If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
"Minimum wage" is one of those odd concepts that seems to have an intuitive definition, but the harder you think about it, the more complicated it gets. For example, if you want to work, but can't find a job, then the minimum wage you'll get is zero:
That's why politicians like Avi Lewis (who is running for leader of Canada's New Democratic Party) has call for a jobs guarantee: a government guarantee of a good job at a socially inclusive wage for everyone who wants one:
(Disclosure: I have advised the Lewis campaign on technical issues and I have endorsed his candidacy.)
If that sounds Utopian or Communist to you (or both), consider this: it was the American jobs guarantee that delivered the America's system of national parks, among many other achievements:
The idea of a wage for everyone who wants a job is just one interesting question raised by the concept of a "minimum wage." Even when we're talking about people who have wages, the idea of a "minimum wage" is anything but straightforward.
Take gig workers: the rise of Uber and its successors created an ever-expanding class of workers who are misclassified as independent contractors by employers, seeking to evade unionization, benefits and liability. It's a weird kind of "independent contractor" who gets punished for saying no to lowball offers, has to decorate their personal clothes and/or cars in their "client's" livery, and who has every movement scripted by an app controlled by their "client":
The pretext that a worker is actually a standalone small business confers another great advantage on their employers: it's a great boon to any boss who wants to steal their worker's wages. I'm not talking about stealing tips here (though gig-work platforms do steal tips, like crazy):
I'm talking about how gig-work platforms define their workers' wages in the first place. This is a very salient definition in public policy debates. Gig platforms facing regulation or investigation routinely claim that their workers are paid sky-high wages. During the debate over California's Prop 22 (in which Uber and Lyft spent more than $225m to formalize worker misclassification), gig companies agreed to all kinds of reasonable-sounding wage guarantees:
When Toronto was grappling with the brutal effect that gig-work taxis have on the city's world-beatingly bad traffic, Uber promised to pay its drivers "120% of the minimum wage," which would come out to $21.12 per hour. However, the real wage Uber was proposing to pay its drivers came out to about $2.50 per hour:
How to explain the difference? Well, Uber – and its gig-work competitors – only pay drivers while they have a passenger – or an item – in the car. Drivers are not paid for the time they spend waiting for a job or the time they spend getting to the job. This is the majority of time that a gig driver spends working for the platform, and by excluding the majority of time a driver is on the clock, the company can claim to pay a generous wage while actually paying peanuts.
Now, at this phase, you may be thinking that this is only fair, or at least traditional. Livery cab drivers don't get paid unless they have a fare in the cab, right?
That's true, but livery cab drivers have lots of ways to influence that number. They can shrewdly choose a good spot to cruise. They can give their cellphone numbers to riders they've established a rapport with in order to win advance bookings. In small towns with just a few drivers – or in cities where drivers are in a co-op – they can spend some of their earnings to advertise the taxi company. Livery drivers can offer discounts to riders going a long way. It's a tough job, but it's one in which workers have some agency.
Contrast that with driving for Uber: Uber decides which drivers get to even see a job. Uber decides how to market its services. Uber gets to set fares, on a per-passenger basis, meaning that it might choose to scare some passengers off of a few of their rides with high prices, in a bid to psychologically nudge that passenger into accepting higher fares overall.
At the same time, Uber is reliant on a minimum pool of drivers cruising the streets, on the clock but off the payroll. If riders had to wait 45 minutes to get an Uber, they'd make other arrangements. If it happened too often, they'd delete the app. So Uber can't survive without those cruising, unpaid drivers, who provide the capacity that make the company commercially viable.
What's more, livery cab drivers aren't the only comparators for gig-work platforms. Many gig workers deliver food, meaning that we should compare them to, say, pizza delivery drivers. These drivers aren't just paid when they have a pizza in the car and they're driving to a customer's home. They're paid from the moment they clock onto their shift to the moment they clock off (plus tips).
