Posts tagged small businesses
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.”
Ranking Member Cassidy, Kiley Introduce CRA to Overturn New Biden Regulation Threatening 27 Million American Independent Contractors
March 6, 2024 // Independent contractors, or freelancers, make their own hours to fit their schedule and decide where and how they want to work. The Biden administration rule attempts to restrict the ability of American workers to be an independent contractor and take advantage of the flexibility it provides. The rule creates a non-exhaustive, six-factor litmus test for unelected bureaucrats to interpret and decide who is and who is not classified as an independent contractor. It also casts as large a net as possible and gives less legal certainty to independent contractors impacted by the regulation. “The Biden administration’s priority should not be to do whatever makes it easier to forcibly and coercively unionize workers. It should be to increase individual freedom and opportunity,” said Dr. Cassidy. “This new Biden rule does the opposite, jeopardizing 27 million workers’ ability to make their own hours and make a living without being pressured into joining a union.”
Kiley, Cassidy Introduce CRA to Overturn New Biden Regulation Threatening 27 Million American Independent Contractors
March 6, 2024 // “Independent contractors, entrepreneurs, and small businesses are fed up with the Department of Labor continually breathing down their necks,” said Representative Virginia Foxx (R-NC), chairwoman of the House Education and the Workforce Committee. “The bicameral Congressional Review Act resolution led by Representative Kiley and Senator Cassidy offers Congress the opportunity to take a unified stand against the Department’s thirst for more government control over America’s workforce. Entrepreneurial opportunities and flexibility should be encouraged, not extinguished with heavy-handed mandates from the federal government.” “Gavin Newsom and Julie Su’s AB 5 severely restricted independent contracting in California, destroying thousands of livelihoods and harming California’s economy. As Acting Secretary of Labor, Su and the Biden Administration have announced a new Department of Labor rule, modeled after on the same job-killing AB 5 that will cost millions of independent professionals across the country their livelihoods while restricting the freedom of many millions more to have flexible work arrangements. Our legislation under the Congressional Review Act nullifies this terrible regulation and protects independent contractors,” said Representative Kiley. “Washington should support workers, not regulate them into oblivion.”
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.
Opinion: Biden’s Labor Nominee ‘Embodies the Spirit of California,’ and That’s the Problem
January 18, 2024 // If approved, Su won’t be the only half-baked Californian in the Biden White House. Vice President Kamala Harris is (per National Review’s Charlie Cooke) “talented enough to make the inanities uttered by her rival Pete Buttigieg sound substantive, concise, and apprehensible.” Economist David Bahnsen calls California’s Janet Yellen “a career bureaucrat, albeit a hyper-intelligent one, who has spent an adult life devoid of accountability for poor decisions and even poorer ideas.” California’s Xavier Becerra knew nothing about health or human services until Biden made him head of Health and Human Services; during Covid, he did nothing, which, given his résumé, might have been for the best. Becerra’s fathomless ignorance is almost a prerequisite for this administration, where experience might mean owning your failures. The first White House gig of Californian Alejandro Mayorkas, now secretary of homeland security, as Obama’s director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services involved running interference for a scandal-plagued electric-car company run by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s brother Tony Rodham and Terry McAuliffe, cochairman of President Bill Clinton’s 1996 reelection campaign, chairman of the Democratic National Committee from 2001 to 2005, and chairman of Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign. I needn’t go on — or should I mention that Biden’s deputy secretary of education is a former San Diego teachers’-union official whose concern for union power exceeds any attachment to student performance? While she was Governor Gavin Newsom’s secretary of labor, Su oversaw the implementation of bad policy and the mismanagement of simple procedures. Any one of her major catastrophes would have been career-enders elsewhere; in California, where the failure of progressive policy is invariably a prompt for more progressive policy, she was instead excused — and then promoted into the Biden
GOP Reps: Biden’s New Rule Rips Freedom Away from Workers, Small Businesses | Opinion
January 17, 2024 // Biden's rule on independent contractors circumvents Congress, the people's representation, to enact a disastrous policy similar to that in California's Assembly Bill 5 (AB5) and the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act. AB5, enacted in January 2020, led to countless Californians who were working as freelance employees losing their income mere weeks before the COVID pandemic. The radical PRO Act would take away independent contractors' ability to work how they see fit. Taking these failed far-Left policies nationwide would devastate millions of American businesses by depriving individuals of entrepreneurial opportunities, the ability to set their own hours, and the flexibility to care for their families the way it suits them.
Biden vows veto if Congress moves to repeal NLRB rule on contract, franchise workers
January 10, 2024 // The rule replaced a Trump-era regulation requiring companies to have "direct and immediate" control over workers in order to be considered joint employers, which was favored by business groups. "Reversing this rulemaking will prevent workers from exercising their right to bargain for higher wages, better benefits, and safer working conditions," the OMB said on Monday. "Too often, companies deny workers this right by hiding behind subcontractors, staffing agencies, and temporary agencies." The House Committee on Education and the Workforce approved the resolution for a vote last month. The federal Congressional Review Act allows Congress to repeal agency rules within 60 days of their adoption. The resolution only needs the support of a majority in the House and Senate to pass, but would require a two-thirds majority to overcome a Biden veto.
25 states will hike minimum wage in 2024
December 22, 2023 // Sean Higgins, an analyst at the libertarian Competitive Enterprise Institute, said many food and hospitality workers already earn more than their state minimum. He noted that employers have raised salaries to compete for a shrinking pool of applicants. “Raising state and local rates does hurt the smaller businesses, the classic mom and pop enterprises, who will employ local high school or college-age kids if they can but may not be able to justify that if the minimum rate increases,” Mr. Higgins said.
Opinion: NLRB says ‘common law’ — and common sense — defines joint employers
December 5, 2023 // The mandate, to take effect Dec. 26, says when two employers — think a local McDonald’s franchise and McDonald’s headquarters in Chicago — control a worker’s toil, from wages and hours to duties and work rules to hiring and firing to uniforms and training, then both are responsible for obeying or breaking Labor law. And that means it should be easier for workers to organize and bargain without being bounced from pillar to post when it comes to whom to bargain with. Using that same “basic common sense” explanation, AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler called the new rule “an important win” for workers.
WA electrical contractors jolted by new law they say favors big contractors, unions
September 7, 2023 // Tim Rockwell is the owner of Rockwell Electric Inc, which is a small electrical contractor also based in Bellingham. Rockwell said trying to start his own apprenticeship program was extremely difficult. To do so, he had to receive a recommendation of approval of the apprenticeship program through the state Department of Labor & Industries, followed by another recommended approval by the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges. The Washington State Apprenticeship Training Council could then provide provisional approval after one year. Prior to a council meeting, the proposed apprenticeship program can be objected to by another apprenticeship program that operates within the same region. The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Union objected to Rockwell's proposed apprenticeship program.