Last month brought news that some ride-hail drivers and their lawyers have adopted a new strategy for pursuing their misclassification-related claims against Uber and Lyft: filing for individual arbitrations in massive numbers. This came to light when attorney... More »
Civil unrest in France continued and even expanded this weekend, as French police arrested over a thousand protesters. A large police presence seemed better able to control the violence this weekend, the fourth weekend in a row in which the Yellow Vests (as pr... More »
This morning, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released its monthly jobs report: unemployment remains at 3.7% for the third month, and the U.S. added 155,000 nonfarm jobs. Reactions are mixed; while the report is “weaker than expected,” it is also a sign of an ... More »
The New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission voted this week to create a minimum pay standard for the approximately 80,000 drivers in the city working for transportation network companies like Uber, Lyft, Juno, and Via. The standard establishes a per-minut... More »
In a hard-fought win for organized labor, Missouri voters repealed a so-called “right-to-work” law enacted last year by Missouri’s Republican state legislature and former Republican governor by a nearly 2-to-1 margin. The New York Times repor... More »
The NLRB General Counsel has begun to implement parts of a 59-point plan announced in January to reorganize agency operations. In a memo to regional board directors sent on Monday, Associate to the General Counsel Beth Tursell detailed the immediate formation... More »
After long campaign by thousands of app-based drivers with the Independent Drivers Guild, New York City released a report today analyzing a proposal to establish a minimum pay rate for app-based for-hire vehicle drivers. The NYC Taxi and Limousine Commission,... More »
“Gig economy” or “online platform” companies that provide personal labor services—Uber, Lyft, TaskRabbit, Handy, Instacart, Grubhub, and others—challenge American law’s system for classifying workers as “employees” or “independent contractors, As I explain in... More »
Starting tomorrow, no Costco employee will earn below $14 an hour. While some locations already saw a $13.50 an hour minimum wage, the new mark, which nearly doubles the federal minimum of $7.25, signals that the “fight for $15” is edging forward, and the nat... More »
On May 11, the Ninth Circuit dealt a blow to a Seattle city ordinance permitting Lyft and Uber drivers to unionize. However, the court’s ruling was not entirely unfavorable for “gig economy” workers. Lyft and Uber, along with other affected groups, challenged ... More »
The Competitive Enterprise Institute has weighed in on our debate over flexibility in the gig economy with a new piece by Trey Kovacs. Their bottom line: they agree with my analysis of the law but object to the “burdens” (what I’d call minimu... More »
Professor Estlund argues that if gig firms have to classify their workers as employees (as I believe the law now requires, and as the Dynamex decision makes more likely), those firms will respond by “exercising greater control over hours and scheduling, ... More »
December 9th, 2018