Every piece
Archive
All 26 pieces in the dossier, grouped by section. The section pages carry the same list with photographs.
Classification
The tests, the judgments, and the statutes that decide whether a worker is an employee — country by country, court by court.
Long read
Seven Judges, Two Drivers, and the Question of Who Works for Uber
The UK Supreme Court's unanimous 2021 judgment in Uber BV v Aslam did not just settle one dispute about minimum wage — it rewrote the ground rules for how British courts read platform contracts.
Standard
The Three-Part Test That Rewrote California
A 2018 state supreme court ruling distilled decades of misclassification litigation into three sentences — and set off a political war that is still unresolved.
Standard
The Law the Platforms Bought Back
California passed the strictest worker-classification statute in the United States. The platforms spent $200 million overturning it at the ballot box.
Long read
IR35 and the Twenty-Five Years Nobody Settled It
A tax rule drafted to stop one trick became the defining instrument of British employment-status law — and is still contested in every forum that touches it.
Short
The Plumber Who Made It to the Supreme Court
How a plumbing dispute produced one of UK employment law's most durable rulings on worker status
Short
False Self-Employment Has a German Word for a Reason
When a legal system names something precisely, it usually means it has thought harder about it.
Standard
What Brussels Agreed After Nearly Three Years of Arguing
The EU Platform Work Directive took three years longer than anyone planned, shed several of its sharper provisions along the way, and still arrived as the most consequential piece of labour classification law the bloc had ever passed.
The Count
The surveys, supplements, and statistical series that try to measure a category nobody has agreed to define.
Long read
Twelve Years When Nobody Counted
When the Bureau of Labor Statistics stopped running its Contingent Worker Supplement in 2005, the silence it left behind shaped a decade of policy argument as surely as any figure it might have published.
Standard
The Survey That Changed Each Year It Was Taken
A commissioned count of American freelancers grew, shrank, and grew again. The methodology moved with it — and the funders' names were on every edition.
Short
McKinsey Counted 162 Million and the Caveats Started on Page Two
A landmark 2016 figure reshaped the policy debate — but the report's own methodology quietly explained why no single number could.
Short
What the ONS Series Captures and What It Misses
Two counting systems, the same workers, different numbers.
Standard
Gig, Contingent, Own-Account, Self-Employed: Not Synonyms
The same person can appear in four statistical categories simultaneously — or none. How agencies count independent workers depends almost entirely on which question they asked first.
Organising
The unions, guilds, and advocacy groups that independent workers built — and the older institutions they borrowed the idea from.
Standard
Somebody Had to Insure the Freelancers
Sara Horowitz built a union whose first product was a health plan. That sequence was not accidental.
Standard
The Cleaners Who Started Their Own Union
A dispute among Latin American cleaners at the University of London produced something the established labour movement had not anticipated: a new kind of institution.
Short
A Lobby Group Built Around One Tax Rule
The organisation now called IPSE began as a reaction to a single paragraph in a 1999 Budget document — and has never entirely escaped that origin.
Standard
The Guilds Had This Argument in the 1930s
Entertainment unions invented collective bargaining for independent contractors long before Uber existed. The gig economy is still borrowing their playbook.
Short
Two Guilds Struck in the Same Summer
Residuals in 2007, AI clauses in 2023: the Writers Guild and SAG-AFTRA keep fighting the same fight with different names for the technology.
Coworking
The rooms, buildings, and companies that gave independent workers somewhere to go — from a San Francisco loft in 2005 to the WeWork collapse.
Short
One Man Rented a Room and Named the Thing
The first coworking space was a deliberate social experiment, not a real-estate product — and the distinction mattered until it didn't.
Long read
The Valuation That Required a Different Definition of Real Estate
WeWork invented a metric to justify its price, and the market took eighteen months to stop believing it
Standard
Before Coworking, There Was the Serviced Office
The serviced office and the coworking space sell the same square metre at different prices by telling a different story about who is in the room.
The Trade
The platforms, marketplaces, and intermediaries that built a business on matching independent workers to work.
Standard
Two Platforms Merged and Called the Result Something New
The Elance–oDesk deal of 2013 was sold as a merger. The 2018 IPO prospectus told a different story.
Short
Everything for Five Dollars, Until It Wasn't
Fiverr launched in 2010 on a single fixed price. Nine years later it went public. The distance between those two facts explains the company.
Short
The Craft Marketplace That Became a Public Company
How a Brooklyn craft site turned its sellers into a balance sheet — and what happened when they noticed.