By Greg Allan, tradesman and creator of Data First Coaching
What test decides if a glazier’s installer is a contractor or an employee?
In New Zealand, whether the person fitting the glass is an employee or a contractor depends on a legal test, not on what the paperwork calls them. Employment New Zealand’s gateway test checks for a written agreement, freedom to work elsewhere, control over hours and the right to decline extra work; if a glazing arrangement does not meet every part of it, the common law test takes over instead.
A glazier running a measure and install team often has both kinds of worker on the books in the same month: an employed fitter doing the shower screens and splashbacks, and a contracted installer brought in for an emergency boarding job that lands at ten at night. Employment New Zealand sets out the gateway test criteria and explains that it came into law in February 2026 and is not retrospective, so an arrangement that started earlier is checked under the common law test for the period before that date (see Employee or contractor?).
Inland Revenue runs a parallel set of questions for tax purposes: whether the worker has to do the work personally rather than send someone else, who decides the quality and amount of output, whose premises the work happens on, whether the worker can take jobs from other businesses, and who sets the rules and procedures on site (see Self-employed or employee). None of this is decided by the label on the contract, and a glazier who treats a long-running installer as a contractor purely by habit can be wrong on both tests at once.
Why can getting this wrong cost a glazing business more than a quote?
Getting the status wrong matters because a worker who believes they have really been an employee can ask the Employment Relations Authority or the Employment Court to decide, and the leading case the courts still work from, Bryson v Three Foot Six Ltd, shows status disputes are decided on the real working relationship rather than the contract’s wording. For a glazing business, that risk sits alongside different ACC obligations for employees and contractors.
Most glaziers do not plan to misclassify anyone. It tends to happen slowly: a contracted installer who was meant to help on one commercial shopfront job becomes the regular overnight call for every emergency boarding job, working set hours, following the business’s procedures, with no written agreement updated to match. If that installer later believes the relationship was really employment, the Employment Relations Authority or Employment Court can be asked to determine it, using the series of common law tests built up since Bryson v Three Foot Six Ltd (see MBIE advice on contracting parties).
ACC adds another layer most glaziers do not think about until a claim happens. A self-employed glazier is automatically covered under ACC CoverPlus and is invoiced directly by ACC, separate from general tax, while an employee’s cover runs through the business’s own levies (see ACC for business). Get the worker’s status wrong and the wrong party can end up carrying the cost of an injury on-site handling toughened glass or a heavy balustrade panel.
This is general information, not legal, tax or employment advice. Check your own situation with the body named here or a qualified adviser.
How does this change what a glazier’s quote actually costs?
Once you know whether a worker is an employee or a contractor, the real question for your business is a costing one: does that person’s labour land in cost of sales on the job they worked, every time, regardless of who they are? If a contracted installer’s rate on an emergency boarding job or a commercial shopfront fit-out is not captured against that job, your quoted gross profit margin on paper stops matching what actually lands in the bank.
Picture a glazier who quotes a double glazing reglaze with the labour costed as if an in-house fitter will do the measure and install, then the job clashes with another install and a contracted installer is brought in at short notice because the glass supplier’s lead time will not move. The contractor’s rate is often higher than the employed fitter’s wage plus on-costs, but if that difference never gets recorded against the job, the margin on that reglaze looks fine on the quote and quietly disappears once the contractor’s invoice is paid. This is the kind of root cause data first coaching looks for: not a bad quote, but a job where the real labour cost never made it into the number the owner was watching.
The same pattern shows up across shower screens, splashbacks, mirrors, balustrade work and insurance work whenever outside help is pulled in to hit a deadline or cover a busy week. Protecting gross profit margin is not a one-off calculation done at quoting time; it is something to check job by job and month by month, because the mix of employee and contractor labour on the tools changes constantly in a glazing business.
How can AI agents keep contractor and employee costs straight on every job?
AI agents, software that does a task the way you would do it yourself, with your prices, your wording and your rules, can watch for exactly this gap: every time a contractor’s invoice or a timesheet comes in, an agent can match it to the job it belongs to and flag where that labour sits against the quoted margin, whether the person doing the install was on the payroll or on a subcontractor invoice.
For a glazier, that means an emergency boarding job booked at midnight, a contracted installer sent to a commercial shopfront, and an in-house fitter’s hours on a shower screen measure and install can all be checked the same way, instead of some jobs being tracked closely and others only showing up as a surprise at the end of the month. AI agents do not decide whether a worker is an employee or a contractor; that still comes back to the tests set out above. What they change is whether the cost of that decision is visible on every job while there is still time to do something about it.
Where the glazing business is based in New Zealand does not change how this works. Greg coaches glaziers online, starting from the business’s own job and finance data rather than a conversation about how things feel, so an owner anywhere in New Zealand gets the same starting point: their own numbers, read properly, before anything is decided.
Where can you check the current rules?
- Employee or contractor?, Employment New Zealand’s gateway test and the common law test used when it does not apply.
- Self-employed or employee, Inland Revenue’s guidelines for deciding status for tax purposes.
- MBIE advice on contracting parties, how the Employment Relations Authority and Employment Court assess disputed status.
- ACC for business, how ACC cover and levies differ for self-employed workers compared with employees.
- IG 16/01 Determining Employment Status for Tax Purposes, Inland Revenue’s interpretation guideline, including the Bryson v Three Foot Six Ltd case.
- CoverPlus Extra, optional ACC cover a self-employed glazier can choose and apply for.
How does Data First Coaching approach this?
Data First Coaching does not start by asking whether a worker should be called an employee or a contractor. It starts by pulling the glazing business’s own job and finance data through the Trade Business Intelligence, to see where labour cost on jobs, contracted and employed, is actually landing against the quoted margin, job by job and month by month. Often the real question underneath is simpler than the legal test: as Greg Allan puts it, “what do you wish they knew” about how that job really ran, before the invoice was paid and the margin was already gone. The how, working through each job type and each supplier relationship, is worked through inside the Academy, with members, because the Trade Business Intelligence is powered by every member who is open minded, innovative and willing to share.
