Emily, Independent Contractor, Louisiana

Emily, Independent Contractor, Louisiana

*Due to the nature of her past experience at DOL, Emily has chosen to forgo using her last name or other identifying information, including client names.

As an independent contractor, Emily wears a lot of different hats. “Right now I contract with a couple of different people,” she explains. “I do some online editing, some payroll and bill pay, and a lot of legal compliance and board management services.”

While the variety is nice, staying flexible in her schedule is Emily’s number one priority. “I have four children and I need more time in the day for them,” she says. “I have to be able to control when and where I work.” So much so, that when Emily’s former employer moved from a 1099 independent contractor model to primarily full-time employees, she stepped away but invited them to be one of her clients.

Emily is very diligent about making sure she fits the criteria for a 1099 contractor classification, and she knows a thing or two about exactly what that entails. She worked for the Department of Labor (DOL) for about a decade, under two presidential administrations.

“I used to work for the Department of Labor in the Wage and Hour Division, so I would advise people on whether they were independent contractors or employees. I worked in D.C. for six years and then became an investigator out in the field for about three years after that.”

After her experience with the agency, Emily recognizes why 1099 contractors are worried about new DOL criteria standards that threaten to reclassify millions of contractors as W-2 employees whether they want to be or not.

“Their worries are justified because this is a very gray area and it’s subject to interpretation. You may feel like you have lots of flexibility in your work, but an investigator from the DOL can walk in at any time and say, ‘No, that’s not how I see it. You’re an employee.’”

And when Emily says, “any time,” she means it. There does not need to be a complaint filed by any workers in order for the DOL to begin investigating a business for labor violations.

“One of the higher-ups in Washington would instruct us to investigate a sector of workers, like delivery drivers, or hotel workers, and we would start identifying employers and then just see what we could find,” she remembers. Investigators could find a violation somewhere since the laws are so complicated—and when they did, they would re-classify contractors as employees and start calculating back wages.

“We would investigate complaints that were filed too, but nobody had to complain necessarily, there didn’t have to be any issues,” she says. “The Department could literally just decide that a sector wasn’t doing a good job, and we’d go after them.”

Emily interpreted labor criteria for years in D.C., and later met face to face in the field with the workers who were directly affected by those interpretations in Tennessee, her assigned region for investigation. Now, she is one of those 1099 workers herself, her status possibly subject to the interpretation of someone sitting at her old desk.

“Now as an independent contractor, I can feel these things and understand the plight of the American worker, who wants to choose the type of work that best fits their life. Personally, I love independent contracting,” she says. “I’m all for it. I think it’s great.”