Now, obviously, this is more expensive for employers, but the Uber Eats arrangement – in which drivers are only paid when they've got a pizza in the car and they're en route to a customer – doesn't eliminate that expense. When a gig delivery company takes away the pay that drivers used to get while waiting for a pizza, they're shifting this expense from employers to workers:
The fact that Uber can manipulate the concept of a minimum wage in order to claim to pay $21.12/hour to drivers who are making $2.50 per hour creates all kinds of policy distortions.
Take Seattle: in 2024, the city implemented a program called "PayUp" that sets a "minimum wage" for drivers, but it's not a real minimum wage. It's a minimum payment for every ride or delivery.
A new National Bureau of Economic Research paper analyzes the program and concludes that it hasn't increased drivers' pay at all:
https://www.nber.org/papers/w34545
To which we might say, "Duh." Cranking up the sum paid for a small fraction of the work you do for a company will have very little impact on the overall wage you receive from the company.
However, there is an interesting wrinkle in this paper's conclusions. Drivers aren't earning less under this system, either. So they're getting paid more for every delivery, but they're not adding more deliveries to their day. In other words, they're doing less work and then clocking off:
A neoclassical economist (someone who has experienced a specific form of neurological injury that makes you incapable of perceiving or reasoning about power) would say that this means that the drivers only desire to earn the sums they were earning before the "minimum wage" and so the program hasn't made a difference to their lives.
But anyone else can look at this situation and understand that drivers only did this shitty job out of desperation. They had a sum they needed to get every month in order to pay the rent or the grocery bill. They have lots of needs besides those that they would like to fulfill, but not under the shitty gig-work app conditions. The only reason they tolerate a shitty app as their shitty boss at all is that they are desperate, and that desperation gives gig companies power over their workers.
In other words, Seattle's PayUp "minimum wage" has shifted some of the expense associated with operating a gig platform from workers back onto their bosses. With fewer drivers available on the app, waiting times for customers will necessarily go up. Some of those customers will take the bus, or get a livery cab, or defrost a pizza, or walk to the corner cafe. For the gig platforms to win those customers back, they will have to reduce waiting times, and the most reliable way to do that is to increase the wages paid to their workers.
So PayUp isn't a wash – it has changed the distributional outcome of the gig-work economy in Seattle. Drivers have clawed back a surplus – time they can spend doing more productive or pleasant things than cruising and waiting for a booking – from their bosses, who now must face lower profits, either from a loss of business from impatient customers, or from a higher wage they must pay to get those wait-times down again.
But if you want to really move the needle on gig workers' wages, the answer is simple: pay workers for all the hours they put in for their bosses, not just the ones where bosses decide they deserve to get paid for.
Independent contractor or employee? Too many companies commit wage theft by worker misclassification. Here's how to fight back.
“Independent Contractor” My Ass: How to Stop Wage Theft Through Worker Misclassification
Every year, wage theft robs millions of American workers of billions of dollars—and worker misclassification is one of its most widespread, evil forms.
There are crystal-clear guidelines on the difference between independent contractors and employees. And a lot of employers steal from their workers by ignoring them. Today, I’m going to break the differences down for you. See if you recognize yourself, a friend, or a family member in these wage-theft-vulnerable positions.
If you are in a misclassification situation, your employer has stolen your wages. But there’s good news! You have recourse to get my two favorite things: money and justice! You can seek tax reimbursements, backpay, unpaid overtime, worker’s compensation benefits, and more for the years you were misclassified. And you can report your exploitative employer and get them into a wet mess of trouble.
Keep reading.
If you found this helpful, consider joining our Patreon.
It’s not a crime if we do it (to nurses) with an app
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
If I could abolish one piece of received wisdom about tech policy, it would be this: "Tech moves at the speed of innovation and regulation moves at the speed of government, so regulation will always lag behind tech."
(If I could abolish two pieces of received wisdom about tech policy, the other one would be "If you're not paying for the product, you're the product." Decent treatment is not a customer reward program, and "voting with your wallet" only works if you're a billionaire whose wallet is thicker than all the other wallets put together.)
To be clear, there are times when tech enables new forms of conduct that don't fit neatly into the existing policy framework. For example, we apply copyright to anyone who makes or handles a copy of a creative work, and that used to be a pretty good proxy for "someone in the supply chain of the media industry."
