Without a government they can start to take this authority themselves in much the same way that local warlords do. Gradually by force, because they have power and you don't.
A small / weak government can't do anything to stop them.
Honestly, most contracting developers are actually employees, and this position is just used as a way to skirt tax and labor laws. The abuse here isn't from the court, it's from devs and businesses.
Devs don't care simply because the pay is high enough and there are a ton of jobs available.
Somewhat true, but to me what matters as a freelance is that I get to make the call when I’ve had enough of a particular contract, or choose whether to wait for a more interesting project, or just sign up to whatever conference I feel it’s important to my own career plan.
When I was an employee I always had to beg to do anything, as well as suck up whatever shite projects the accounts would figure out would mean a sweet billability streak... dammit, the humiliation...
Eh that’s a good question, practically never. But there’s some good reason for it, in that development is not a routine job where you are completely interchangeable. There’s - thankfully - a certain amount of creative skill and professional judgement that makes me the hire and not a sub of my choice.
Several years ago Italy introduced CoCoCo contracts to capture this concept of temporary professional employment, between an employee on your payroll and a butcher you buy a stake from.
Eventually companies abused it and applied it to completely subordinates such as call center operators. It was - rightfully, given the circumstances - repealed.
I wonder if we could have something like that again, it would be easier than this pantomime.
Not so sure about the US, but having seen how contacting developers are working in Canada and the UK, I would say that contracting devs are almost always acting as employees.
In many tech companies you can't even tell the difference between who is an employee and who is a contractor, unless you ask.
In every role I was a contractor, there was essentially no difference between me and employees. Even had gigs where I was in one cube over, had a company badge with my photo on it, and had an @companyname.com email.
There are a few differences: employees are invited to the meeting where quarterly financial performance is shared; they have to do the yearly goals; they are invited to the the year end holiday lunch; and they sometimes get a bonus. The last one is contractors are first cut when there are financial hard times.
Many employees skip the financial meeting. Contractors are often ignored when they sneak into the holiday lunch. For most contractors the bonus is the biggest difference, and the courts tend to agree that is not enough and force the contractors to get the bonus as well.
One company (Sabre) actually had a department (development team that supported HR) holiday lunch/outing. Everyone on the team went, contractors and employees. (Don't get me wrong - I'm glad I had a great manager who would do that ... but honestly the only difference I really ever felt was my paycheck was signed by someone else)
I was a contract consultant for over a decade; I didn't hide any work. I usually didn't work out of their office, but when I did use their resources my working assumption was that any artifact left behind was theirs, modulo any agreement to the contrary.
Intermediate documents, experimental code, etc. weren't offered to customers, but I can't imagine what I'd want to hide. (Aside from my shame, given how a couple projects went.)
Sorry that was quite hard to parse - I mean, what would you expect to appear different to colleagues?
The differences between employees and contractors may reside in the work they do, but doesn't need to, it's in the legal basis of their employment - which other workers can't see. Just like you can't see the wage another worker is getting, rat doesn't mean they're getting the wage you think they are.
The way you know someone is a contractor is they leave after a few months, or they retired and still work there. You can't necessarily tell by their work output.
If an employee and contractor are digging ditches the only difference is likely to be in the paperwork; though possibly the contractor uses their own PSE and tools, but not necessarily.
No, it is not just a matter of which set of papers the company and the individual signed. I expect, and the government expects, that if someone works like an employee they are an employee (and have employee rights and payroll withholding, etc.)
Different agencies have different criteria, but the IRS considers several factors:
The agency [IRS] is more likely to classify as an independent contractor a worker who:
can earn a profit or suffer a loss from the activity
furnishes the tools and materials needed to do the work
is paid by the job
works for more than one company at a time
invests in equipment and facilities
pays his or her own business and traveling expenses
hires and pays assistants, and
sets his or her own working hours.
On the other hand, the IRS is more likely to classify as an employee a worker who:
can be fired at any time
is paid by the hour
receives instructions from the company
receives training from the company
works full time for the company
receives employee benefits
has the right to quit without incurring liability, and
provides services that are an integral part of the company’s day-to-day operations.
On the contrary I think that without any regulation, Google and Facebook are able to completely entrench themselves and take advantage of us all in the process.
