Posts tagged AB5
Commentary: To Harvard and Back with Julie Su
August 18, 2025 // This year, Julie Su, Joe Biden’s pick for secretary of labor, became a resident fellow with Harvard’s Kennedy School, Institute of Politics. The Century Foundation also brought Su on board as a full-time senior fellow. These prestigious institutions seem to have overlooked key events in Su’s long career. Harvard, where Su, a Stanford grad, earned her law degree, hails the Biden nominee as “a nationally recognized workers’ rights and civil rights expert.” As California’s labor commissioner, Su was “widely credited with a renaissance in enforcement and creative approaches to combating wage theft and protecting immigrant workers.” In reality, her experience was a bit more extensive.
Proposed NJ regulations would impact up to 1.7 million self-employed workers
August 5, 2025 // Director of Independent Women’s Center for Economic Opportunity Patrice Onwuka told The Center Square that “New Jersey is proposing to alter its employment test that determines whether a worker is an employee or an independent contractor.” Onwuka said that “instead of greater clarity, simplicity, and certainty, the NJ Department of Labor is introducing new uncertainty, confusion, and complexity” with this ABC test. The ABC test would go from three one-sentence factors that must be met to prove independent contractor status to three factors each burdened by numerous sub-factors or, as shown in an Independent Women news release.
A Taft-Hartley Roundup of Recent Labor News
June 25, 2025 // For just shy of 80 years, conservative Americans and the Republican Party that provides their imperfect electoral vehicle have sought to advance a policy consensus on labor relations based on three principles: ensuring union membership and participation is voluntary, scrutinizing unions’ operations in exchange for their government-granted powers, and protecting the public from the fallout from labor disputes. As America sits by the pool at the beginning of what might prove to be a long, hot summer, what news is there about the Taft-Hartley consensus?
New Jersey Copycats California’s Job-Destroying Policy
June 3, 2025 // This proposal comes five years after the New Jersey legislature attempted and failed to codify the ABC test. A controversial bill in 2019–the same year that California passed AB5——failed to pass after loud public outcry from industries and independent contractors themselves. What policymakers could not enact through the law, they’re now seeking to advance through regulation.
Federal lawsuit alleges discrimination against Vietnamese women nail techs
June 3, 2025 // Licensed barbers, cosmetologists, estheticians and electrologists can still work as independent contractors under state labor law without being subjected to a rigorous test. But exemptions under Assembly Bill 5 expired this year for manicurists. The change has left manicurists and nail salon owners alike confused as to whether non-employees can continue renting booths for their businesses — a decades-long industry practice.
Commentary Kim Kavin: Worse than California’s AB5
May 6, 2025 // They tried, and failed, to do just that back in 2019-20 with legislation that mirrored California’s disastrous freelance-busting ABC Test law. Independent contractors from all across New Jersey cried foul. Our elected officials ultimately decided this policy was a bad idea for the Garden State. Trenton bureaucrats are now moving to impose this ABC Test interpretation on us all anyway, through rule-making, in their final months of having power before this fall’s election.
OOIDA makes now-solo case in court that California’s AB5 should exempt trucking
April 23, 2025 // For OOIDA, which is carrying on the lawsuit that was originally filed by the California Trucking Association in 2019, the issue is clear: AB5 “categorically prohibits leased owner operators from operating in California,” OOIDA outside counsel Paul D. Cullen Jr. said in his opening remarks. (CTA last August decided not to pursue the appeal to the 9th Circuit.)
Déjà Vu All Over Again
April 14, 2025 // Reclassification attempts began with a media narrative, then blue-state legislation. The same thing is happening now with sectoral organizing.
Truckers tell Ninth Circuit that California law unfairly bans independent contractor drivers
April 10, 2025 // Though a business-to-business exemption is available under the law, the association says members can't apply because they have to follow contradictory federal law that says trucking companies need to have exclusive control over trucks involved in interstate commerce. “One of the requirements of the business-to-business exemption is that the worker be free from the control of the business. Leased owner-operators in inter-state commerce must comply with federal regulations called the Truth In Leasing regulations which require the motor carrier to have exclusive possession and control of the vehicle and the operation of that vehicle in inter-state commerce. Whatever the scope of that control is it can’t be squared with the B2B requirement that the worker be free from control. It’s irreconcilable,” Cullen said.
Kim Kavin: Intent to Reconsider
April 8, 2025 // The federal government has indicated in court that it may rescind the Biden-Harris administration’s independent-contractor rule and undertake the process of new rule-making. Yesterday, the U.S. Labor Department filed a status report in one of several lawsuits against the Biden-Harris administration over its independent contractor rule. This status report was filed with regard to the Frisard case, whose plaintiff is represented by Liberty Justice Center and the Pelican Institute.