California

“The contractor employee laws do not work for the field of education! In order to be able to retain their own rights to their creations, and use the curriculum they develop at other programs, curriculum developers need to be ‘independent contractors.’ There’s no benefit to being classified as a part-time employee, yet many drawbacks. As a professional dance performer, teacher, and choreographer, we run into the same issues around intellectual property. Sometimes within a dance company, as performers, we become the subject matter itself. It’s very complicated. Over the last 20 years, the contractor vs employee issue has gone more and more in the direction of disadvantaging smaller nonprofits, schools, programs, organizations, etc, and fields like education and arts have been heavily impacted.”