The problem is that computers work by making dozens and dozens of copies every time you click your mouse, and we all use computers for everything, and clicking a mouse doesn't make you part of the entertainment business. The fact that we've had hyperinflation in "making and handling copies" but continued to apply an esoteric industrial framework to pretty much everything everyone does all the time is a huge problem that desperately needs fixing:
Copyright notwithstanding, tech generally does not outrun our capacity to regulate it. Rather, tech bosses come up with incredibly flimsy reasons why their business doesn't fit into the existing regulatory framework, and policymakers accept these ridiculous excuses so readily that one can only assume they're in on the racket.
Take "fintech," all those neobanks and the cryptocurrency junk and shitcoins and stablecoins and NFTs and so on that a group of pump-and-dumpers, money launderers and stock swindlers have pushed for more than a decade now. As Trashfuture's Riley Quinn says, "Whenever you hear 'fintech,' you should think 'unregulated bank.'" It's not hard to apply existing regulations to these companies: they fall under banking law, usury law, securities law and gambling law.
There's no (good) reason not to apply these legal frameworks to the crypto industry – but there are plenty of bad reasons not to. The most obvious reason not to apply those regulations is that you are on the same side as the pump-and-dumpers, money launderers and stock swindlers. The reason we struggle to regulate fintech is that we just don't want to.
Then there's Uber, which claimed that it wasn't a taxi company, it was a "transportation network company," which meant that none of the regulations we apply to taxis should apply to Uber. To call this a transparent ruse is to do great violence to the good, hardworking transparent ruses putting in the hard yards to run honest scams. "Uber isn't a taxi company, it's a transportation network company" is about as plausible as those t-shirts that read "It's not a bald spot, it's a solar-panel for a sex-machine."
Emboldened by the success of the "transportation network company" wheeze, Uber launched Uber Eats, claiming that it wasn't a "food delivery company" but rather a "delivery network company." This set up the template for a remorseless tide of new sex-machine solar-panels that have pushed Uber's system of wage-theft and worker misclassification into an expanding constellation of labor categories.
From fintech to price-fixing to gig-work, the entire industry runs on the very stupid proposition that "it's not a crime if we do it with an app":
One of the worst of these sex-machine solar-panels is to be found in nursing, where a cluster of heavily capitalized apps that nurses must rely on to get shifts insist that they aren't "healthcare staffing agencies," rather, they are "healthcare worker platforms" that should be exempted from the regulations that we started applying to the former after a string of calamities and disasters.
This phenomenon is detailed in eye-watering detail in "Uber For Nursing," a must-read new report by Katie J Wells, Maya Pinto, and Funda Ustek Spilda for the AI Now Institute:
If "Uber for nursing" rings a bell, you might be thinking of "Uber for Nursing: How an AI-Powered Gig Model Is Threatening Health Care," an earlier report that Wells and Spilda wrote for the Roosevelt Institute in late 2024:
The Roosevelt Institute report contained many eye-popping findings, most notably that at least some of the leading national nursing gig-work platforms were using data-brokers to find out how much debt nurses were carrying, and offered lower wages to the nurses with the most debt, on the grounds that the most economically desperate nurses will accept the lowest pay:
The new report describes how, in the absence of a muscular policy response, these nursing gig-work companies have raised fantastic sums of money, some of which they have diverted to regulatory capture projects in a bid to states to recognize their solar-panel sex-machines, with great success. These companies haven't merely refined their lobbying game, either – as a sphincter-puckering appendix detailing the experience of nurses with these apps shows, they have also made great strides in immiserating nurses and transferring their earning power to gig platforms and the hospitals that rely on them.
This degradation of the work experience is characteristic of the new world of AI-powered jobs. AI isn't taking workers' jobs, but it is enshittifying them, with degrading, neurosis-inducing surveillance and high-handed discipline:
But gig-work companies remain laser-focused on healthcare workers, likely because that is one of the only growing professions left in America. They're trying to screw over healthcare workers for the same reason Willie Sutton robbed banks: "That's where the money is." The implication here is that the 15% of the American workforce that is employed in the healthcare industry is on the front lines of the battle against gig-work and algorithmic management.
