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Under the law as it is written, the labor secretary is basically correct. It's not the labor secretary's job to rewrite the law. What congress should have done

Under the law as it is written, the labor secretary is basically correct. It's not the labor secretary's job to rewrite the law. What congress should have done several years ago is to address the emergence of the gig economy with a new designation that is distinct from both independent contractors and employees. Lots of issues in modern US business arise from laziness / stupidity / corruption / uselessness of Congress. I believe that there should be reform and that we should be working towards a better legal environment for informal workers and companies that want to use them at scale facilitated by technology. You can believe that and still recognize that the law as written would not support a definition of these workers as independent contractors (because they are not and it really is not a gray area due to the way that they are managed/directed). It's also an issue for the US that we can go many years under an enforcement regime that assumes that we basically have this new category of worker that we are, for reasons of convenience, defining as independent contractors, but that the law clearly states do not meet the definition of independent contractors. Then we get a new administration that decides it will enforce the law as it's written instead of tacitly recognizing the fake pseudo reform of non enforcement that we had from earlier administrations. That isn't good government.

auiya 5y ago
>Lots of issues in modern US business arise from laziness / stupidity / corruption / uselessness of Congress. And by extension lots of issues in Congress arise from laziness / stupidity / corruption / uselesssness of the electorate that put them there. Invest heavily in education and revisit in a few generations.
- spaetzleesser 5y ago
  What kind of education?
  - auiya 5y ago
    The kind that doesn't result in an intellectual race to the bottom as we're witnessing today, where people eat tide pods, purposefully hasten pandemic spread, and bottles of Windex have to have legal disclaimers like "do not spray directly into eyes".
    - spaetzleesser 5y ago
      Easier said than done I suspect.
- willcipriano 5y ago
  > Invest heavily in education and revisit in a few generations It is a persistent myth that the US does not invest in education. Not only is the dollars per student spent in the US competitive, it exceeds the majority of European nations spending per student by a large margin. "In 2015, the United States spent approximately $12,800 per student on elementary and secondary education. That is over 35% more than the OECD country average of $9,500. At the post-secondary level, the United States spent approximately $30,000 per student, which was 93% higher than the average of OECD countries ($16,100)." https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/020915/what-country-spends-most-education.asp https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/020915/what-country...
  - inglor_cz 5y ago
    The question is what part of those dollars really buy quality and what part just ends in pockets of well-connected interest groups. I see this question only rarely asked. Too many people seem to think that shoveling extra money on X will get you better results almost automatically. No, it won't, corruption and special interests can capture that extra value unless the investor is careful. Now it is true that underfinancing will get you worse results, but the opposite just does not hold.
  - jjav 5y ago
    Invest, not spend. You'll see plenty of school districts which receive tons of money but at the classroom level teachers are barely paid and kids have no supplies. Money is going somewhere but most of it isn't into the actual education.
- epistasis 5y ago
  I think the bigger problem is the lack of citizen representation. Individual legislators are servicing an absolutely huge number of constituents, which means that their elections cover absolutely massive amounts of people, necessitating massive amounts of money for campaigns. Which means that the influence comes from donors, as they are the ones who enable reelection. It also means that outside money can lead to successful primaries of otherwise popular legislators, if the legislator doesn't toe the line required. There used to be many Republicans that not only publicly agreed that climate change is a real, human-caused, phenomenon and that also proposed action to solve the problem. After a few legislators got primaried out of their seats, this position is no longer allowed at all in public statements by Republicans, because most legislators are too scared to risk being primaried. Increasing the House of Representatives by ten fold or more might help. Getting rid of many of the procedures that prevent votes from happening would probably help too. And of course, overturning Citizens United...
  - BitwiseFool 5y ago
    "Increasing the House of Representatives by ten fold or more might help." While you would end up with much more representatives - and in theory more representation - each individual rep would become much less influential. I think expanding the house to be thousands of members large would also make deliberations much more difficult and shallow as a result. I have no idea how parliamentary procedure would work with thousands of interested parties. But I do acknowledge that it is do-able. That being said, I am in favor of increasing the size of the house, but only by about 100 seats or so. I'd also want term limits in order to facilitate more turnover for district seats. But that's a separate debate.
  - AngryData 5y ago
    The House of Reps has been frozen since 1929 with the Reapportionment Act, we were originally suppose to add new electors/reps with every census and sometimes sooner if population change is fast enough. It is also the reason why some small states have slightly more power in the House of Reps, the lack of new Reps has made their fair share of Reps drop below the minimum number of Reps. With more Reps overall, their share rises and surpasses the minimum number, fixing that particular problem.
bilbo0s 5y ago
