Our discourse on this topic is horribly stunted by everyone — on both sides — insisting that there are only two God-ordained classes of employment: "employees" and "contractors".
We would have infinitely more sophisticated discourse if we allowed for the possibility that our taxonomy does not capture the reality we live in, where there are intermediate classes of labor which should have some (but not all) the rights, protections, and expectations accorded to full-time employees.
Novel categories for niche situations might be nice to have, but the lack of some Perfect Category isn't the main cause of the disagreements/injustice going around. No matter how many are invented, we'd almost certainly still have the problem of people mis-categorizing for profit.
> Our discourse on this topic is horribly stunted by [...] insisting that there are only two
Most of these cases involve resolving how (or whether) a current situation must be brought into alignment with current laws, rather than how laws could look in 10+ years, so I think it's reasonable for much of the discourse to reflect that.
Sure, we could dramatically overhaul national employment laws and legal theory, but that's not what courts are supposed to do during a lawsuit, and it's usually outside the scope of what many local/state legislatures are prepared and willing to tackle.
> Sure, we could dramatically overhaul national employment laws and legal theory, but that's not what courts are supposed to do during a lawsuit, and it's usually outside the scope of what many local/state legislatures are prepared and willing to tackle
Literally what you are saying is "well that might be a better place to be, but the courts can't do it, and also it's too hard for the legislatures".
If you truly believe that making good laws is too complicated for the government to handle, then people and corporations are perfectly within their moral rights to ignore the bad laws and to do everything in the power to evade the consequences. You've lost the mandate of heaven, it's time to start over.
More like: "You shouldn't be surprised that changing X doesn't come up so often, given that a majority of discussions involve timelines where X cannot be implemented or groups that simply don't have authority to change X."
I don't even know what point is being made here, but it's ridiculous to claim that people in the 1930s or whatever crafted the perfect labor/employer social contract which would be applicable ad infinitum.
But won't someone think of the shareholders? Surely we can't deprive them of positive financial outcomes over something as silly as a living wage for workers?
We would have infinitely more sophisticated discourse if we allowed for the possibility that our taxonomy does not capture the reality we live in, where there are intermediate classes of labor which should have some (but not all) the rights, protections, and expectations accorded to full-time employees.