The legal battle over the question of independent contractor (IC) versus employee status produced a decision Tuesday at the National Labor Relations Board that is seen as likely to favor defining a worker as an employee rather than as an IC.
In a case known as Atlanta Opera, the Democrat-controlled NLRB ruled in favor of defining several different types of workers for that city’s opera company as employees rather than independent contractors, which is how the opera company classified them.
But the status of the workers was less significant than the fact that in handing down its decision, the NLRB overturned the so-called Super Shuttle precedent. That NLRB decision from 2019 came down heavily on the side of making it easier to define workers as ICs rather than employees.
The NLRB decision that the opera company’s workers were employees was not controversial. The one dissenting NLRB board member, Marvin Kaplan, agreed with the rest of the board that the workers, who were stylists such as hairdressers, were employees, not ICs.
Instead, Kaplan’s dissent was over the NLRB decision to toss out the Super Shuttle precedent in favor of what is known as FedEx II, in reference to a decision involving that company that had been the governing guideline at NLRB prior to Super Shuttle.
The board’s decision upheld a regional director’s decision that the workers were employees.
The legal community that watches IC law had identified the Atlanta Opera case back in 2021 as one that the full...
Israeli citizen Ilit Raz pled guilty to securities fraud charges in the US after she was found to have defrauded investors of around $27 million by misleading them about the core aspects of a comp...