As reported by Jessica Anderson in the Baltimore Sun (Strip club dancers are suing clubs over pay – and winning), strip clubs are getting in trouble by improperly treating strippers as independent contractors instead of as employees.
Although there’s no hard and fast rule as to whether an individual working for your company is an employee or an independent contractor, the U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS) does provide some guidance on the issue.
Important Employment Factors
Two key factors that favor employment status are setting the work schedule and controlling how the work must be done by the person. For strip clubs, this meant club management telling the dancers when they had to perform and dictating what they could and couldn’t do when stripping/dancing.
What’s the potential damage by mislabeling employees?
If you treat your employees as independent contractors, you may be liable for back wages, statutory damages, penalties, employment taxes, plus contributions to workers compensation and unemployment compensation funds. These misclassified employees may also be eligible for benefits you’ve provided to your other workers, such as 401k contributions, paid vacation, and health insurance.
How to this problem?
If your workers are really employees, treat them as such from the time you extend an offer to work for you. Pretending they’re independent contractors when they’re not creates a ticking time bomb of legal and tax liabilities you don’t want.
On the other hand, if a worker truly is an independent contractor, it’s often a good idea to make that relationship clear in a professionally prepared written independent contractor agreement signed by the parties. If the contractor decides to assert employment status, you’ve got a contract to point to when trying to convince a judge or government agency that the worker is not an employee.
IRS Form SS-8
If it’s truly unclear whether your workers are employees or independent contractors after consulting with an experienced business lawyer, you may wish to file a Form SS-8 “Determination of Worker Status for Purposes of Federal Employment Taxes and Income Tax Withholding” (PDF file) with the IRS for a determination as to the workers’ status.
