One required by federal policy. Companies are legally bound, or at least incentivized to not risk lawsuits, to degrading temporary staff so as to distinguish between regular employees and contractors.
Federal policy just says that if you don't distinguish between regular employees and contractors, the contractors are considered regular employees.
It doesn't say you are not allowed to hire those people as regular employees and treat them like regular employees.
Of course, it could separately be the case that people buy too much printer ink, and that we have good reasons for asking them to buy less. In which case our feelings about these new insults might be complicated. But if the goal of a regulation is "do less X", and the chosen mechanism is "you must insult other people when you do X", I'd call that questionable policy design.
Coming back from the metaphor, it seems more accurate to say that this regulatory situation with contractors wasn't explicitly designed at all, but rather "emerged" out of previous policies and court decisions. So maybe asking whether it was designed well or poorly is beside the point.
The idea is that if you treat somebody like an employee, they're an employee, and that idea was allowed to be hollowed out. If companies participate in certain shunning rituals they're allowed to keep those same cheap employees.
The purpose of the ruling wasn't to allow companies to operate in an identical way with identical costs, just meaner. It's not even a perverse incentive resulting from the ruling. It's that we've decided that only superficial, administrative features define an employment relationship, and so long as those rituals are adhered to, the fact that you work full time completely under the control of someone for years on end is not sufficient. There's no limit to the indirection, you may not have ever met your "actual" employer.
This is not an accidental outcome, this is an efficient outcome. It could be ended by government, but for the people who pay the people who work in government, it's ideal.
What you're saying defeats the purpose and idea of having contractors.
We understand the """"purpose"""" of having contractors.
The biggest two reasons it matters (i.e. two biggest disincentives from just hiring contractors) are healthcare and quarterly reports. Healthcare provision is very expensive, even amortized across the employees in a company, and TVCs get no healthcare from the client company. And the client company can grow and shrink TVC contracts all day long without having to tell shareholders they went through a mass hiring cycle or a layoff cycle.
As I grow older it bothers me more. Some classes of people have a facade where it's socially acceptable to be assholes, but other people, well, that's a moral failing. The US has a new religion, and it's worse than the last one.
