Posts tagged self-employment
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.
Commentary: Why we just sued the US Department of Labor
February 6, 2024 // As one of us testified before Congress last year, the Biden administration remains relentless. It’s now attempting a regulatory workaround with the Department of Labor’s independent contractor rule, which, in a cruel twist, was released just days before Mercatus Center research showed that the protesting independent contractors have been right all along. Mercatus found that the California approach not only failed to create unionizable jobs, but actually decreased overall employment by 4.4 percent and self-employment by 10 percent. Mercatus also noted that this happened despite California ultimately exempting more than 100 professions. The new Labor rule exempts none. The department acknowledges there may be “conceptual overlap” with the California law’s most harmful language. We agree. What’s worse is that the Labor rule is so vague, it’s impossible for anyone to know how to operate legally with independent contractors. The Biden administration sees this as a feature, not a bug.
OPINION: Biden’s war on working women
February 5, 2024 // But given the administration’s bent toward categorizing workers as employees (in an effort to ramp up unionization), the prospects of retaining their independent status look bleak for the nation’s 70+ million independent workers. Over half of freelancers are women. They earn full-time, part-time, or occasional incomes through various occupations that include—but are not limited to—the gig economy. Think about virtual assistants, marketing professionals, transcriptionists, makeup artists, entertainers, and medical assistants. SEE ALSO Goodbye, wage gap. Hello, partner gap. As true take-home-pay equality looms, psychologists warn it could interfere with women’s evolutionary drive to seek out a partner who provides. Women ultimately may pay the price for finally earning as much as men They depend on flexibility to work around their priorities, such as raising families, caring for aging parents and sick spouses, or managing their own illnesses and disabilities.
‘Independent Contractor’ Rule Latest Dumpster Fire Exported From California
January 31, 2024 // One of those infamous policies and the havoc it’s bound to wreak has gone national, thanks to labor department rules issued by the Biden administration. A 339-page Department of Labor rule – you can always count on the federal government to keep it pithy – would make it much harder to be an independent contractor or freelance worker in America. Created to replace a simpler Trump-era rule, it’s modeled on AB5, a disastrous 2019 California law that made independent contracting and freelance work so hard to do that it effectively outlawed it in the Golden State.