Like parasites that attack the sick and weak, gig-work and algorithmic management come first for industries that are already bad for workers and the people they serve, making things much worse while insisting that they're just trying to apply a cool digital fix to a broken analog system. That, too, was Uber's playbook: attacking the medallion taxi system as corrupt and sclerotic – while replacing it with a system that's corrupt, extractive and dynamic, able to evade all attempts to improve things for drivers and riders (such as drivers' unions).
That's what's happened with healthcare staffing agencies. These have long been a fixture in healthcare, partly because there was always a large cohort of skilled healthcare professionals who valued the flexibility of short term contracts (for example, "travel nurses") and partly because hospitals love hiring contractors who aren't part of their workers' unions.
Staffing agencies weren't good. A string of scandals led to waves of regulations in states like Colorado, Minnesota and New York that required agencies to "register annually, disclose shareholders and executive officers, certify worker credentials, report to state authorities on the number of workers employed, document service rates charged to facilities, and list average wages paid to workers by job category." These regulations also banned staffing agencies from locking up workers with noncompete agreements and ripping them off with finder's fees.
Rather than strengthening these protections, gig nursing platforms avoid them. Where staffing agencies secure multi-week contracts for travel nurses, gig platforms typically assign workers to single-day shifts. Where staffing agencies let nurses bargain for their scheduling needs, gig platforms present take-it-or-leave-it offers and no opportunities to speak to a human when things go wrong. And where staffing agencies evaluated the workers on their roster based on employer feedback, the gig platforms install apps that continuously surveil and evaluate workers, downranking them and cutting their hours and pay based on algorithmic judgments that are never explained and cannot be appealed.
Platforms match nurses with shifts, claiming to regulators that they're little more than a "job-notice board." But when they pitch hospitals, they tell a different story, about their ability to use algorithms to erode wages and blacklist workers who make trouble. Healthcare gig-work apps push workers to accept shifts that require more travel and pay less, at facilities they don't want to work at. Refusal to accept a shift can permanently compromise your ability to get future shifts, and/or lower the wage you're offered in future.
In addition to these poor working conditions and low wages, gig platforms have resurrected the prohibited practice of charging workers "finder's fees," by layering on junk fees that take money out of every paycheck. Staffing agencies aren't allowed to do this, but the gig-work platforms' "solar panel for a sex-machine" gambit transforms the finder's fee into a "platform fee" that somehow escapes regulators' grasp.
How is it that a regulator can't see that a "platform fee" is exactly equivalent to a "finder's fee?" This is not a case of technology outpacing regulation – it's a case of lawmakers colluding with profitable firms to evade regulation in order to steal from workers.
The platforms are aslosh in investor cash – Clipboard Health, Intelycare, and Shiftkey are all valued at more than $1b, and Shiftkey just completed a $300m private equity raise. This leaves them with lots of ready cash to spend on regulatory entrepreneurship. In Georgia, Clipboard lobbied "to exempt gig nursing platforms from state unemployment insurance and workers’ compensation laws." In Ohio, Shiftkey and Clipboard are pushing a bill "to classify gig nurses as independent contractors, exempting gig platforms from minimum wage and other worker protection laws." In Utah, Nursa is praising a bill that a state senator called "lightest-touch regulation." All in all, 17 states have nurse gig platform deregulation bills underway.
In 2022, the healthcare gig-work platforms tried to get a California ballot measure to carve nursing platforms out of all state labor laws. They withdrew it, but pursued an "under the radar" approach to get the same thing by seeking changes in administrative rules, rather than state laws. Lobbying for administrative law changes to exempt healthcare gig-work platforms from regulation is also underway in Missouri, Louisiana and Utah.
