> I’m not sure how deel handles this situation with employees in countries with stricter worker protections. Do they require the company to pay severance, do they include that in their fees?

We hired engineers in Mexico through Deel and were required to provide the mandatory severance up front (I forgot the exact amount but I think it was like 3 months salary?).

That money sat in an escrow account until we let go of the employees at which point we still had to follow all of the local labor laws which I believe also meant that every severance needed to be individually negotiated.

Deel handled all the mechanics but we still had to follow the process (meaning that the time between deciding to lay people off and actually being able to do it was a month if I recall correctly).

For what it's worth the experience convinced me to stick to traditional contracting companies for my remote engineers. Deel is probably a better fit for a company looking to transition to having a full time headquarters and business set up in that country rather than one that wants to just leverage the global pool of engineers.

That sounds like lawsuits waiting to happen for Deel and/or their customers. Either people are employees of Deel or they are your employees, Deel can't have their cake and eat it, too.

Definitely seems to be based on a strictly literal reading of the law that might not hold up under scrutiny.

If someone is acting as a de facto employee of a company, I don’t see the “employer of record” fiction holding up.

It's pretty close to working with a local software house receiving works (customers) from the U.S. and operate team as "project base". Except you can't rotate into projects across companies and get paid about +30-40% of local market rates.