Posts tagged W-2 employees
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.
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.
OPINION Congress must block Biden’s destructive labor policy
April 16, 2024 // .A California-based tutoring company provides one anecdotal example of the consequences. The company has already let go independent workers in the Golden State and—in anticipation of the nationwide DOL rule—has announced terminations in Massachusetts and New Jersey. It’s the proverbial canary in the coal mine. If Congress doesn’t act, the DOL’s rule risks replicating California’s dysfunction on a national scale. One estimate predicts the independent workers impacted by this rule could face more than $30 billion in lost income. That tracks with a recent Mercatus Center study on the impact of AB 5 in California. It found that after the law was implemented, self-employment decreased by more than 10 percent on average for affected occupations. Overall employment decreased by more than four percent.
Commentary: ATR Applauds House Education & Workforce Committee for Defending Independent Contractors
March 22, 2024 // “Independent contractors want to be their own boss. But Biden and the Democrats want to force them to HAVE a boss,” said Grover Norquist, President of Americans for Tax Reform. Americans for Tax Reform applauds the House Education & Workforce Committee majority for passing Congressman Kiley’s resolution to nullify the Biden DOL’s harmful reclassification of independent contractors.
Commentary: Biden pursues organized labor’s agenda through regulation
March 14, 2024 // The OSHA “walkaround” rule flies in the face of a regulation that stipulates that people who accompany an OSHA inspector must be employed by the company under inspection. Under the proposed rule, OSHA representatives would have to simply state that a union official was “reasonably necessary” to the inspection to bring that individual to the site. The walk-around rule presents an opportunity for union organizers to collect information or otherwise infiltrate nonunion workplaces, a clear attempt by OSHA to give unions a leg up in organizing drives. Another example is the Securities and Exchange Commission’s universal proxy rule, which forces companies to include management and dissident shareholder nominees on a single proxy card in contested elections. The rule enabled a coalition of our nation’s largest and most militant unions to extract new concessions from Starbucks by threatening to mount a hostile takeover attempt of the coffee company’s board. Unions will continue to exploit the universal proxy rule to bring other publicly traded companies to the table with threats of a hostile takeover.
Everything You Need to Know About the Department of Labor Independent Contractor Rule
March 12, 2024 // The DOL does not provide an analysis of how many independent contractors will actually become employees. Let’s say a company is contracting with 100 photographers, all of whom are affected by this rule: how many of those photographers will become employees? It’s clearly not all 100 of them. To unpack the potential benefits (and costs) on workers, we need some analysis into how many of those 100 freelance photographers would become employees. Another consideration for the benefits side of the equation is whether most independent contractors are currently working with small businesses or larger ones. This matters because, as I point out in a previous post, many small businesses do not provide healthcare insurance, retirement benefits, or maternity benefits to their employees. This means that the “benefits” differences between an independent contractor and an employee at a small business are smaller than expected.
Democrat Party’s Embrace of Union Tactics Emboldens Corruption
February 9, 2024 // The Biden administration’s green-lighting of Big Labor’s thuggish tactics has only served to exacerbate union corruption. In 2023, the Office of Labor Management Standards (OLMS) conducted 155 criminal investigations into union activity, handing down 39 indictments and 57 convictions. Union crimes the OLMS prosecuted include petty theft, embezzlement, racketeering, and falsifying records.
Column: The PRO Act will disempower Virginia workers
March 28, 2023 // Under the guise of transparency, the PRO Act would mandate employers to partake in “notice-posting” and codify the National Labor Relations Board’s 2014 Election Rule that gives them access to workers names, addresses, job locations, phone numbers and email addresses in a searchable electronic format. Unions having unfettered access to information like this would be a major privacy violation and lead to worker intimidation for refusal to comply. It’s unacceptable for labor unions to meddle in affairs like this.
Opinion: Biden Labor Nominee Julie Su is a Threat to Independent Contractors and Freelancers Nationwide
March 2, 2023 // Su, who is currently serving as Deputy Labor Secretary, has a demonstrated record of mismanagement of taxpayer resources and will wage war on the nearly 60 million Americans that engage in freelance work. Before DOL, Su worked as California Labor Secretary. Under Su’s scandal-tarred watch, California’s unemployment system paid out over $11 billion in fraudulent claims, totaling 10 percent of all benefits paid. Estimates show that a further $19 billion in claims were improperly distributed. An audit spurred by Su’s failed leadership showed that her work was a “high-risk issue” and “inefficient.” Su will also raise your taxes. Su will likely push a national version (such as the PRO Act) of AB5 if confirmed, breaking Biden’s pledge not to raise taxes on Americans making less than $400,000 per year.
Opinion: Biden must reverse course and protect independent contractors
June 17, 2022 // With this new rulemaking period, the administration has a chance to turn the page on its stridently anti-independent contractor stance. Any new rules should protect the right of Americans to make a living outside of a traditional employment relationship. Under current law, there are two ways an individual can have a relationship with someone that is paying you. The first is an employee, where a person that is paying the individual has total control over how, when, and where the work is being done.