I have been around the block once or twice and one of the funniest things I have seen is how self employed people are treated in Germany.
It seems that sometime back, some of these contractors were working side by side with some some regular employees and the inevitable day had come to trim costs. Well, the easiest way to do this is to get rid of some of your not so fixed expenses.
Quite understandably some of these not so fixed expenses wanted a paycheck and were very comfortable where they were. They decided to sue the consulting company that they were working for using the legal argument “no really, we are actually indistinguishable from their actual employees”.
When I heard this initially I thought that it was a joke and there would be a punchline. Well, the punchline is that the court felt that indeed the contractors were treated just as if they were employees. They were given direction, where treated in internal systems (ie email, company address book, etc) in the same way and thus they won their lawsuit.
Uh, well I guess that is score one for the little guy. Not just that company but all German companies did have a bit of an adverse reaction due to that ruling.
Wow, we thought those people were ours to use and get rid of, we don’t want them as actual employees.
The general reaction of the companies was what can we do in order to prevent this from happening again. I guess there must have been a room of lawyers and other big brains looking through the results of the lawsuit.
Well, we could…
- put all contractors through agencies
- don’t list them by full name in our address lists
- don’t talk with them directly.
This did work out fine for about a decade when yet another couple of contractors were to be gotten rid of. The company was a fortune 25 company and fought tooth and nail yet the judge said that yes they were essentially the same as employees and would have to be hired.
This was really terrible, two people were forced to our payroll but who knew how many tens or hundreds might want to join us in the next few years. Besides they are IT specialists, we have very little use for that skill. Right?!?
This time the discussions really began. What corrective actions could we perform to make sure this doesn’t happen again. Well, we could …
- make them wear their badges so they are visibly distinguishable from internal people
- get rid of most of our external consultancies, only having a few larger ones
- we could take away their email addresses and for those in support or projects give them group mail addresses
- send them off site so we don’t have to look at them
- ensure they don’t go to regularly scheduled meetings
- remove entrance permissions from their badges
- simply get rid of all external consultants
- only communicate problems with ticketing systems
Only time will prove if this is enough to keep the consultants at arm’s length but also only time will prove if these limitations the returned value of even using external consultants.
Well, if that wasn’t enough I know of a company that took even more actions.
- All externals were given email addresses that used a different domain than the company email
- All the names of the individuals who used email were removed and replaced with their initials and an arbitrary number (MT14)
- Everyone who could be moved away from the corporate offices to a remote location were indeed moved away
The jury is out if this will be enough but it should definitely be a solution for productivity.