It's not the labor secretary's job to rewrite the law This. Sometimes I feel like the entire nation needs to go back and revisit our civics books. The job of the Labor Secretary is to make certain that federal labor laws are followed. If you want changes to federal labor law, it does you no good to demand them of the Labor Secretary. Call your congressperson and your senator. Even better, vote for more qualified congresspeople and senators. This is a republic. Which means that ultimately, the labor laws are far more our fault than the fault of the Labor Secretary.
- throwaway_isms 5y ago
  >Which means that ultimately, the labor laws are far more our fault than the fault of the Labor Secretary. It also doesn't really matter what the Federal law is or Labor Secretary does/says, worker agreements are governed by State law, and their are 50 States with similar, but not identical legal standards defining employees vs independent contractors. In some cases you may be defined as an employee at the State level but Independent Contractor for purposes of the Federal level (say the IRS Code/Federal Taxes). Even within a single State one agency say unemployment office was classify you as employee and another such as workers comp classifies you as independent contractor.
- lhorie 5y ago
  > Even better, vote for more qualified congresspeople and senators The problem with this comment (and others like it) is the presupposition that the problem is that people are not voting "correctly", because if only they did, all the problems would be solved. But that glosses over a very large number of problems, some of which are deeply systematic, at which point questions like "whose job is it really to fix these issues anyways" may in fact deserve answers that are more out-of-the-box than "the republican democratic system works as intended, so the problem must be elsewhere".
  - rsj_hn 5y ago
    >But that glosses over a very large number of problems, some of which are deeply systematic, at which point questions like "whose job is it really to fix these issues anyways" may in fact deserve answers that are more out-of-the-box than "the republican democratic system works as intended, so the problem must be elsewhere". This glosses over the fact that enough of the population disagrees with your assessment of the problem and proposed solutions that there is no consensus and that is why your problems are not being solved in the way that you want. In fact, that is almost always the case. People feel that the thresholds of consensus required in republican processes get in the way of their plans only when they fail to persuade others. Then they start looking for more authoritarian solutions, such as having party-bureaucrats make laws by fiat.
awillen 5y ago
You're putting a lot of weight on the word basically in your first sentence - the reality is that gig workers have characteristics that clearly fall under the classification of employees and others that clearly fall under the classification of contractors. The problem with your argument is that because the law is ambiguous with regard to this situation, the labor secretary is effectively making law by choosing a particular interpretation of the law. Though to be clear, I agree with you 100% that this is because Congress is just perpetually failing America through corruption, selfishness, etc., and that failure puts the labor secretary in an unenviable position of having to enforce laws that don't really work for the situation.
- larrik 5y ago
  > The problem with your argument is that because the law is ambiguous with regard to this situation, the labor secretary is effectively making law by choosing a particular interpretation of the law. As a member of the Executive branch, that seems to be his job, yes.
- brudgers 5y ago
  [IANAL] My understanding is that if a worker has any characteristic of an employee, they are an employee. Any of several criteria are sufficient and only one of them is necessary. In the bigger picture, Congress passes laws and delegates authority to a branch of government to establish rules and regulations using a process complying with other statutes that dictate how rules and regulations become binding. Essentially, in the US at all levels -- Federal, State, and Local -- there are two types of legal requirements. Statutes and rules/regulations. The statute is the what. Rules and regulations are the implementation details...ok, there's actually a third parallel part which is legal precedent established by the courts. Anyway, Congress delegates authority to executive agencies so that it can focus on other things and not have to micro-mange each tiny detail of everything under the sun.
  - awillen 5y ago
    I am also not a lawyer, but my understanding is that the system is not clear in the way that you are describing it. As to "Anyway, Congress delegates authority to executive agencies so that it can focus on other things and not have to micro-mange each tiny detail of everything under the sun." - each tiny detail? This is a case of classifying millions of workers. We're not talking about a tiny detail, we're talking about something that is immensely important both to all the people affected by it as well as all the companies that have to operate under these labor laws. This isn't Congress delegating away the details, it's them failing for an extended period of time to address an absolute enormous and critical issue in the labor market.
thesimon 5y ago
In the UK apparently there are 3 types. The Economist wrote on the Uber case in UK: “Employees” gain access to the full gamut of employment-law protections; “workers” get some protections but can be dismissed at will; the self-employed are taxed more lightly but receive few legal rights. The Surpreme court ruled that Uber drivers are workers and not self-employed.
- larkost 5y ago
  In most states in the U.S. all employees can be terminated at will. It is generally called "right to work" (yes... it is a questionable name). So essentially that first category does not exist in the U.S. (outside of a union where it gets tricky). So the Labor Secretary's decision amounts to the same decision. And self-employed here generally are not taxed less, rather about the same (details vary), but have to do the taxation themselves. I should note that you still can be fired illegally, for example surrounding harassment or protected status (gender, race, etc...).

