The Donald Trump-appointed National Labor Relations Board dealt a major blow last week to workers being exploited by companies misclassifying them as independent contractors. Whether a worker is an employee has long been determined by a number of factors, including how much control the employer exerts over things like work hours and conditions. The NLRB, though, looked at SuperShuttle drivers in Dallas-Fort Worth who have to buy the exact van that SuperShuttle wants, pay a series of fees to SuperShuttle, use company dispatchers, and be monitored by SuperShuttle GPS tracking, and decided that they are legitimately independent contractors and not employees because something something “entrepreneurial opportunity.” Moshe Marvit has the gory details:
Throughout the Board majority’s decision, it becomes clear that when it uses the language of “freedom” and “entrepreneurial opportunity,” it is the freedom to fail and the opportunity to lose. Reading the decision, one is struck by the lack of any evidence that the drivers—or “franchisees” in the language of the case—do well under the agreement. Instead, the Board majority approvingly cites the NLRB Acting Regional Director who made the first determination in the case, in which she found that “franchisees face a meaningful risk of loss in light of the substantial costs that go into owning a franchise, i.e. the vehicle payments, weekly system fees, insurance costs, gas, maintenance, licensing fees, and tolls.” The Board methodically goes through every instance where the company has offloaded costs and risks to the drivers, while maintaining strict control, and calls the new relationship one where the drivers are small business owners, experiencing freedom and entrepreneurial opportunity.
Basically the NLRB served notice that there may be no employment relationship so exploitative that it declines to affirm it as independent contracting.
This blog was originally published at Daily Kos on February 2, 2019. Reprinted with permission.
About the Author: Laura Clawson is labor editor at Daily Kos.
