independent contractor

VOTERS SUPPORT HOLDING CORPORATIONS ACCOUNTABLE FOR LABOR CONTRACTING ABUSES

Recent polling confirms that voters who live in battleground districts overwhelmingly want their Congressional representatives to hold corporations accountable to the workers who build their business and their wealth. Voters want legislators to make it harder for companies to call workers “independent contractors”; they want lawmakers to discourage companies from contracting with temp and staffing …

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BREAKING: Draft Legislation in New York Would Put Gig Workers into Toothless ‘Unions’

An effort backed by the New York State AFL-CIO would create a new bargaining scheme for app-based workers without addressing the question of whether or not these workers are legally “employees.” Labor Notes obtained a draft version of the legislation that is being negotiated by unions and app employers. Workers for apps like Uber, Lyft, and …

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McGraw Hill Rejects Calls to Stop Charging Its Freelancers a Fee in Order to Get Paid

The revelation that McGraw Hill (MH), a multibillion-dollar educational publishing company, has begun charging its freelancers and independent contractors a fee in order to get paid has prompted a wave of public outrage, along with a letter from advocacy groups demanding that the company end the practice. The company’s response: No.  Two weeks ago, In These Times reported on the existence of the 2.2% fee that the company …

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Why Many Uber Drivers Couldn’t Afford To Stay Home During Australia’s Fires

Australia’s bushfire crisis has killed tens and incinerated an area two-thirds the size of Illinois. The resulting blanket of smog reduced air quality in the nation’s capital, Canberra, to third worst among all major cities. But the latest manifestation of the climate crisis has hurt an already hard-done by group: gig workers delivering food for Uber Eats. While state governments have …

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New Jersey hits Uber with $650 million bill for back taxes, this week in the war on workers

New Jersey says Uber owes $650 million in back taxes and interest for misclassifying workers as independent contractors. This isn’t coming out of nowhere—in 2015, the state notified Uber it owed $54 million in unemployment and disability taxes. Four years later, the number has grown to $523 million in past-due taxes and $119 million in interest …

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How Does the Passage of AB 5 in California Affect Me and Others in the Gig Economy?

Today Governor Gavin Newsom signed into law Assembly Bill 5.  The untitled new law will have a significant impact on the gig economy in California.  It will be increasingly difficult to lawfully classify California workers as independent contractors.  With the exception of several significant carveouts, which I discuss below, the definition of “to employ” announced …

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California moves one step closer to reining in the gig economy and expanding worker protections

A million California workers are denied key workplace protections—including the minimum wage—because their employers falsely label them as independent contractors. But that came one step closer to changing on Friday when the state Senate’s appropriations committee passed Assembly Bill 5, a plan to crack down on that misclassification of workers. AB5 is based on a 2018 decision by the …

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California Assembly votes to rein in gig economy abuses, this week in the war on workers

The so-called gig economy often rests on exploiting workers by misclassifying them as independent contractors, which means they don’t get minimum wage, unemployment insurance, workers compensation, overtime pay, or other protections that regular employees are guaranteed (at least in theory). That may be about to change in California, where the state Supreme Court ruled to clarify how …

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Delivery Drivers Sue Amazon Over Misclassification, Failure to Pay Overtime and the Minimum Wage

With wage and hour lawsuits becoming increasingly common across the country, there was little reason for the lawyers at Amazon.com’s Seattle headquarters to be surprised when one landed on their doorstep recently. But they may have been concerned to learn that their newest legal adversary is “Sledgehammer Shannon” Liss-Riordan, a Boston attorney who gained legal …

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Madeline Messa

Madeline Messa is a 3L at Syracuse University College of Law. She graduated from Penn State with a degree in journalism. With her legal research and writing for Workplace Fairness, she strives to equip people with the information they need to be their own best advocate.