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.
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