auiya 5y ago

>Lots of issues in modern US business arise from laziness / stupidity / corruption / uselessness of Congress. And by extension lots of issues in Congress arise from laziness / stupidity / corruption / uselesssness of the electorate that put them there. Invest heavily in education and revisit in a few generations.

spaetzleesser 5y ago
What kind of education?
- auiya 5y ago
  The kind that doesn't result in an intellectual race to the bottom as we're witnessing today, where people eat tide pods, purposefully hasten pandemic spread, and bottles of Windex have to have legal disclaimers like "do not spray directly into eyes".
  - spaetzleesser 5y ago
    Easier said than done I suspect.
willcipriano 5y ago
> Invest heavily in education and revisit in a few generations It is a persistent myth that the US does not invest in education. Not only is the dollars per student spent in the US competitive, it exceeds the majority of European nations spending per student by a large margin. "In 2015, the United States spent approximately $12,800 per student on elementary and secondary education. That is over 35% more than the OECD country average of $9,500. At the post-secondary level, the United States spent approximately $30,000 per student, which was 93% higher than the average of OECD countries ($16,100)." https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/020915/what-country-spends-most-education.asp https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/020915/what-country...
- inglor_cz 5y ago
  The question is what part of those dollars really buy quality and what part just ends in pockets of well-connected interest groups. I see this question only rarely asked. Too many people seem to think that shoveling extra money on X will get you better results almost automatically. No, it won't, corruption and special interests can capture that extra value unless the investor is careful. Now it is true that underfinancing will get you worse results, but the opposite just does not hold.
- jjav 5y ago
  Invest, not spend. You'll see plenty of school districts which receive tons of money but at the classroom level teachers are barely paid and kids have no supplies. Money is going somewhere but most of it isn't into the actual education.
epistasis 5y ago
I think the bigger problem is the lack of citizen representation. Individual legislators are servicing an absolutely huge number of constituents, which means that their elections cover absolutely massive amounts of people, necessitating massive amounts of money for campaigns. Which means that the influence comes from donors, as they are the ones who enable reelection. It also means that outside money can lead to successful primaries of otherwise popular legislators, if the legislator doesn't toe the line required. There used to be many Republicans that not only publicly agreed that climate change is a real, human-caused, phenomenon and that also proposed action to solve the problem. After a few legislators got primaried out of their seats, this position is no longer allowed at all in public statements by Republicans, because most legislators are too scared to risk being primaried. Increasing the House of Representatives by ten fold or more might help. Getting rid of many of the procedures that prevent votes from happening would probably help too. And of course, overturning Citizens United...
- BitwiseFool 5y ago
  "Increasing the House of Representatives by ten fold or more might help." While you would end up with much more representatives - and in theory more representation - each individual rep would become much less influential. I think expanding the house to be thousands of members large would also make deliberations much more difficult and shallow as a result. I have no idea how parliamentary procedure would work with thousands of interested parties. But I do acknowledge that it is do-able. That being said, I am in favor of increasing the size of the house, but only by about 100 seats or so. I'd also want term limits in order to facilitate more turnover for district seats. But that's a separate debate.
- AngryData 5y ago
  The House of Reps has been frozen since 1929 with the Reapportionment Act, we were originally suppose to add new electors/reps with every census and sometimes sooner if population change is fast enough. It is also the reason why some small states have slightly more power in the House of Reps, the lack of new Reps has made their fair share of Reps drop below the minimum number of Reps. With more Reps overall, their share rises and surpasses the minimum number, fixing that particular problem.

bilbo0s 5y ago

It's not the labor secretary's job to rewrite the law This. Sometimes I feel like the entire nation needs to go back and revisit our civics books. The job of the Labor Secretary is to make certain that federal labor laws are followed. If you want changes to federal labor law, it does you no good to demand them of the Labor Secretary. Call your congressperson and your senator. Even better, vote for more qualified congresspeople and senators. This is a republic. Which means that ultimately, the labor laws are far more our fault than the fault of the Labor Secretary.

