A recent event that happened to a friend of mine got me thinking about self employment and contract work.
My friend runs a home based business and he contracts out to a few different companies as well as some private individuals.
Here's the situation. He recently took a 4 day weekend, but as Murphy's law goes, one of the companies that he's on contract to, called him up on the last day before he was supposed to go away (a Wednesday) at 4pm and asked him to get some work done by the following Friday. When he said he was going away for the next couple of days, a manager from the company got his panties tied up in a bunch and called him back and give him shit. He insisted that my friend work an all-nighter before going away to get the work done. As it is, the work required couldn't have been done by the Friday even if he did stick around so my friend told them not a chance. So the manager then asked for the electronic files so they could find someone else to sub it to, to which my friend said, even if he could find someone, for them to pick up and try to working on someone else's files will take longer than if they just waited.
What pisses my friend off is that he's been on contract with this company for well over 5 years and has always put them on his priority list when it comes to dropping work/putting off work for the other contracts. They know very well how he operates and that he has other companies that he works for as well. Also, he always gives them a yearly reminder in the early spring that his summer plans are to take extended vacations every other week.
It has never been an issue in the past for him to go away as the companies have always given him lots of lead time to get stuff done, but in this situation because of the one company's poor planning and communication it blew up into an issue. If they had properly communicated to him that this was coming down the pipe, they would have found out sooner and if he had known, he might have been able to make arrangements or planned ahead for this. So here's the question, because he's self employed and on contract, is he allowed to take vacation/time off whenever he wants or is he obligated to submit his dates to (all) the companies that he's contracting out to?