Biden Admin Issues New Rule to Crack Down on "Gig" Work

The latest goal of Bidenomics is sinking the so-called “gig economy.” 

According to the Wall Street Journal:

The Biden administration issued a new rule Tuesday intended to put more contractors on company payrolls, a change that could reverberate across a range of industries, including healthcare, restaurants, construction and transportation.

The rule, which will go into effect in March, would impose a stricter test to determine whether companies can classify their workers as independent contractors. It would replace a 2021 rule implemented by the Trump administration. 

Under the new rule, if a worker can be counted as a contractor would depend on factors such as whether the job is primarily permanent or temporary, how much control an employer has over work performance or how integral a worker’s job is to the overall business.

The workers have already made up their minds; the Pew Research Center found in 2021 that only 28% of gig platform workers see themselves as employees, while 65% see themselves as independent contractors. 

In terms of the effect this would have on “gig” companies, the stakes are clearly high, as evidenced by the fact that the most expensive proposition in California’s history (proposition 22), of which over $200 million as spent on,  was one exempting the likes of Uber and Lyft (and similar ride hailing and delivery service apps) from having to reclassify their contractors as employees under the state’s AB5 law. The Biden labor department’s new rule is directly inspired by the AB5 law. 

Interestingly, Uber and Lyft said they don’t expect to be affected by the move from the Biden administration - though this more likely just reflects their confidence in their lobbying ability more than anything else. The Biden administration clearly has an ideological vendetta against “gig” work, and their claimed mission of simply trying to protect miscategorized workers is a trojan horse. 

While one can have sympathy for the relatively low wages offered by “gig economy” jobs, one must keep in mind that its workers chose the job because they felt it was the best possible job available to them - and the flexibility offered by being a contractor is often part of that decision. There’s also the obvious question of where the money is supposed to come from. Companies like Uber, Lyft, Grubhub, Instacart, etc. have all hemorrhaged a combined amount in the tens of millions of dollars, and are only surviving on debt and investor cash. Whether they’ll survive as is is already a major debate, and the Biden admin rule only further tilts the scale in favor of “no.”