found had to pay out on a lawsuit filed by so-called permatemps.
I guess what I am trying to say is that even though both temporary workers and independent contractors fill a short term role and both appear to be utilized by companies as cost cutting measures you cannot compare the two. Simply put, worker misclassification is illegal.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 14th, 2009 at 6:13 pm and is filed under Misclassification. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.