No one is forcing employers into performative hysterics, it's a reactionary choice by the corporate legal community. MSFT was guilty of what they were accused of. If they don't misclassify workers, they won't lose such a suit.
> No one is forcing employers into performative hysterics, it's a reactionary choice by the corporate legal community.
"The rest of the world is wrong, only I know the truth in this thread on a random web forum" is an unpersuasive frame to be arguing from. Corporate legal departments may be inflexible and hidebound, but they surely know this stuff better than you do.
No, this is the way it works. If you do what MS did and offer unrestricted perks to your temps, they'll sue you and you'll lose. Period.
What you're arguing amounts to "no one should hire temporary labor to work alongside salaried employees". And, OK, that's a position. But if that's what you want then you should make that case and not argue that somehow Viscaino doesn't exist, because it does.
Microsoft wasn’t offering unrestricted perks to contractors, they were treating them like second class employees, paying them less, not giving them benefits or allowing time off, dictating additional rules, excluding them, and avoiding existing labor, discrimination, and tax laws — exactly the same thing they (and every other big corporation) are still doing now — with a codified fiction in place that didn’t exist previously.
Microsoft didn’t lose the lawsuit, they won a settlement — and their lawyers and lobbyists made sure it would never happen again.
Most corporations have preferred vendors and the 50% plus savings in salary and benefits has a large kickback that finds its way back to the employer.
The real issue that was skirted around in the lawsuit was that Microsoft actually owned the vendors that supplied them with contractors.
They weren’t temps, read the case - average tenure, 11 years. And the entire thing started because the IRS said they were dodging payroll taxes, so the common law employees sued for what they were rightfully owed. MSFT acknowledged wrongdoing and settled the case.
They will only win if you are violating labor law. Why is that so hard for you to understand. If they hadn’t violated labor law they would have appealed and won. And here you are 26 years later trying the case again on a “silly web forum”.
I don't think that the parent isn't aware of that. I think the parent says that providing employee perks for your contractors _is_ violating the US labor law.
