I’m working at a startup, technically classified as a contractor even though that’s really not the case. The company offers a wide variety of benefits to their members. My position involves customer service for members and potential members (answering every email, text, and call the company receives), as well as handling requests for benefits and carrying out the requests (bookings, researching vendors, billing the member and the vendor they’re using, etc). Basically everything on the customer-facing side of the business. I have a set schedule, a work email with @companyname.com, and I report to my boss every morning with the tasks I’m responsible for that day.
Since this is a startup, processes change pretty frequently. My team got an email yesterday to sign up for a new time tracking software, and we had a meeting this afternoon to discuss it. It’ll track our location and take screenshots every 5 minutes, and we have to download it and will not be allowed to use it in the browser. I don’t have any of the company’s software downloaded because it’s my personal laptop, I’ve always used everything in my browser. Someone asked where we should send our hours if we forget to clock in, which is a valid question considering how often processes change here. Boss said “don’t forget to do that, we won’t add anything in manually.” Needless to say my team is unhappy. We’re getting all our work done, and this is invasive considering we aren’t even employees and don’t get benefits/taxes paid.
My question is, because I’m technically a contractor and not an employee, is this legal? We message our slack channel when we log on/off, so there are time stamps for when we work. There’s also a grey area for the days this week between stopping the old method of time tracking and starting this one. We were told to just…trust the CEO to handle it and we won’t have a way to verify before payroll is submitted.