
A story about Upwork fucking over freelancers in order to upsell their clients - wmeredith
https://mobile.twitter.com/MattFnWallace/status/1060659941491363841
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throw_legalist
It looks like the OP is in California. California courts recently ruled that
contract workers are presumed to be employees by default of their employing
organization, and places the burden of proof on the employing organization to
prove they are not [1]. This test is stricter than others previously applied,
and among other things, requires the work done by freelancers to be
independent of the work normally done by the employing organization.

Since OP was doing freelance marketing work for a marketing organization,
California now requires him to be an employee of that organization.

Upwork is acting to comply with California law here. There are civil and now
criminal penalties for failing to comply (ie: people can go to jail, including
the company improperly classifying freelancers).

[1] [https://www.forbes.com/sites/tonymarks/2018/05/29/the-
califo...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/tonymarks/2018/05/29/the-california-
supreme-court-deals-a-blow-to-independent-contractors/#45cf255a70a1)

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gnicholas
I agree that this is likely the root cause. Upwork obviously still botched
things here, and they need to better communicate what's going on and why. They
probably don't want to be transparent about this stuff because it makes their
business model (hire contractors through us to do everything!) less attractive
for some of their customers.

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gnicholas
It's an interesting story, and Upwork definitely screwed up here. But it seems
too simplistic to say that Upwork is trying to upsell clients.

As the author mentions toward the end of the story, he was no longer showing
up as eligible to freelance because Upwork determined that he might be
classified as an employee of the company. It sounds like the company could
still request him to work for them, but they would have to do so as an
employee, which entails different payroll responsibilities (which Upwork could
provide at an extra charge).

But it doesn't sound like Upwork's goal was to upsell the company on these
extra charges. First, the company didn't realize that they could still hire
him at all. According to the author's friend, who worked at the company, they
didn't find out about the employee-hire option until they pressed Upwork for
details of why he disappeared from the freelancer section. If Upwork were
trying to upsell the company, they wouldn't have disappeared him from the
freelancer section — they would have shown a notification saying "you can
still hire this person, just upgrade your account!".

My guess is that Upwork was hoping that the company would just hire a
different freelancer and wouldn't care much about the transition. Why? Because
Upwork's benefit is partly the low cost, and once you add in all of the
employee-related stuff, it would be much more expensive to hire through
Upwork.

I could be wrong about this, but based on the (relatively thin) facts
provided, it seems like this wasn't about upselling. It was about avoiding the
risk of employee/contractor misclassification, and hoping the company would
hire a different contractor.

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Teichopsia
Or maybe they didn't implement that "feature" properly. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

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gnicholas
Definitely a possibility! Hanlon's razor at its finest: _Never attribute to
malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity._

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marsrover
Not the first time I’ve heard of Upwork fucking over freelancers and I’m sure
it won’t be the last. Is there any good alternative for freelancers?

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tsm
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