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**APRIL 29, 2021**

Meyerson on TAP

Biden and Walsh: To the Rescue of Gig Workers

The battles to win some justice for workers whom their employers deem to
be independent contractors when they're not has taken a new term.

Last November, Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, and their ilk dropped a cool $200
million to successfully persuade California voters to nullify a new
state law that would have required the companies to stop mislabeling
their drivers and would have thereby required them to pay those drivers
at least the minimum wage and provide them with benefits. It was not a
good day for friends of worker justice.

Over the past week, however, those battles have taken a different turn.
In California, a federal court has ruled

that roughly 70,000 truckers in the state who've been mislabeled as
independent contractors are actually employees of trucking companies. In
the nation's capital, new Secretary of Labor Marty Walsh, in an
interview today

with Reuters, said that the department will be considering rulemaking
that could deter employers from mislabeling their gig workers as
independent contractors. To that end, according to reporting

from Bloomberg News, Walsh and the White House want to appoint David
Weil, dean of the Heller School for Public Policy and Management at
Brandeis, to head the Labor Department's Wage and Hour Division, which
sets rules and monitors compliance so that employers don't violate the
laws on minimum wages, maximum hours, and such.

Weil held that position during Barack Obama's second term as
president, where he not only markedly beefed up enforcement of those
laws but initiated procedures-discarded, of course, by the Trump
Administration-to crack down on worker mislabeling. Weil has also
authored what is the definitive book on the deterioration of employment
arrangements and worker rights: The Fissured Workplace, which detailed
how employers, through their use of contactors, subcontractors,
franchises, and mislabeling of employees as independent contractors,
have been dodging their legal obligations to pay minimum wages, provide
benefits, and make themselves subject to collective bargaining law
should their workers decide to unionize.

Whether Weil wants to return to Labor is by no means clear, but the
incentive surely is that he could actually significantly curtail the
exploitation of millions of workers. And whether he takes the job or
not, the fact that the Biden White House and Sec. Walsh would like him
to is further confirmation that this administration is more serious
about helping the working class than any administration since FDR's.

~ HAROLD MEYERSON

Follow Harold Meyerson on Twitter

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Bidenism's One-Two Punch

The president's case for his program rests on egalitarian nationalism
and the value of democracy. That's a more potent case than the
Democrats have had in decades. BY HAROLD MEYERSON

On Summer Vacation and Hungry

The school lunch program has gone a long way to reduce childhood hunger
across the country. What happens during the summer? BY KALENA THOMHAVE

Biden Would Rather Build an Entirely New Welfare State Than Touch the
Hospitals

Health care improvements are minor and largely neglected in Biden's
new plan because he doesn't want to arouse the ire of health care
lobbyists. BY JON WALKER

First 100: The Deficit Obsession is Back

As we close First 100, that old deficit hawkery threatens the promise of
the Biden presidency. BY DAVID DAYEN

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