[jp10558]

> “evading wage and hour” laws. But that’s my point: Why do you count it as “evading” anything when you buy labor from someone who offers it as a freelancer, and that rate is under the minimum?

Working for less than minimum wage is against the law. Are you actually suggesting that minimum wage is a bad idea, and so of course the rest wouldn't hold up. In this case, a minimum wage is considered a premise of the entire decision.

I cannot see an issue about gifting people something. I do see an issue with allowing paid work at less than the legal minimum wage, which I expect is why this was framed as an evasion of the wage and hour laws.

To go very off topic, my quick reason for why minimum wage laws are desired is as follows (note I don't think any of this works as follows in real life, but this is the reasoning I can come up with):

We as a society do not actually want to subsidize businesses where they shunt the cost of their employees to the public but privatize the profits - i.e. if Walmart only "makes money" because the local governments have to pay 1/2 the employee wages in poverty avoiding benefits - we don't want Walmart to succeed. So we set a wage minimum in law where if you make that amount society thinks you wouldn't need welfare etc. It may also be seen as a moral value that an employee should make enough to survive at a job. I.e. we should treat employes "this good" in a developed country.

[SilasX]

>Working for less than minimum wage is against the law.

No, it's not. You can absolutely set up a proprietorship, and sell labor, such that the pre-tax proceeds per hour of labor are less than the minimum. That is legal. It's just not legal for an "employer" to be the payer of that income, hence begging the original question.

That's my whole point: why does this distinction exist?

It's pretty trivial to defend any tiny part of the system in isolation. The problem is to explain why you have this employer-contractor boundary. That needs more (as justified in my original comment) than "I don't want workers to be oppressed" or "I don't like businesses shunting costs onto the public".

[siegel]

There's a simple reason the decision does not provide the explanation you are looking for: that's not the role of the court. The California legislature, by statute, and the Industrial Welfare Commission, established that there needs to be a distinction between employee and independent contractor. The courts have the role of setting forth a rule consistent with California statutes and IWC wage orders that courts (and, by extension, the public) can use to determine whether someone falls into the "employee" or "contractor" category. It does not matter to the court WHY that distinction exists, except to the extent that why informs what test to use to determine who is and who is not an employee under state law.