In Defense of the Biden Department of Labor's Proposal for Defining an Employee Versus an Independent Contractor

A very long but well-considered explanation placed in a historical context is about how the government negotiates for fair labor rights with an app

Paol Feser Unsplash

An article on MSNBC by Noah Rothman is titled This new Biden proposal would throttle the 'gig economy. As the title states, Mr. Rothman poses the issue as an economic policy although the proposal is just a rule about how to legally distinguish an employee from a person who owns their own business.

By confusing rule guidelines with an alleged inflationary economic policy, Mr. Rothman reduces the rights of workers to a budget deficit echoing Erin Cooperrider characterizing overcrowded housing as a “density bonus”. Beyond the limits of Rothman’s perceptions, ownership is the difference between a slave and a free man and so this very technical issue needs to be gotten right, in large part because of the gig economy.

After all, the new rules are likely to impose new costs on companies that depend upon contract labor — costs that will be passed on to you, the consumer. The “PRO Act” was modeled after a 2019 California law, ABC, which was supposed to remedy the supposed i…