So many companies take advantage of people who work from home for them by treating them like employees but calling them independent contractors. I have found that most often this occurs in the customer service and telephone work industry of home workers. Companies want to pay you per call or per project completed, yet you get no calls or projects to do.

Now that itself is not so much the injustice. The injustice is that these companies REQUIRE you to sit at home during your ?shift? that either they assign or you schedule in advance. So you have to be there even if they have no work for you, and then they don't pay you for the time that you're there.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is plain and simple FRAUD. The IRS clearly states the description of Independent Contractors here: http://www.irs.gov/businesses/small/article/0,,id=99921,00.html

Basically, the document there and throughout the IRS site dictates the main difference between an employee and an independent contractor is that you cannot dictate the means and the methods of the work being done for an independent contractor, while you can for an employee. You can't tell an independent contractor how to do the job, when to do the job or where to do the job. The only thing that matters is the END result of the job - that is the only thing the hiring company is permitted to dictate to an independent contractor.

So if you are considering working from home and you run across such companies (I've heard stories from Secure Call Management, Sterling, and more abusing this), please report them directly to the IRS. Further more, no company that pays you as an independent contractor is permitted to provide TRAINING for you. As an independent contractor you must already know how to do your job.

So when looking for a work at home job as an independent contractor, please only seek work in the fields with which you are experienced or can become experienced on your own as you go (ie: transcription is pretty easy to pick up on your own). Some jobs you simply can't do as an Independent contractor without experience, for example building houses! I could not build a house, nor could I learn to do one up to code by myself without training.

People are worried about submitting companies who abuse the independent contractor status to the IRS, because they worry about losing work at home jobs in the market. You know what? If you're working 40 hours and making $30, you're better off babysitting a kid at your house during the day instead.

Don't be so desperate to work from home that you will become a stoop to companies who break the rules!