The Contractor

You’re not an employee. That’s the first thing they tell you. The second thing is everything an employee would be told: where to sit, when to work, what to wear, who to report to.

The difference is what they don’t tell you. They don’t mention the health insurance because you don’t get it. The 401k match because there isn’t one. The paid time off because if you don’t work, you don’t get paid. The severance because contractors don’t get severed — they get “not renewed.”

You’re not an employee. You’re a line item. A variable cost instead of a fixed one. When they say “we have 500 people,” they mean 500 employees. The 200 contractors who do the same work in the same building don’t count. That’s the feature. You’re invisible in the metric that matters.

The work is the same. Sometimes you do more because you know you’re replaceable. You both pretend the arrangement is temporary. The company calls it “flexible staffing.” You call it a gig while you wait for the conversion that’s always six months away.

The gig economy language makes it sound like freedom. Be your own boss. Set your own hours. The translation: no benefits, no security, no floor. The freedom to work whenever you want as long as it’s whenever they need you.

The driver who delivers your groceries is a contractor. The nurse filling a staffing shortage is a contractor. The engineer building the feature is a contractor. The pattern is the same everywhere: the institution needs the work done but doesn’t want the worker on the books. So it invents a category that gets the labor without the obligation and calls it flexibility.

You’re not an employee. You do the work of one and get the protections of none.