Biden Chips Away at Trump’s Deregulatory Legacy With New Gig Worker Rule
The administration's draft regulations expand and complicate who the federal government considers an "employee."
Sean Higgins, a labor policy researcher at the free market Competitive Enterprise Institute, says that litigation chaos is unlikely given that the DOL is reinstating federal standards that had been on the books for decades. But the Biden administration’s new standard reduces certainty for businesses and workers about when an employer-employee relationship exists.
The Trump rule “boiled it down to a fairly simple question of just who is in charge around here. That determined whether a worker was a freelancer or not. It put the power in the hands of the workers themselves,” Higgins tells Reason. Returning to the old six-factor test “makes everything more confusing.”
The primary impact of DOL’s rule-making, says Higgins, will be to make it easier to have states pursue A.B. 5–type bills and regulations by reimposing that more expansive federal definition of employee.
Read the full article on Reason.