In trying to answer the question – When are workers employees? – the Biden administration has reignited a long and roiling controversy over fairness in the workplace.
Is it best to try to protect workers from unscrupulous firms that don’t offer minimum wage or benefits? Or by applying such traditional standards to a new and burgeoning freelance workforce, is the federal government holding back entrepreneurial Americans from supplementing their income?
There is no easy answer because these workers – part of the so-called gig economy – vary greatly in their needs and outlook. Whatever the administration implements in the coming months, it could affect the incomes and livelihoods of more than a third of Americans.
For more than seven decades, the United States has made a distinction between employees, who have rights such as a minimum wage and overtime pay, and contract workers who don’t have such rights. Under current law, for example, a plumber hired by a firm to install new pipes is pretty clearly a contractor, who negotiates their price, rather than an employee of the firm, who is guaranteed a minimum wage.
In cases where the distinction is not so clear, the courts over the years have developed multifactor tests to determine between the two with occasional guidance from the U.S. Labor Department.
In its waning days, the Trump administration issued a formal Labor Department rule that...
You are reading the second issue of the Disinformation Monitor. It is published on a monthly basis and provides an overview of developments on the disinformation scenes on NATO’s eastern frontier....