The designation of employee vs. contractor affects far more than just gig workers
This article is second in a three-part series on the worker classification debate. The first article can be found here.
Recent news headlines suggest that the ongoing debate over how to classify independent contractors is not going away anytime soon. The current Department of Labor (DOL) announced in May that it will no longer seek to enforce the Biden administration’s rulemaking that favored classifying workers as employees rather than contractors. The Biden rule, in turn, had reversed a more pro-contractor rulemaking from the first Trump administration. Trump 2.0 appears poised once again to swing the pendulum back toward favoring independent contracting.
This debate continues to broil at all levels of government—from localities to states to the halls of Congress and DOL. But much of the political shouting over the past decade of this debate has focused specifically on the gig economy and the use of independent contracting status by gig platforms. This overlooks the fact that broad swaths of the traditional American workforce also operate via 1099 contracting arrangements and largely find themselves ignored in the debate.
Continue reading the entire piece here at Discourse
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C. Jarrett Dieterle is a nonresident senior fellow at the R Street Institute and a legal policy fellow for the Manhattan Institute.
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