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varispeed | 3 days ago
The rule set was sharpened the moment skilled workers realised the agency / consultancy was charging £2k a day for their labour while paying them £60k a year, and decided to leave on Friday and invoice on Monday. Same desk. Same client. Same work. The only difference was that the margin stayed with the person producing the value instead of flowing to partners and shareholders.
That is when it became “disguised employment”.
When a multinational intermediary inserts itself and captures the spread, that is respectable commerce. When a one-person company does the same and keeps the surplus, it is suddenly suspicious and requires a special anti-avoidance regime.
You can hide behind control tests and contractual nuances, but the economic reality is identical. The variable that changes is who captures profit.
If a rule only becomes urgent when labour tries to behave like capital, that is not some sterile legal tidying exercise. That is class politics dressed up as “compliance”.
scott_w|3 days ago
Right, so you're talking about IR35 specifically. This has nothing to do with "Uberisation" at all because the working arrangement and contract structure are completely different. It's also got fuck all to do with "classism" because it's 100% about tax.
First off, IR35 does not apply to self-employed workers, it only applies to a worker contracting via a limited company.
Second, it looks at how many "clients" you have. A limited company of 1 contracting to multiple clients is outside the scope of IR35 because, like your plumber, they are a business and not an employee trying to reduce the amount of tax they pay.
Thirdly, IR35 companies are allowed but they must operate in a specific way (that makes them not worth the hassle for the most part).
> That is class politics dressed up as “compliance”.
No, it's just about tax law.
I don't know why you needed to write 6 paragraphs when a simple "I don't know what the fuck I'm talking about" would have been much quicker for you to write and for me to read.
varispeed|3 days ago
You are using class-loaded language. Nobody says a worker is “operating via” a Big Four consultancy, but when it is a one-person company, suddenly it is framed as some artificial wrapper.
It is a recognised form of self-employment under UK law, where a person runs their own company to contract for work in their own right, on the same legal footing as any other incorporated business.
And IR35 is not confined to one-person outfits either. Its scope extends beyond the caricature of a lone contractor “gaming” the system.
IR35 is not determined by how many clients you have. It is driven by the ownership structure of the company providing the services. The legislation applies where the individual delivering the work has a material interest in that company, typically 5% or more.
> Thirdly, IR35 companies are allowed but they must operate in a specific way (that makes them not worth the hassle for the most part).
It amounts to saying you are free to run your own company, right up to the point where doing so allows you to retain the full commercial value of your labour rather than routing it through an approved intermediary.
Those restrictions are designed around companies owned by the worker delivering the service. The same structural suspicion is not applied to firms owned by external shareholders supplying labour in similar conditions.
When the rule set specifically constrains worker-owned businesses while leaving non-worker-owned ones operating freely, that is not accidental. It is a deliberate design choice that limits upward social mobility.
It is also not accurate to say IR35 has nothing to do with wider labour trends, because tax rules shape how work is structured in practice; many gig and platform workers are required to set up limited companies, and once labour is channelled into that model, the IR35 framework directly affects them, so drawing a hard line between “tax” and “Uberisation” ignores how policy design influences the real-world organisation of work.