independent contractors

The editorial board of the Orange County Register decided to kick off 2016 by going full 1916. How did a paper of record turn the clocks back so? By questioning the motives of professional cheerleaders who are seeking employee (rather than independent contractor) status. The Register suggests that “they receive the fringe benefits of being surrounded by men who earn on average $1.9 million in the NFL and $5 million in the NBA” and should thus shut their damsel traps.

FedEx has agreed to settle with over 2,000 past and present California workers who claimed they were misclassified as independent contractors. The $227 million settlement comes amidst a multitiude of long-running legal battles affecting FedEx drivers.

New York and Illinois have done a fantastic job of curbing the practice known as "employee misclassification" – where shady businesses use a loophole to call workers independent contractors and get out of paying taxes (and giving benefits or a living wage to the workers).

California truck drivers for three major transportation companies went on strike Monday morning to protest labor law violations. Over 120 drivers are taking action at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, two of the West Coast’s largest supply points which handle roughly 40 percent of the nation’s imports.

Awareness about employee misclassification is growing and with it new laws have been enacted. But enacting a law and enforcing one are two different things, as demonstrated by the apparent ineffectiveness of Pennsylvania effort to combat the workers’ rights issue. Act 72, which set standards for who can and cannot be labeled an independent contractor, went into effect in 2011 but has resulted in very few court cases.

At the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, truck drivers yesterday began a two-day strike to protest poor working conditions, specifically the fact that nearly 90 percent of drayage truckers at the ports are misclassified as independent contractors. The strike could disrupt traffic and force International Longshore Workers Union members to decide if they want to cross a picket line to get to work.

A new collaborative report from several organization shows that nearly 50,000 of the country's 75,000 port truckers are incorrectly labeled as independent contractors, costing the average driver an astonishing $5,072 each month. It's a billion-dollar tax loophole that impacts everything from a family's reliance on safety nets to tax revenue and even the environment.