The real problem here is that benefits such as health insurance and retirement savings depend on being an <i>employee</i>. Those benefits should be decoupled.
I've read that Germany and Canada have a middle ground between independent contractor and employee, the dependent contractor.<p>Does anyone know how well that works out in practice? Are Uber drivers dependent contractors in these countries?
So, I'm looking forward to the onslaught of insightful, balanced, and deliberative discussion that will accompany this article.<p>Idea for HN: the balance of downvotes and upvotes on an article is a useful piece of information in and of itself. It might not be a good idea to show that on each particular article, but an end-of-year analysis of what words in an article title often corresponded to lots of downvotes (relative to the upvotes), would be an interesting way to measure which topics are currently hot-button issues.