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OCTOBER 11, 2022

Meyerson on TAP

**One More Pro-Worker Move From Biden**

The Labor Department says if you make your living driving for Uber,
Lyft, or FedEx, you're an employee, not an 'independent
contractor.'

Notoriously, the federal minimum wage doesn't amount to very much.
It's been stuck at a pathetically low $7.25 an hour for well over a
decade, though many states have set their own minimum considerably
higher. (In California this year, it's at $15.50.)

Nonetheless, a proposed rule
released
today by the Department of Labor would effectively guarantee a raise for
the thousands of Uber and Lyft drivers in California, who are mislabeled
as independent contractors and thus not covered under state or federal
minimum-wage legislation. According to a recent study
, when the expenses
they have to pay to buy, lease, and/or maintain their cars are
subtracted from their income, their real hourly income comes out to be a
less-than-princely $6.20.

Today's proposed rule, accordingly, would raise that level by about a
dollar, and more importantly, qualify those drivers for overtime pay and
require their employers to pay into the funds for Social Security and
unemployment insurance. Those changes would take place because the
DOL's new rule would establish more real-world standards for what
constitutes employment-criteria such as determining the rate the
drivers charge and what share they pay to the parent company, or, if
they drive trucks for FedEx or other companies, whether those trucks can
be used for other work or driver use-that sort of thing. It's a "if
it quacks like a duck, it's a duck" rule. Which stands in sharp
contrast to the rule, still on the books, promulgated by Trump's Labor
Department, which said if it quacks like a duck, all that matters is
what's most advantageous for the duck's keeper.

Rulemaking is a prolonged process; the department will spend the next
month and a half collecting comments on its proposal and then must take
more time to finalize and effectuate its ruling. Once the rule is made
official, however, its ramifications will be considerable-and
considerably positive.

The DOL isn't the only part of Joe Biden's administration that has
been considering this change. Under the leadership of General Counsel
Jennifer Abruzzo, the National Labor Relations Board has been inching
toward a decision that could rule the misclassification of workers as
independent contractors to be an unfair labor practice, which would
change their status to employees and make them eligible to form a union.
For that matter, though it's nowhere to be found in today's 184-page
proposed rule from the DOL, the reclassification of workers as employees
that it envisions would also make them eligible to form unions.

Which just reconfirms the happy reality that the Biden administration is
the first since Lyndon Johnson's-or perhaps, since Harry
Truman's-that understands that progressive government and the
Democratic Party need unions if they are to prevail.

~ HAROLD MEYERSON

Follow Harold Meyerson on Twitter

[link removed]

[link removed] The
Conservative Astroturf Organization Rolling Back Child Labor Protections

The National Federation of Independent Business has been active in
passing new laws allowing teenagers to work long and late hours in three
states. BY SARAH LAZARE

[link removed]
Cheers for Social Security's Cost-of-Living Adjustment

It will compensate seniors for the bout of inflation. Workers deserve as
much. BY ROBERT KUTTNER

[link removed]
A Progressive, and Persuasive, Case for a Politics of Persuasion

Anand Giridharadas's 'The Persuaders' profiles activists,
organizers, and change-makers charting a path to power through changing
minds and 'calling in.' BY ADAM M. LOWENSTEIN

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