Every so often a large settlement of a class action lawsuit reverberates in the independent contractor world – but last month there were two mega-settlements. The first was between Flowers Foods, a large nationwide baked goods company, and a class of distributors who sued for allegedly misclassifying them as independent contractors in violation of the California Labor Code. The $55 million settlement covering 475 distributors is a very high per plaintiff result. In addition, Flowers Foods reports that it will be incurring another $50 million to buy back about 350 distributor routes and then convert them to an employee distributor model. The other mega-settlement involves a large commercial cleaning company, JanPro, which was sued in California by over 2000 janitorial franchisees for misclassification under the state’s Labor Code and fair trade practices laws as well as breach of contract. JanPro is settling for $30 million. These two settlements demonstrate that California’s very strict test for IC status is extraordinarily unfavorable to many companies with IC relationships that are otherwise lawful under most other state and federal IC laws, assuming the IC relationships are structured, documented, and implemented in a compliant manner. Many businesses that seek to maintain their IC relationships across the U.S. but minimize misclassification exposure in California and other states have followed a process such as IC Diagnostics (TM), which offers companies a customized...
THE Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has claimed that a viral comment linked to an X account attributed to its chairman was posted before the original pro-APC post it was respondin...