After more than 20,000 workers walked out last week in protest of the company’s handling of sexual misconduct, Google announced that it would no longer require claims of sexual harassment or assault to be funneled into secret forced arbitration—one of the walk... More »
Uber has reached a settlement with 5,000 drivers who argue they were misclassified as independent contractors. The drivers were not covered by an arbitration agreement, though most drivers are now required to sign such an agreement before driving for the compa... More »
The U.S. Department of Labor announced that it is extending its Payroll Audit Independent Determination (PAID) program by six months. The program protects employers from enforcement action resulting from federal wage-and-hour violations if they work in good f... More »
President Trump said yesterday that the United States and Mexico have reached a deal on a renegotiated NAFTA, though Canada has apparently been left out of the deal for the time being. Lawmakers and industry expressed concern that the trilateral NAFTA could be... More »
In today’s Sunday Review for The New York Times, economic historian Louis Hyman argues that new technology companies like Uber and TaskRabbit did not create the gig economy but only took advantage of a decades-long shift to temporary work arrangements. He ana... More »
In the forthcoming September issue of Vanity Fair, Uber engineer-turned-Silicon Valley watchdog Susan Fowler examines the future of the gig economy. In her piece entitled, “What Have We Done?: Silicon Valley Engineers Fear They’ve Created a Monster... More »
As expected, the New York City Council voted yesterday to cap the number of Ubers allowed to drive within the city, in a win for taxi drivers, who had complained of deflated incomes. The move came despite opposition from the NAACP and other civil rights organi... 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In a hard-fought win for organized labor, Missouri voters repealed a so-called “right-to-work” law enacted last year by Missouri’s Republican state legislature and former Republican governor by a nearly 2-to-1 margin.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 »
New York State’s Unemployment Insurance Appeal Board ruled that Uber drivers are employees, rather than independent contractors, for purposes of unemployment insurance and benefits. The Board wrote that “credible evidence establishes that Uber exercises suffi... 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 »