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Most states have separate employment agreements depending on their peculiar regs. Remote workers have made this more "fun" for legal to keep up with. I had to have state-specific lawyers review the overall employment agreement and the specifics of the IP clauses around side-ventures and open-source.

Workers should be free to employed wherever or start a business that's not lifting IP.

These sort of regs needs to harmonized like UCC. California's model is mostly the right one.




What about remote workers crossing country boundaries? Stuff is a lot of fun already, especially in Europe.


We are a fully remote 10 people startup. Everyone is in a different country, mostly in Europe. The only option to make it work is to have everyone as a contractor, because setting up legal entities that can do employment around the globe is not feasible for SMEs.

Also there are some companies selling full employment and payroll option, reporting. They might work for large enterprises, but for us it is just easier to limit the talent pool for those who are willing to work as a contractor and pay then more for taking that risk. Global talent pool is larger than any local talent pool, so you find more staff, more talented staff and staff willing to go for more competitive compensation.


Then, there are countries with regulations against fictitious self-employment. They’ll happily decide that your foreign contractor has been a full time employee, with all the protections of their local law. They’ll also hand you an invoice for all the missing social security and whatever other payments, plus a fine for misreporting.

Payroll companies are, sadly, the way to go here.




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