The U.S. Department of Labor has proposed a final rule stepping back from the Obama administration’s damaging effort to stretch the definition of “joint employer” so as to tag companies with liability over the employment actions of many franchisees, subcontractors and even suppliers. “The new rule beats a retreat from the past administration’s aim ‘to force much more of the economy into the mold of large-payroll, unionized employers, a system for which the 1950s are often (wrongly) idealized.’ That very same goal is at the root of California’s unfolding debacle with AB5, a law that tries to force many lines of freelancing into a direct-employment model and is already harming large numbers of workers it had purported to help.” I explain in a new Cato post.
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Some people piece together a nice living doing consulting or driving for Uber part-time. Maybe they don’t like working for someone or want to work from home or are in school or like a flex schedule or maybe they are an unpleasant person who keeps getting fired. Whose business is it to prevent them from working? The goal of AB5 and similar is to force someone to create a “good” job with all the union perqs when there may be no such job. It is typical Leftist ploy to try to force employers to provide more benefits (fight for 15 for example) and to not trust people to work independently.