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Models
Body leasing
Body leasing is the practice of selling named people as if they were inventory, with the vendor standing in as little more than a billing address. It is the street name for the thin side of contracting.
Also called body shop model
How it works
A body-leasing pitch sounds like a dedicated seat: here is Ana, here is her rate, start Monday. The vendor cannot show its own supervisors, capital, or remittances. You set hours, tools, and discipline. When Ana leaves, they send Ben with the same login. DO 174-17 cares about that pattern because the vendor never became an employer. You did. Price looks lower because thirteenth month and SSS never hit the invoice. They still exist. They attach later, with penalties, if someone files.
Example: ₱35,000 ‘all-in’ for a full-time chat agent, swapped three times in four months, no payslips in the vendor’s name. Loaded cost was a fiction. The queue also never had an owner.
How it differs
Staff leasing is a broader commercial label that can be legitimate if the lessor is a real employer. Labor-only contracting is the legal finding. A dedicated seat employed by an EOR is the opposite structure.
Common errors
Buying a person by the month with no contract in anyone’s name. Treating login continuity as restaff.
In practice
Treat Body leasing as a week-one operating object. Name the employer on the contract and the manager in Slack. If those two names cannot both be true at once, the model is theater. Write an owner - founder, local employer, or worker - and a date you will look at it again: first cutoff, first holiday, or first miss. If nobody can show a contract clause, a payslip line, a calendar block, or a checklist box, you do not have body leasing yet. You have a conversation. Convert the conversation before the person starts, while changing the deal still costs a paragraph rather than a resignation. Re-read the worked example above against the actual hire in front of you. If the numbers in that example cannot be swapped for this seat’s pesos, hours, and start date, the brief is still unfinished.