You are interpreting it all wrong. Staff augmentation happens all the time who do same work as employees. The fundamental difference is amount of time you are hiring the person for. If you say I need person to augment my existing staff only for 6 months then they need not be employee. This is why many contractors are forced on leave after certain number of months. A contractor may also chose to work, say, 20hr per week.
Being a contractor is not fundamentally bad if US hadn’t tied medical insurance and companies hadn’t tied stock bonuses with employment. Technically there is no such need for “employment”. You go work for the time and you get paid equitably without an artificial status called “employment”. Unfortunately this status has became part of many arcane laws and difficult to get rid of.
> The fundamental difference is amount of time you are hiring the person for.
That's not the fundamental difference in either federal law or the California ABC test. It's not a factor in the ABC test, [0] and it's one of several factors in the “relationship” prong of the federal test. [1]
No, I am not interpreting it all wrong. You are fundamentally misinformed about what AB5 in California allows. And while I agree, there are many cases where staff augmentation exists, in many of those cases employees would be misclassified under AB5. Also, in many of those cases of staff augmentation the person is hired through as an employee of a staffing company, not as a 1099 contractor by the client company.
Being a contractor is not fundamentally bad if US hadn’t tied medical insurance and companies hadn’t tied stock bonuses with employment. Technically there is no such need for “employment”. You go work for the time and you get paid equitably without an artificial status called “employment”. Unfortunately this status has became part of many arcane laws and difficult to get rid of.