Inst. 1. You have read Chapters 19, 20 and 21 of your Legal Environment of Business textbook. 2. I want you to focus on page 421 of your textbook for this assignment. 3. Review the following fact situation: You own and operate Green Thumb, a sole proprietorship, which you opened in 2018. Green Thumb does landscape and yard work for various homeowners. You design a yard for grass, trees, and plants to be laid down and, also in the long term mow the lawns, trim the trees, change plants per the seasons, rake leaves and other necessary landscape touch up and yard work. Your customer homeowners contact you and setup how often you will come to their homes, and they pay you via check or Venmo, which you deposit to your Green Thumb checking account. After 2 years, you are getting numerous referrals, and you realize you cannot meet all the demand. You know your friend, Taylor, has landscaping skills and has expressed he has time to get into the landscaping and yard work business. You have seen some of his work and know he has the skills to do great work. You contact Taylor and ask him if he will take on the new homeowners. You tell him to help him facilitate matters, you will take the calls and get the payments into this checking account until he sets up all this personal accounts. Taylor is slow in getting his account and other business matters set up so over the course of a year you handle all the calls and provide the information to Taylor as to the homes he is to go landscape and perform yard work. The homeowners send payment to you, and you deposit them into your Green Thumb checking account. Taylor and you agree to minimize having to do each day that every week you give Taylor a check for the amount he earned money from the homes he handled. You keep 5% of Taylor's earned money because of having to handle the calls and payments. One day you get an angry call from a homeowner that Taylor did a terrible job. According to the homeowner, he mistook their home as one he needed to pull up grass and do an overhaul. In the process, he cracked sprinkler pipelines and hit a gas line that could have blown up the house. The homeowner blames you and says you are his employer, and that they are going to sue you and Green Thumb for damages that will end up costing your business all its funds. You are going to lose it all. 4. Writing Assignment: A. Answer the following questions: i. Is Taylor your employee or an independent contractor? ii. Why is Taylor your employee or an independent contractor? iii. Will you bear any responsibility for Taylor's wrongdoing to the angry homeowner? B. In answering these questions, keep it simple. Address the issue by analyzing the facts based on how one is determined to be an employee versus an independent contractor. Be sure to EXPLAIN and ELABORATE by utilizing the facts in your analysis. C. This Writing Assignment does not require you to research beyond what you have read in your textbook. D. What am I looking for in YOUR assignment? i. An introductory paragraph with YOUR thesis (legal opinion) on whether Taylor is an employee or an independent contractor. State in this introductory paragraph a summary of why you reached this thesis (legal opinion). ii. Supporting paragraphs for YOUR thesis (legal opinion). Go step by step in your analysis. iii. A conclusion paragraph that brings it all together
