If you pay a person a fee, and they work on it without any direction from you, and supply you with the result by an agreed upon date and time, they are a sub-contractor.
If you expect that person to be in your building at certain hours,if you give them tools and materials to accomplish the task, they are employees. If they are directly responsible for the product you sell, they are employees.

Office workers are employees; that includes receptionists, box office people, sales and marketing, PR, anyone you expect to be in the office, anyone you supply with a desk and a phone, anyone whose work you oversee on a daily basis are always employees.

If you send the plans to an independent shop to build the set, that’s a sub-contractor. If you own a shop and hire people to use your tools, they are employees. Directors, choreographers, stage managers, and actors are employees.

Your lighting designer is a sub-contractor; your master electrician is an employee. Your costume designer is a sub-contractor, but your wardrobe mistress is an employee.

That’s the real measurement, and it has nothing to do with what one believes other people are doing.

Yes, that is the third criteria the article I linked to mentioned. That actually seems to give you the benefit of the doubt because you didn’t know any better due to industry practice. I just felt it might be hard for a lot of arts companies to get past the first point because they will call people independent contractors but impose all sorts of restrictions. The only people I can see hitting all three are those who treated people like independent contractors but reserved the right not to.

To establish that you had a reasonable basis for not treating the workers as employees, you can show that:
…
• You treated the workers as independent
contractors because you knew that
was how a significant segment of your
industry treated similar workers;

Maybe the IRS’s study into these practices will yield different rules, but for now it seems to be an established (and okay) practice.

Mental health, however, seems to simply escape any discussion of the national well-being. When an act occurs like the crashing of a plane into the IRS last week and the person is revealed to be mentally ill, we just shrug our shoulders and say “Oh well.” Likewise, the amount of productivity lost due to depression and other similar ailments seems to be written off as inevitable. There may be no provable connection between arts education and mental health (many artists like Van Gogh might be used to say otherwise) but teaching young people survival techniques through artistic appreciation seems like an easier approach than continuing to ignore the issue of stress and hopelessness and suffering the consequences.

In general, I think this is a symptom of a larger issue of groups that look at social media efforts after the fact as opposed to incorporating them into strategic marketing planning. Marc van Bree @ Dutch Perspective has some very good material on this but I don’t have a link handy.

And thank you for the shout-out. Love your site and always have. I was just horribly behind on blogroll.

LJ