throwaway_isms 5y ago
>Which means that ultimately, the labor laws are far more our fault than the fault of the Labor Secretary. It also doesn't really matter what the Federal law is or Labor Secretary does/says, worker agreements are governed by State law, and their are 50 States with similar, but not identical legal standards defining employees vs independent contractors. In some cases you may be defined as an employee at the State level but Independent Contractor for purposes of the Federal level (say the IRS Code/Federal Taxes). Even within a single State one agency say unemployment office was classify you as employee and another such as workers comp classifies you as independent contractor.
lhorie 5y ago
> Even better, vote for more qualified congresspeople and senators The problem with this comment (and others like it) is the presupposition that the problem is that people are not voting "correctly", because if only they did, all the problems would be solved. But that glosses over a very large number of problems, some of which are deeply systematic, at which point questions like "whose job is it really to fix these issues anyways" may in fact deserve answers that are more out-of-the-box than "the republican democratic system works as intended, so the problem must be elsewhere".
- rsj_hn 5y ago
  >But that glosses over a very large number of problems, some of which are deeply systematic, at which point questions like "whose job is it really to fix these issues anyways" may in fact deserve answers that are more out-of-the-box than "the republican democratic system works as intended, so the problem must be elsewhere". This glosses over the fact that enough of the population disagrees with your assessment of the problem and proposed solutions that there is no consensus and that is why your problems are not being solved in the way that you want. In fact, that is almost always the case. People feel that the thresholds of consensus required in republican processes get in the way of their plans only when they fail to persuade others. Then they start looking for more authoritarian solutions, such as having party-bureaucrats make laws by fiat.

awillen 5y ago

You're putting a lot of weight on the word basically in your first sentence - the reality is that gig workers have characteristics that clearly fall under the classification of employees and others that clearly fall under the classification of contractors. The problem with your argument is that because the law is ambiguous with regard to this situation, the labor secretary is effectively making law by choosing a particular interpretation of the law. Though to be clear, I agree with you 100% that this is because Congress is just perpetually failing America through corruption, selfishness, etc., and that failure puts the labor secretary in an unenviable position of having to enforce laws that don't really work for the situation.

larrik 5y ago
> The problem with your argument is that because the law is ambiguous with regard to this situation, the labor secretary is effectively making law by choosing a particular interpretation of the law. As a member of the Executive branch, that seems to be his job, yes.
brudgers 5y ago
[IANAL] My understanding is that if a worker has any characteristic of an employee, they are an employee. Any of several criteria are sufficient and only one of them is necessary. In the bigger picture, Congress passes laws and delegates authority to a branch of government to establish rules and regulations using a process complying with other statutes that dictate how rules and regulations become binding. Essentially, in the US at all levels -- Federal, State, and Local -- there are two types of legal requirements. Statutes and rules/regulations. The statute is the what. Rules and regulations are the implementation details...ok, there's actually a third parallel part which is legal precedent established by the courts. Anyway, Congress delegates authority to executive agencies so that it can focus on other things and not have to micro-mange each tiny detail of everything under the sun.
- awillen 5y ago
  I am also not a lawyer, but my understanding is that the system is not clear in the way that you are describing it. As to "Anyway, Congress delegates authority to executive agencies so that it can focus on other things and not have to micro-mange each tiny detail of everything under the sun." - each tiny detail? This is a case of classifying millions of workers. We're not talking about a tiny detail, we're talking about something that is immensely important both to all the people affected by it as well as all the companies that have to operate under these labor laws. This isn't Congress delegating away the details, it's them failing for an extended period of time to address an absolute enormous and critical issue in the labor market.

thesimon 5y ago

In the UK apparently there are 3 types. The Economist wrote on the Uber case in UK: “Employees” gain access to the full gamut of employment-law protections; “workers” get some protections but can be dismissed at will; the self-employed are taxed more lightly but receive few legal rights. The Surpreme court ruled that Uber drivers are workers and not self-employed.

larkost 5y ago
In most states in the U.S. all employees can be terminated at will. It is generally called "right to work" (yes... it is a questionable name). So essentially that first category does not exist in the U.S. (outside of a union where it gets tricky). So the Labor Secretary's decision amounts to the same decision. And self-employed here generally are not taxed less, rather about the same (details vary), but have to do the taxation themselves. I should note that you still can be fired illegally, for example surrounding harassment or protected status (gender, race, etc...).