**Approach:** The hypothetical tracks the labour-hire facts in the High Court’s 2022 decisions. With a genuine, comprehensive written contract, characterisation turns on contractual rights and obligations, not post-contract conduct or the parties’ label. Those rights here (direction, control, place and time, no delegation, no independent business) align with employment.

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(a) Classification: employee

(b) The controlling approach is that where the parties have a comprehensive written contract that is not a sham, the worker is characterised as employee or independent contractor by the **rights and duties the contract creates**, not by a wide-ranging review of how the relationship operated in practice or by the label the parties chose. The leading authority is *Construction, Forestry, Maritime, Mining and Energy Union v Personnel Contracting Pty Ltd* [2022] HCA 1. On the same day the Court decided the companion case *ZG Operations Australia Pty Ltd v Jamsek* [2022] HCA 2, which applied the same contractual approach in different facts.

**Working:** The contract requires the labourer to perform work as the labour-hire company directs, at times and places it specifies on client sites, and subject to its control over how the work is done. He cannot delegate, has no business of his own, and supplies no significant equipment. Those contractual entitlements and obligations are characteristic of an employment relationship. Calling him a “self-employed contractor” does not alter that analysis when the contract is genuine and wholly in writing.

(c) One practical consequence for the engaging business is that it must treat him as an **employee** for compliance purposes—for example, it must pay **superannuation** guarantee contributions on his ordinary time earnings and withhold PAYG tax from his wages, rather than paying him as an independent contractor under invoices alone.

*Benchmarking hypothetical, not legal advice.*