One bright light in all this comes from New York state, where a 2025 law "affirmatively recognizes gig nursing platforms as entities that must comply with the state’s healthcare staffing agency rules." The existence of this law proves that the crisis of gig-work healthcare platforms is not an example of tech racing ahead of regulation. If New York's state leg can figure out that a gig-work platform is just a staffing agency in app form, then other states can do so as well. If they don't figure that out, that's because they don't want to.
Sometime in this century, our political class and our financial class arrived at a consensus that Douglas Rushkoff describes as "go meta," in his 2022 book Survival of the Richest:
The "go meta" ethos insists that the most important, smartest and most valuable move is always away from productive labor. Don't drive a cab: go meta and own a medallion that you rent to a cab driver. Don't own a medallion, go meta and start a gig-work ride-hailing company. Don't start a gig-work ride-hailing company, go meta and invest in a gig-work ride-hailing company. Don't invest in a gig-work ride-hailing company, go meta and buy options in a gig-work ride-hailing company – and so on and so on, into ever more abstracted forms of gambling and rent-collection.
The reorganization of the economy around parasitic middlemen and financial gamblers (but I repeat myself) is the real reason that we can't regulate tech. Once you've decided that the most important party to a transaction is the person who has the option on the share on the platform on the license that the worker who actually does the job requires, of course you're going to see a solar-panel for a sex-machine in every bald spot.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
The brains behind Trump's stolen Supreme Court have detailed plans: they didn't just scheme to pack the court with judges who weren't qualified for – or entitled to – a SCOTUS life-tenure, they also set up a series of cases for that radical court to hear.
Obviously, Dobbs was the big one, but it's only part of a whole procession of trumped-up cases designed to give the court a chance to overturn decades of settled law and create zones of impunity for America's oligarchs and the monopolies that provide them with wealth and power.
One of these cases is Jarkesy, a case designed to allow SCOTUS to euthanize every agency in the US government, stripping them of their powers to fight corporate crime:
The argument goes, "Congress had the power to spell out every possible problem an agency might deal with and to create a list of everything they were allowed to do about these problems. If they didn't, then the agency isn't allowed to act."
This is an Objectively Very Stupid argument, and it takes a heroic act of motivated reasoning to buy it. The whole point of expert agencies is that they're experts and that they might discover new problems in American life, and come up with productive ways of fixing them. If the only way for an agency to address a problem is to wait for Congress to notice it and pass a law about it, then we don't even need agencies – Congress can just be the regulator, as well as the lawmaker.
If there was any doubt that Congress created the agencies as flexible and adaptive hedges against new threats and problems, then the legislative history of the FTC Act should dispel it.
Congress created the FTC through the FTCA because the courts kept misinterpreting its existing antitrust laws, like the Sherman Act. Companies would engage in the most obvious acts of naked, catastrophic fuckery, and judges would say, "Welp, because Congress didn't specifically ban this conduct, I guess it's OK."
So Congress created the FTC with an Act that included a broad authority to investigate and punish "unfair methods of competition." They didn't spell these out – instead, they explicitly said (in Section 5) that it was the FTC's job to determine whether something was unfair, and to act on it:
The job of the FTC is to investigate unfair conduct before it becomes such a problem that Congress takes action, and to head that conduct off so that it never rises to the level of needing Congressional intervention.
Now, it's true that since the Reagan years, the FTC has grown progressively less interested in using this power, but that's broadly true of all of America's corporate watchdogs. But as the public all over the world has grown ever more furious about corporate abuses and oligarchic wealth, governments everywhere have rediscovered their role as a public protector.
In America, the Biden administration altered the course of history with the appointment of new enforcers in the key anti-monopoly agencies: the FTC and the DOJ's antitrust division. But more importantly, the Biden admin created a detailed, technical plan to use every agency's powers to fight monopoly, in a "whole of government" approach:
Now, this can give rise to seeming redundancies. Take labor issues. The NLRB is a (potentially) powerful regulator that had been in a coma for decades, but has awoken and taken up labor rights with a fervor and cunning that is a delight to behold:
At the same time, the FTC has also taken up labor rights, using its much broader powers to do things like ban noncompetes nationwide, unshackling workers from bosses who claim the right to veto who else they can work for:
But the NLRB doesn't make the FTC redundant, or vice-versa. The NLRB's role is principally reactive, punishing wrongdoing after it occurs. But the FTC has the power to intervene in incipient harms, labor abuses that have not yet risen to the level of NLRB enforcement or new acts of Congress.
