
Thanks as always to Pirate’s Cove, The Other McCain, The Daley Gator, Bacon Time and (new this week) Professor Moron for the Rule Five links!
This hit close to home for me, as I’m a gig worker myself: The Biden(‘s handlers) Administration is basically telling gig workers where to head in. Excerpt:
Crime will be fresh on the minds of voters during November’s midterm elections. But there is no greater robbery than that being planned by the Biden administration. What it’s proposing is a government-backed mugging.
In essence, the White House wants to outlaw gig work in America. No, it’s not saying so outright. The Biden Labor Department obscures that harsh reality with words meant to deceive. Labor Secretary Marty Walsh says the department’s proposal is needed to safeguard “our nation’s most vulnerable workers,” and ensure they are not deprived “of their federal labor protections.”
Left out is the part that, should the proposal become policy, millions of Americans will be stripped of their jobs and income. Under its rule, the Labor Department would be free to “determine whether a worker is an employee or an independent contractor under the Fair Labor Standards Act.” And it will determine in every case that the worker in question must be a hired employee, no longer free to continue his or her job as an independent contractor.
How can we be so sure as to say “every case”? There’s precedent. Almost three years ago Assembly Bill 5, passed and signed in 2019, went into effect in California. The standard it put in place to determine if workers could remain independent contractors is so high that it is virtually impossible to reach. Everyone has to be a hired employee or their job is lost.
I don’t think I have to point out that the President has zero Constitutional authority to do this. President Biden(‘s handlers) have been wiping their asses with the Constitution since they took office. They have plenty of company, of course. Congress has been doing the same thing.
For the last nineteen years, I’ve been an independent consultant. A gig worker. I work with a couple of placement agencies, with whom I have corp-to-corp relationships; I do the work, I send them an invoice, they send a check not to me but to our LLC. So I’m not yet certain how or even if this whole thing would effect us. But I do know it would be a disaster for independent truckers, Uber/Lyft drivers, food delivery folks, and a million other “gig” workers. And there’s the thing: Nobody put a gun to these people’s heads and made them work in the gig economy. As the article points out, the best data says that the overwhelming majority of gig workers, like me, do so because they prefer working the gig economy over having a traditional J.O.B. – not because they have no other choice, but because that was their choice.
Now a Democrat administration, aping a Democrat state, wants to deny them that. And these assholes call themselves “pro-choice.”