Seasonal Help - The Right to Refuse to Hire?

On a recent Tuesday morning at 7:00am there was a meeting to discuss peak season.

My boyfriend couldn't make it because he had to pick his truck up from the shop (which opened at 7:00) before heading in - it wasn't finished until late Monday evening and he couldn't get there in time before closing. It's not like they actually give "fair warning" of a few days when they schedule these meetings so he can plan around them and Mondays are the only days he can schedule appointments for maintenance (shops aren't generally open on Sundays).

So, he only caught the very tail end of the meeting where he heard, "So, in closing we'd like to see your plans on hiring additional help for the peak season."

His plan on hiring help? He's not planning on it, plain and simple. It's going to get interesting -really- but he could care less about them trying to say he's in breach of contract.

FHD really doesn't want this fleet/employee responsibility, so this year it seems they've gotten together to decided that the Contractors should hire temps and rent trucks.

I've gone through his very open ended contract a few times to see where they say you "MUST" hire help to deal with all of the packages we decide to heap on you. The only terms I see are they "MAY" hire help. From what I can gather, if push comes to shove, they can only make Contractors handle what is physically possible from the standpoint of the DOT hours.

SO, if he can only handle say 190 stops in 12 hours or 950 amount of stops in the concurrent hour limit, anything over that is their problem.

I'd like to see them back the concept that they have the right to tell a 1099 Employee that they must hire employee's themselves. As it stands, they push the definition of a 1099 employee to the very limit. Technically a company has zero right to tell another company (a 1099 employee basically) anything. Not what they should do, how they should do it and the volume of service they should supply.

I'm thinking by leaving the contract open ended so there is no definition of things like "expected and acceptable" volume of packages handled, they can try pull something like this to claim "breach of contract".

Lets just say I'm a builder who uses particular vendors and have working deals with them. I suddenly want to build 50 houses by the end of the year and I need doors, 1 front, 1 back. I say say to a local door fabricator, YOU MUST GIVE ME 100 DOORS BY END OF MONTH. The fabricator has the right to say, nope, we just can't supply 100 doors because we only can produce 50 doors by the end of the year with the staff of 2 long term reliable people that I have. Its not worth it to me to hire 2 more people to train them for the short term because, not only do I have additional wages, I have to worry about things like my door building reputation because their work may not be as good, as well as worry what if one decides to walk out because they found a long term job and can't risk loosing it over the short term job and I've committed to 100 doors. I as the builder have the right to walk away from the relationship and find someone who can supply 100 doors.

The FHD contract in a way, though, should be able to cover the contractor because if the norm is 100-150 packages and that is "reasonable" for the contractor's business model of a single piece of equipment/operator how can it suddenly become "unreasonable" if he/she can't go over that volume? FHD shouldn't have the right to say, well, you can't cover 250 package per day when I want you to, I have the right to find someone to fill your slot that would.

We'll see how it all works out, but its no wonder our State had been investigating their practices. I'm wondering how much payola had to go out to make the DOL turn their head and say, yeah, these guys ARE 1099s.