Federal wage-and-hour lawsuits against employers are at an all-time high. In fact, the number of employee lawsuits has quadrupled in the last 10 years, according to government figures. Most of the recent suits accuse companies of wrongly calling an employee an independent contractor. (The remainder are for failure to pay overtime, wage miscalculation, and similar issues.) Of course, more and more businesses want to treat their workers as contractors, because they can often avoid overtime rules,