How is it an ethical issue? If you don’t have enough in front of you and the pressure isn’t on to be superman, why take the slackoff job your employer is incentivizing for you? Rational take is to do this. See yourself as a consultancy sees itself. If the barriers towards forming your own LLC to represent your own labor in this way weren’t so high this wouldn’t even have to happen; we’d all be contracting projects because that actually makes sense over salary or even hourly. That is even how your own boss sees you without this arrangement: a sort of kept contractor to be let go of should restructuring happen after a project ends.