This case is made beautifully in Alvaro Bedoya's speech "'Overawed': Worker Misclassification as a Potential Unfair Method of Competition," delivered to the Law Leaders Global Summit in Miami today:
Bedoya describes why the FTC has turned its attention to the problem of "worker misclassification," in which employees are falsely claimed to be contractors, and thus deprived of the rights that workers are entitled to. Worker misclassification is rampant, and it transfers billions from workers to employers every year. As Bedoya says, 10-30% of employers engage in worker misclassification, allowing them to dodge payment for overtime, Social Security, workers' comp, unemployment insurance, healthcare, retirement and even a minimum wage. Each misclassified worker is between $6k-18k poorer thanks to this scam – a typical misclassified worker sees a one third decline in their earning power. And, of course, each misclassified worker's boss is $6k-$18k richer because of this scam.
It's not just wages, it's workplace safety. One of the most dangerous jobs in the country is construction worker, and worker misclassification is rampant in the sector. That means that construction workers are three times more likely than other workers to lack health insurance.
What's more, misclassified workers can't form unions, because their bosses' fiction treats them as independent contractors, not employees, which means that misclassified construction workers can't join trade unions and demand health-care, or safer workplaces.
Contrast this with, say, cops, who have powerful "unions" that afford them gold-plated health care and lavish compensation, even for imaginary ailments like "contact overdoses" from touching fentanyl – a medical impossibility that still entitles our nation's armed bureaucrats to handsome public compensation:
Cops have far safer jobs than construction workers, but cops don't get misclassified, so they are able to collect benefits that no other worker – public or private – can hope for.
Not every employer wants to cheat and maim their employees, of course. In Bedoya's speech, he references Sandie Domando, an executive VP at a construction company in Palm Beach Gardens. Domando's company keeps its employees on its books, giving them health-care and other benefits. But when she started bidding against rival firms for jobs funded by the covid stimulus, she couldn't compete – two thirds of those jobs went to other firms that were able to put in cheaper bids. Those bids were cheaper because they were defrauding their workers by misclassifying them. Thus, publicly funded projects were overwhelmingly handed over to fraudulent companies. Fraud becomes a fitness-factor for winning jobs. It's a market for lemons – among employers.
Employee misclassification is a pure transfer from workers to bosses. Bedoya recounts the story of Samuel Talavera, Jr, a short-haul trucker who worked for decades in the Port of Los Angeles. For decades, his job paid well: enough to support his family and even take his kids to Disneyland now and again.
But in 2010, his employer reclassified him as a contractor. They ordered him to buy a new truck – which they financed on a lease-purchase basis – and put him to work for 16 hours stretches in shifts lasting as much as 20 hours per day. Talavera couldn't pick his own hours or pick his routes, but he was still treated as an independent contractor for payroll and labor protection purposes.
This lead to an terrible decline in Talavera's working conditions. He gave up going home between shifts, sleeping in his cab instead. His pay dropped through the floor, thanks to junk-fees that relied on the fiction that he was a contractor. For example, his boss started to charge him rent on the space his truck took up while he was standing by for a job at the port. Other truckers at the port saw paycheck deductions for the toilet-paper in the bathrooms!
Talavera's take-home pay dropped so low that he was bringing home a weekly wage of $112 or $33 (one week, his pay amounted to $0.67). His wife had to work three jobs, and they still had to declare bankruptcy to avoid losing their home. When Talavera's truck needed repairs he couldn't afford, his boss fired him and took back the truck, and Talavera was out the $78,000 he'd paid into it on the lease-purchase plan.
This story – and the many, many others like it from the Port of LA – paint a clear picture of the transfer of wealth from workers to their bosses that comes with worker misclassification. The work that Talavera did in the Port of LA didn't get less valuable when he was misclassified – but the share of that value that Talavera received dropped to as little as $0.67/week.
