Taking the ‘Free’ Out of ‘Freelance’

Dear Capitolisters,
One of the big themes of my forthcoming book, Empowering the New American Worker, is that our political class often misunderstands—willfully or otherwise—much of the U.S. workforce. I discussed this problem generally back in September, but there may be no better specific example than the Biden administration’s recent broadside against independent work, in the form of a new Department of Labor proposed rule for determining when a worker is properly classified as a contractor or an “employee” under the Fair Labor Standards Act (and thus subject to minimum wage, overtime, and other labor regulations). The rule is complicated and still preliminary, but most experts agree on its objective and likely result: to make it more difficult for workers to be classified as independent and thus to force many of them to be reclassified as employees, whether they like it or not.