WASHINGTON—Catering to the capitalist class, the right-wing Republican majority on the House Education and the Workforce Committee voted to let bosses classify more workers as “independent contractors” unable to unionize and ineligible for jobless benefits and workers comp.
After the panel’s party-line votes on July 23, the GOP majority on the Senate committee dealing with workers issues is moving in that direction, too. And while they were at it, the House Republicans decided to let “joint employers” off the hook, and ease restrictions on child labor.
As a result, AFL-CIO Legislative Director Jody Calemine opposed the Senate’s ideas, which parallel the House’s, in language that covers both independent contractor bills, as well as the others.
The key bill, the so-called Modern Worker Empowerment Act, “makes it easier for employers to classify workers as independent contractors and exclude them from labor protections,” Calemine wrote to lawmakers.
The other bill would let “independent contractors” have “portability” of benefits from job to job—if employers provide benefits such as pensions and health care. Many non-union employers don’t.
Redefining “employee” more narrowly and “independent contractors” more broadly, under both labor law and the minimum wage-overtime law, “is a giveaway for anti-worker employers who do not want to provide workplace protections and benefits employees are guaranteed by law,” Calemine wrote.
Doing that would “make it easier to shirk employer mandates by pretending employees are in fact independent contractors,” Calemine said. One of those mandates under current law is that “employees”–but not contractors–have the right to organize.
Committee Chair Tim Walberg, R-Mich., claimed without proof that “the vast majority” of independent contractors want to stay that way, but still get the benefits.
The panel’s top Democrat, Bobby Scott of Virginia, quoted the National Employment Law Project as retorting the benefits measure “legitimizes a corporate-driven model where savings accounts with meager contributions from corporations are touted as ‘portable benefits.’”
More and more bosses use the “independent contractor” dodge to misclassify millions of workers in everything from trucking to agriculture to construction and even to hair salons. Doing so legally lets them get away with not paying minimum wages or overtime, banning unionization, forcing the workers to pay both the boss’s and the worker’s share of Medicare and Social Security payroll taxes, prohibiting jobless benefits and workers’ comp and generally lowering their standards of living.
During the Biden administration, Acting Labor Secretary Julie Su campaigned against, and enforced tougher rules against, the independent contractor scam, drawing on her expertise as California Labor Commissioner. Current Trump Labor Secretary Elizabeth Chavez-DeRemer is going the other way by yanking the rules Su used.
Scott added an economic point against the pro-independent contractor bills.
Cannot overstate the harm
“I cannot overstate the harm this could inflict on workers and communities. By codifying the pervasive trend of employers misclassifying their employees as independent contractors, this bill strips workers of their basic wage and hour protections and leaves law-abiding businesses at a competitive disadvantage,” he said.
The key to both bills, on both sides of Capitol Hill, is that until now the Labor Department’s Wage and Hour Division—which enforces the minimum wage and overtime pay laws—has one definition of what an independent contractor is and the National Labor Relations Board has a slightly different one. The measures, by Rep. Kevin Kiley, R-Calif., would wipe out the differences.
Scott retorted the Republicans “establish a single, and far too narrow, test to determine whether an individual is an employee.”
Kiley lined up support from some of the worst abusers of workers—the National Retail Federation, the American Trucking Association and a right-wing ideological think tank, the Cicero Institute—for his measures. The retail federation is a thinly veiled lobby for rabidly exploitative Walmart.
The House panel wasn’t done trashing workers during its session. Its legislation on joint employers could leave workers bouncing from pillar to post in trying to figure out who to bargain with for a contract and who’s responsible for corporate labor law-breaking.
Scott said that measure is so extreme that it’s possible both corporate headquarters and local franchises could get away with avoiding responsibility.
“This bill lets the real decision-makers off the hook and makes it harder for workers to fight back when they are underpaid, mistreated, or ignored at the bargaining table, and even creates a situation where technically no one could be the employer,” he said.
“Employees may be able to prove they were not paid overtime, but neither the temp agencies nor the business where they actually work, qualify as the responsible employer. Nobody’s on the hook for the fact that employees were not paid overtime because nobody’s an employer.”
And the measure’s so loosely written, Scott noted, that it opens the door to further abuse and exploitation of child labor. The GOP bill would “turn back the clock to a time when children did not benefit from the broadest possible protection of the law.” “Red” states, led by Iowa, have been moving in that direction, too.
The House panel also passed what was allegedly a bipartisan bill restoring almost complete control by colleges, universities and particularly their coaches and athletic directors over athletes’ ability to use “name, image and likeness” to gain for themselves a larger share of the billions of dollars the institutions reap from the athletes’ endeavors on the playing field.
That gives the NCAA and especially its football “power conferences” “blank checks and bailouts,” with little to no regulation, Scott said. The GOP legislation also would ban the college athletes from unionizing. The ban and curbing the ability of the athletes to make money off their “name, image and likeness” is a longtime goal of right-wingers from the college football-mad South.
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