About this site
Fifty notes for the person on the receiving end of a worker status — employee, worker, contractor, agency-supplied, umbrella, invoicing through a company of your own, or taking work from a platform. Written for the person who was given the category, not for the business that gave it.
What it covers
What the word on your contract is actually doing and what it is not. The money, and the arithmetic of a year that almost nobody does before accepting. What exists for you when you cannot work — illness, injury, caring, having a child. Time away, quiet months, and turning work down. How these arrangements end, and what you are owed when they do. The structures that sit in the middle, and what changes when somebody else engages you. And how you would find out where you stand, what it costs to raise it, and what it costs to leave it alone.
The argument running through it
Almost nothing that follows from your status is written in the thing you signed. Some of it comes from the place you work in whatever the paper says, some only from what actually happens week to week, and a part of it nobody can tell you in advance. The problem is not that the answers are bad. It is that the questions have no address until you go and find one.
What it is not
It is not legal, tax or employment advice, and it cannot tell any reader what they are. Which categories exist, what attaches to each, which test applies, who decides, whether one body's decision affects another, what an intermediary structure changes, and what routes exist to challenge any of it all differ by jurisdiction, by industry and by the facts, and they change. Those are questions for somebody qualified in the place where you work.
The device at the top of every page leaves a blank line wherever nobody can answer in advance. Those blanks are deliberate, and filling them with reassurance would be the least useful thing this collection could do.
About the examples
Every example used anywhere on this site is an illustration of what one person recorded about their own arrangement, labelled as such on the page where it appears. None of it describes any named business or any real individual, and nothing here claims to say what any authority anywhere would decide.
Where better information lives
Whichever body administers employment, revenue or social insurance matters where you live. Free advice services. Unions and professional bodies, several of which cover independent and platform workers specifically. All of them know more about your situation than anything written generally, and most of them cost nothing.
Editorial approach
Examples illustrate practical working arrangements and should be checked against current contracts, local rules and qualified advice. Product comparisons use consistent review criteria and current information published by each provider.