On 16 June 2010 11:27, Alexander Harrowell <[email protected]> wrote: > It's a horrible idea, it hugely undervalues ordinary people's time and effort, > it takes absolutely no account of the fact the people involved need not > promises of jam tomorrow but wages, now, to pay things like rent, and it > reinforces the unpleasant tendency of jobs in quite a lot of sectors to be > monopolised by rich kids who can live off the Bank of Mum & Dad while working > for free in order to make a start. > > Also, given that some huge percentage of startups crash and burn, what happens > to my wages?
(putting my head above the parapet in a moment of lucidity) unless I am missing something, it doesn't look like whoever put this together took much (any?) legal advice. A big question (sort of implicit in Alexander's remark) is what is the status of someone contributing their work in this way? The sign up page gives no indication of what the relationship with the end user will be, yet one of the claimed advantages of this system is that someone else (a trusted third party) takes care of some of it for you - so surely they ought to know. Now status has boring lawyerly style implications. There's the National Minimum Wage Act 1998 (for instance) - this looks dangerously like it might be unpaid work (at least some of the time) and therefore unlawful. Are the work contributors employees? (in which case you had better be paying SMP, SSP, accounting for payroll tax, paying redundancy money etc). If they aren't employees, what are they? Partners (in which case you create a complex legal relationship you probably don't want and there will be tax implications)? Or just unconnected members of the public who are contracting with you for equity - in which case that looks to me rather like it comes under OFT regulation and, trust me, the shoals which you have to navigate to stay on the right side of the law there are much more tortuous than anything in employment law. Got to have it one way. And "there will be tax implications" is probably always going to be true 8-). -- Francis Davey _______________________________________________ Mailing list [email protected] Archive, settings, or unsubscribe: https://secure.mysociety.org/admin/lists/mailman/listinfo/developers-public
