Labor law simply hasn’t caught up with the times. We have classifications for “employees” and “contractors” and gig work really does fall into both in many ways.
A new classification with fair labor law applied to it is needed. Hourly employees have the FLSA for example.
Arguing for either side here is impossible because they are both right in sone ways and wrong in sone ways. We need clear guidelines and classification.
I think we need to eliminate the "employee bundle" and just talk more directly about what we want for workers and legislate that. Most problems here relate to the bundle concept. For example, healthcare shouldn't be tied to employment, minimum wage laws could apply to all classes of labor, withholding for taxes could be for independent contractors, etc. A lot of this was shown in the AB5 bill in California, which was an attempt to create exemptions for employee classification for special interests. If you create a bundle that is wrong for a certain group, you can either do what we have been doing and make the bundle more complicated, or just get rid of the bundle.
A new classification with fair labor law applied to it is needed. Hourly employees have the FLSA for example.
Arguing for either side here is impossible because they are both right in sone ways and wrong in sone ways. We need clear guidelines and classification.