I worked 16 years in HR (4 at the VP level so you know who would have gotten perp-walked) and the 1099 vs W2 gyrations my bosses/boards would expect me to implement drove me from that field. I had absolutely no interest in serving jail time for these people. Also, it looked increasingly like that was the way corporations were going to be sourcing labor. Had I known there would be no penalties for willful violation of safe harbor …. naw, ethically, I wanted no part of that deception.

I’m still horrified at how IC/1099 workers have now been essentially normalized. I talk to millennials all the time who think the only thing bad about contract work is the taxes on April and then quarterly when they find out the hard way they gotta do that (don’t ask them about taxes they owe each state when they cross the borders to take a 2 month gig in some other state!) All very short-term, very much going to bite them in the butts before they know it. And all of us “younger” Boomers when there is no young labor pool putting into the social systems. This is a huge failure of short-term thinking government and it's catching up to us like crumbling bridges.