Several years ago I worked for a major company as a “perma-lancer”. For anyone unfamiliar, this means you are a freelancer or contractor who works full-time hours over several years. Typically you work through a temp agency who takes a big chunk of your pay and provides the bare minimum of benefits. You do all of the work, if not more, of an actual full-time payroll employee, but without the fair pay or great benefits. This is not entirely legal where I live, but the laws leave so many grey areas and these companies are so powerful they get away with it.
I stuck around at this job for several years because my boss was a good mentor who taught me a lot and I liked my coworkers. But eventually once I learned all I could there, and it was clear I would not be given the company job I deserved, I left.
Jump to 4 years later and I am now at a small company where aforementioned Big Company outsources some of their work to. They suddenly started saying that they are going to triple the amount of work we get from them. A former coworker from Big Company that I'm still friends with recently told me that they are firing all of their freelancers that have been there for over 2 years. We suspect it's because they finally got in trouble for exploiting freelancer work. And guess what the response is? Fuck these people who have been doing good work for us for years. Fire em. This company is huge. They have so much money. But they can't be arsed to put these people on pay roll and give them benefits. Instead they're just casually firing them all and passing the buck onto outside contractors like me.
Literally just because they do not want to spend money on benefits. They have BILLIONS in revenue. There's no excuse. I could just say fine, great, more work for us. But I am disgusted. I'm thinking of moving jobs again soon because I feel like I can't support this.