For much of the last decade, a legal and regulatory storm at the state and federal level has surrounded classification of workers as “independent contractors” or “employees.” The dramatic growth of the gig economy, especially app-based services such as Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, and Instacart, has contributed to the upheaval. Uber and Lyft have faced lawsuits across the country contending they misclassified their drivers as independent contractors rather than employees in violation of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) and similar state wage and hour laws. One lawsuit involving almost 400,000 Uber drivers in California and Massachusetts was settled for approximately $100 million prior to trial. The court rejected that proposed settlement, however, as insufficient to adequately compensate the affected drivers. The state of New York has determined Uber drivers to be employees for purposes of its unemployment benefits law, and the Massachusetts attorney general filed suit against Uber and Lyft in July 2021 for classifying their drivers as independent contractors instead of employees. The presiding court rejected the companies’ efforts to have the lawsuit dismissed.
Courts have not served as the only avenue to address worker classification issues. In 2019, the California legislature enacted a law defining many gig economy workers as employees. Numerous app-based service providers mounted an aggressive campaign to overturn the law, raising over $200 million to promote a ballot...
Several accounts -- run by users in Vietnam and boasting tens of thousands of followers -- later shifted to focus solely on Australian national politics, linking to websites full of AI-generated a...