That's an interesting concept. I wonder what legal issues would need to be tacked with regards to the notion of whether you are a "business" or an "employee" to make that work in the North American market?<p>I wonder though, do the individual contractors market themselves as being from that company? What does that do for the reputation of the umbrella corp? Anyone have any details?
This is a pretty common practise here in Australia as well. I've been contracting through an umbrella company - certainly takes the headaches out of paperwork. Don't quite know how they manage it but usually their fee is added on top of my negotiated daily rate rather than taken out of my rate. Works for me :)
I'm not sure I see the difference between an "umbrella company" and every private consulting company in the US.<p>* I assume the difference is, the "employee" in the umbrella scenario has to do their own sales and marketing? If so, how does some other company pay them a salary? They don't know what the revenue from the consultant is going to be.<p>* If the umbrella just provides invoicing, you can already outsource invoicing without changing your employment status.<p>* In the US, your "employer" is responsible for a portion of your payroll taxes, which adds financial risk and overhead.<p>* If you do the kind of high-end work most HN readers do, the major corp-to-corp relationship problem can't be outsourced --- the negotiation of a master services agreement. Are you working on some F-500 company's own paper? You're a sucker.<p>* If you're a contractor that plans to continue contracting, this isn't necessarilly a win: you've outsourced the corp-to-corp stuff to someone else, who now owns the paper for the deal and thus a chunk of the relationship. How do you resolve channel conflicts?
If this were done in the US, the umbrella company could offer a 401k, which many freelancers would like. (I know you can do it even as a freelancer, but it's a hassle.)<p>Edit: There might be at least one place that does this: <a href="http://www.mbopartners.com/Individuals/groupbenefits.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.mbopartners.com/Individuals/groupbenefits.html</a>
this is interesting. basically offering the accounting department of a company as a package deal?<p>I can definitely see something like this working in a tech dense area.