Can you explain what these burdens are?
“Can you explain what these burdens are?”
Unemployment insurance, workers comp insurance, health insurance, social security, pension/401K, breaks/lunch and other unproductive time, required safety equipment, the list is endless, but those costs really add up.
Even greater than the specific burdens, like unemployment insurance, taxes, etc. are the risks you take on as soon as you hire an employee, even the minimum wage kid.
For example, you can assume there will be, at some point, some error in a required regulatory document that you'll have to deal with. And if you are in business long enough, you'll have in person visits from various government functionaries, some of whom will lift their jacket just so you know they are armed while they show you their ID.
And inevitably they'll want you to do something, and you can bet that writing a check will be part of the process. You won't have any choice in the matter, but you'll still spend a lot of money with your accountants, lawyers, etc.
Or one of your employees will sue you, or file a complaint, or decide to apply for Cobra health insurance continuation but fail to pay their bill. Or any one of hundreds of other things that always end up costing the employer money, sometimes a lot of it, like the new health insurance related penalties. In that case if you lose an employee classification argument you could end up paying a few thousand dollars per employee, enough to sink many companies, and bankrupt their owners.
In that situation, smart employers do everything they can to get work done in ways that doesn't expose them to the risk of having employees. This is yet another reason jobs migrate overseas, or disappear altogether. Having work done in a foreign country is an excellent solution to all of those issues.