Posts tagged self-employment
Opinion: Gambling With a Worker’s Job
May 1, 2024 // But the job losses go beyond anecdotal evidence. In our recent analysis of California’s AB5, which is the first empirical investigation of the law, my co-authors and I find that it is associated with a significant decline in overall employment and self-employment for affected occupations. Self-employment fell by 10.5 percent for non-exempt occupations. Overall employment fell by 4.4 percent in the same professions. Not only that, but AB5 didn’t appear to make up for these job losses by putting more employees on traditional payrolls with better stability, benefits or protections. Our study found no consistent evidence of more workers becoming W-2 employees.
Commentary: JOHN STOSSEL: Unions Wanted To Help Freelance Workers. Now They Lost Their Jobs
April 17, 2024 // Vox called the law “a big win for workers everywhere.” Ha! A few months later, Vox media layed off hundreds of freelancers. “They expected that all these companies were going to reclassify independent contractors as employees,” freelance musician Ari Herstand told me. “In reality, they’re just letting them go!” Herstand was dismayed to learn that when he wants other musicians to join him, he could no longer just write them a check. “I have to put that drummer on payroll, W2 him, get workers’ comp insurance, unemployment insurance, payroll taxes!” he complains. “I have to hire a payroll company.”
IWF Signs Independent Contracting Coalition Letter
March 18, 2024 //
Over 30 Leading Policy Groups Send Coalition Letter to Congress Raising Concerns with Department of Labor’s Independent Contractor Rule and Its Crushing Impact on Independent Workers
March 11, 2024 // Vincent Vernuccio, president of Institute for the American Worker, said, “Instead of empowering workers to make their own decisions to earn a living in the best way to support their families, many policymakers in Congress and the White House want to stifle worker freedom and flexibility. The vague and authoritarian DOL rule will hold back growth, destroy jobs, and harm the very workers it purports to help.”
Opinion: Biden rule threatens to throw independent contracting into disarray
March 6, 2024 // For example, the U.S. Postal Service uses 7,900 contracted delivery services to reach about 3 million of its delivery points. The plainclothes carrier who delivers mail via her personal vehicle to my home in Shenandoah, Va., is presumably one of these contract drivers. Under the Biden administration’s new rule, she and potentially thousands of individuals like her would almost certainly be considered employees. That is because the work these contractors perform is “integral” to the Postal Service; the Postal Service exercises a high degree of direct and indirect control over these individuals by mandating where and when the work must be done, and the delivery contractors are not exercising significant “skill” or “initiative.”
Commentary: New Research Exposes Flaws in California’s Independent Contractor Law
February 28, 2024 // The theory behind both AB-5 and the DOL’s recently finalized regulation for classifying independent contractors or employees under the Fair Labor Standards Act is the same: by making it harder to maintain independent contractor relationships, independent contractors will be converted into traditional employees. The Mercatus study suggests this theory has failed in California. The question is whether DOL has learned anything from that example.
Collateral Damage in the War on ‘Gig Work’
February 12, 2024 // A new Department of Labor rule regarding independent contractors is likely to hurt overall employment.
Labor Department Sued Over New Rule That Stands To Impact Independent Contractors in Promo
February 7, 2024 // “While the Labor Department believes the new rule will merely result in the independent contractor becoming an employee, insignificant consideration is given to the other alternative: Namely, that the employer could opt to end the position,” attorney Chuck Machion, senior vice president and senior counsel at ASI, has said.
Biden’s war on work undermines the American dream
February 6, 2024 // Biden’s Labor Department rule pursues the same goals as AB 5 and would put the monthly incomes of tens of millions of people — disproportionately women (especially mothers) and minorities — at risk.
OPINION: Bidenomics Labor Agenda on the Rise in Time for 2024 Election
February 6, 2024 // This means entrepreneurs will lose the ability to open their franchise stores like a McDonald’s or Meineke auto shop. It also means many small mom-and-pop businesses like plumbing, baking, accounting and cleaning can’t perform mutually beneficial services for other businesses without being slammed by costly new regulations, legal threats and even targeted unionization efforts — not to mention the loss of their American Dream to have an independent business in the first place. In other words, more than 750,000 franchises and even more small businesses serving as contractors and vendors are now under threat, as are tens of millions of workers. The similar 2015 Browning-Ferris joint employer rule was estimated to increase costs by more than $33 billion and lead to 376,000 lost jobs for franchises, meaning the new rule in 2024 will be even more costly. Next, on January 10, the Labor Department published a final independent contractor rule that modifies the subfactors used in Labor’s “economic realities” test to create as many roadblocks toward independent contractor careers as Labor can without legislation.