"Dependent Contractors" In the Gig Economy: A Comparative Approach
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In recent years, lawsuits alleging the misclassification of workers as “independent contractors” rather than “employees” have become widespread in the United States. Determining employee status is important because such status is a gateway to many substantive legal rights. In response, some commentators have proposed an in-between hybrid category just for the gig economy. However, such an intermediate category is not new. In fact, it has existed in many countries for decades, producing successful results in some and misadventure in others. We use a comparative approach to analyze the experiences of Canada, Italy, and Spain with the intermediate category. In Italy, the quasi-subordinate category created an opportunity for arbitrage that resulted in less worker protection. The end result was confusion, and since 2015, the third category’s use has been extremely limited. Spain’s third category, the TRADE, was only made available to a small percentage of self-employed workers because of the burdensome nature of its regulations and the high dependency threshold required for inclusion. As for Canada, the practical result of the “dependent contractor” category was to expand the definition of employee and to bring more workers under the ambit of labor law protection. We ultimately conclude that workable proposals for a third category must also encompass other forms of precarious employment. Working within the existing framework, one solution would be to change the default presumptions regarding the two categories that already exist. Above a minimum threshold of hours worked or income earned, the default rule would be an employment relationship for most gig workers except those that may fit into a “safe harbor” for de minimis amateurs or volunteers.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".