Chapter 2
Who Are Employees?

Generally, employees are defined either under common law or under special statutes for certain situations.

Employee status under common law. Generally, a worker who performs services for you is your employee if you can control what will be done and how it will be done. This is so even when you give the employee freedom of action. What matters is that you have the right to control the details of how the services are performed. Get Pub. 15-A, Employer's Supplemental Tax Guide, for more information on how to determine whether an individual providing services is an independent contractor or an employee.

You are responsible for withholding and paying employment taxes for your employees. You are also required to file employment tax returns. These requirements do not apply to independent contractors. The rules discussed in this publication apply only to workers who are your employees.

In general, you are an employer of farmworkers if your employees:

• Raise or harvest agricultural or horticultural products on a farm.
• Work in connection with the operation, management, conservation, improvement, or maintenance of your farm and its tools and equipment.
• Handle, process, or package any agricultural or horticultural commodity if you produced over half of the commodity (for a group of more than 20 operators, all of the commodity).
• Do work related to cotton ginning, turpentine, or gum resin products.
• Do housework in your private home if it is on a farm that is operated for profit. (You may report the taxes for household employees separately. See sections 3 and 8.)

For this purpose, the term "farm" includes stock, dairy, poultry, fruit, fur-bearing animal, and truck farms, as well as plantations, ranches, nurseries, ranges, greenhouses or other similar structures used primarily for the raising of agricultural or horticultural commodities, and orchards.

Farmwork does not include reselling activities that do not involve any substantial activity of raising agricultural or horticultural commodities, such as a retail store or a greenhouse used primarily for display or storage.

The table on page 19, How Do Employment Taxes Apply to Farmwork?, distinguishes between farm and nonfarm activities, and also addresses rules that apply in special situations.

Crew Leaders

If you are a crew leader, you are an employer of farmworkers. A crew leader is a person who furnishes and pays (either on his or her own behalf or on behalf of the farm operator) workers to do farmwork for the farm operator. If there is no written agreement between you and the farm operator stating that you are his or her employee and if you pay the workers (either for yourself or for the farm operator), then you are a crew leader.

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