If your business model is based on something that will violate the GDPR, like streetlend selling user data to advertisers, then should you really be opening that business in the first place?
The parent comment point has been missed or understood but not used. The point is that small companies which are valid must jump through significant hurdles to satisfy gdpr. Contracting an expensive DPO (are they going to be doing you a service in pricing or making out well) to set this up may be more than some small businesses can handle.
In the UK the ICO is the governing body, and they say I don't need one. From their guidance linked below
>The GDPR introduces a duty for you to appoint a data protection officer (DPO) if you are a public authority, or if you carry out certain types of processing activities.
I am neither a public authority or carry out those certain types of activity.
If your business model is based on something that will violate the GDPR,
That is COMPLETELY IRRELEVANT to what people are saying. If someone complains about me, am I obliged to defend myself? If I don't, am I subject to ruinous penalties? If I do and am victorious is the complainer required to compensate me for all of my costs?
I'm afraid I disagree entirely. If your business is aggregating data in order to sell more effective advertising then you are walking a line and need a lawyer. If your business is selling widgets and you collect personal details in order to complete orders then you are just going to have to write some documentation.
I can tell you as someone who is working in an old school retailer/wholesaler we are not, and neither is anyone we are talking to through various trade bodies, employing lawyers to do GDPR.
Actually, you can keep order data as it has to do with VAT law but you have to keep it in line with GDPR... So it not just writing some documentation, rather making sure your data is secured with up to date and taking into account state of the art technologies etc...
Lawyers can't help you with ambiguous laws very much as it takes precedents to make sure what the words mean.
Other way around. This business was opened half a decade ago, with users being perfectly fine with it (or it wouldn't have stuck around). The GDPR on the other hand has flown under the radar and only suddenly became a thing that service providers (generic "service", not "internet service providers") were made aware of in legal context. So if we're raising eyebrows, it's at the EU and the GDPR. Not at sites that have operated to user's satisfaction for five+ years.
That's what they said about the EU VAT changes as well. "How are small businesses surprised by this new rule that comes into effect in under a month? We've been discussing it in committees they've never heard of somewhere in another country for years!"
The reality is that almost all businesses are small businesses, and most businesses are microbusinesses. These sorts of organisations don't have full time resources watching out for potential legal hurdles coming down the line in a few years. Many of them don't have full time resources at all.
It's ironic that a law where one of the main effects is to dramatically increase notification requirements has resulted in barely any media coverage and no notification from any official sources to any of my businesses yet. What media coverage there has been mostly seems to have been prompted by people being surprised by the sudden wave of privacy-related emails. So, how is this not going to be a surprise move for millions of small businesses if no-one did anything to tell them about it?
Please, I work for a "small" business and the management have been going on about it for months.
If you run a business and were not aware of GDPR then you incompetent or employ people who are feeding you bad information.
Seems like these businesses who are not "aware" of it are exactly the type that would have other bad practices that will leak personal data of their customers.
If you run a business and were not aware of GDPR then you incompetent or employ people who are feeding you bad information.
Why? Most businesses are very small and don't have any sort of in-house legal team, and won't go actively looking for expensive external legal advice if they aren't aware that they have a need to.
Seems like these businesses who are not "aware" of it are exactly the type that would have other bad practices that will leak personal data of their customers.
That is an entirely unfounded assumption. There is literally no relationship between being technically competent in protecting personal data, having a positive attitude towards respecting privacy, and being aware of new laws coming out of the EU.
Yes, and talks first started in 1996, and yet here we are today with massive problems because small business, and especially self-employed startups etc don't have an on-call lawyer that knows everything about EU regulation. Or anyone. They wont' have heard of this from anyone until it hit the news, only a few months ago. Is a few months enough to understand and become fully GDPR compliant? Probably not. Do you know all the EU laws currently in the works that are going to affect your website 5 years from now? Probably also not.
What about small companies that don’t sell data as a business model?
GDPR punishes the vast majority of businesses that do not have business models reliant on selling user data in favor of trying to catch the ones that do.
Unfortunately, I fear this regulation will do absolutely nothing to stop the bad actors from selling data as they do now.
But that's a drastic action that won't happen before many other options have been tried.