Worker misclassification is rampant across many sectors, but its handmaiden is technology. The fiction of independence is much easier to maintain when the fine-grained employer-employee control is mediated by an app (think of Uber):
That's why those scare-stories that AI trucks were going to make truckers obsolete and create an employment crisis were such toxic nonsense. Not only are we unlikely to see self-driving trucks, but the same investors that back AI technology are making bank on companies that practice worker misclassification through the "it's not a crime if we do it with an app" gambit:
By focusing our attention on a hypothetical employment crisis that will supposedly be caused by future AI developments, tech investors can distract us from the real employment crisis that's created by app-enabled worker misclassification, which is also the source of much of the capital they're plowing into AI.
That's why the FTC's work on misclassification is so urgent. Misclassification is a scam that hurts workers and creates oligarchic power – and it's also a mass-extinction event for good companies that don't cheat their workers, because those honest companies can't compete.
Worker misclassification is having a long-overdue and much needed moment. The revolutionary overthrow of the rotten old leadership at the Teamsters was caused, in part, by a radical wing that promised to focus the Teamsters' firepower on fighting worker misclassification:
Bedoya's speech is a banger, and it reminds us that labor rights and anti-monopoly have always been part of the same project: to rein in corporate power and protect workers from the insatiable greed of the capital class:
Independent contractor or employee? Too many companies commit wage theft by worker misclassification. Here's how to fight back.
“Independent Contractor” My Ass: How to Stop Wage Theft Through Worker Misclassification
Every year, wage theft robs millions of American workers of billions of dollars—and worker misclassification is one of its most widespread, evil forms.
There are crystal-clear guidelines on the difference between independent contractors and employees. And a lot of employers steal from their workers by ignoring them. Today, I’m going to break the differences down for you. See if you recognize yourself, a friend, or a family member in these wage-theft-vulnerable positions.
If you are in a misclassification situation, your employer has stolen your wages. But there’s good news! You have recourse to get my two favorite things: money and justice! You can seek tax reimbursements, backpay, unpaid overtime, worker’s compensation benefits, and more for the years you were misclassified. And you can report your exploitative employer and get them into a wet mess of trouble.
Keep reading.
If you found this helpful, consider joining our Patreon.
NEW POST! ✨ “Independent Contractor” My Ass: How to Stop Wage Theft Through Worker Misclassification ✨ Link in bio 👆 and in the comments 👇 babies. Here’s an excerpt:
"Every year, wage theft robs millions of American workers of billions of dollars—and worker misclassification is one of its most widespread, evil forms.
There are crystal-clear guidelines on the difference between independent contractors and employees. And a lot of employers steal from their workers by ignoring them. Today, I’m going to break the differences down for you. See if you recognize yourself, a friend, or a family member in these wage-theft-vulnerable positions.
If you are in a misclassification situation, your employer has stolen your wages. But there’s good news! You have recourse to get my two favorite things: money and justice! You can seek tax reimbursements, backpay, unpaid overtime, worker’s compensation benefits, and more for the years you were misclassified. And you can report your exploitative employer and get them into a wet mess of trouble."
A Massachusetts medical transportation business and its managers has been cited $460,945 in restitution and penalties for violating workers' rights and
A Massachusetts medical transportation business and its managers have been cited $460,945 in restitution and penalties for violating workers’ rights and state wage laws.
After losing an extended, expensive fight in Austin over an ordinance passed in December that mandated fingerprinting for ridesharing drivers, Uber and Lyft have ceased operating in the city. Drivers are upset about the loss of income. Riders are angry about being stuck with Austin’s insufficient cab service. Everyone is framing it in terms of crotchety, charming old Austin versus the interlopers who have either made the city one of the most vibrant in the country or killed its soul, depending on whether you moved to the city before or after Twitter exploded at SXSW.
There are a number of contract-based professions in which workers are required to undergo this kind of background check, which has not historically led to reclassification of those workers as employees. This includes one particular profession that’s seen 30 years of misclassification lawsuits fail to change labor practices: exotic dancing.
