Earlier today, July 15, the Wage and Hour Administrator of the U.S. Department of Labor, Dr. David Weil, announced a new “Administrator’s Interpretation” addressing the misclassification of employees as independent contractors under the federal Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). The 15-page Interpretation sets forth the test to be…

This article was published as a comprehensive three-part series in the Employment and Class Action sections of Law360 on July 7–9, 2015 as “The Costs of Worker Misclassification.” © Copyright 2015, Portfolio Media, Inc., publisher of Law360.  This article is based on the 2015 Update to my White Paper. …

Yesterday, as anticipated, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit adopted the decision of the Kansas Supreme Court that FedEx Ground drivers, as a matter of law, were employees and not independent contractors under the Kansas Wage Payment Act (KWPA). The Seventh Circuit had “certified” two questions to

…

On June 16, 2015, Forbes columnist and senior editor Daniel Fisher, who covers finance, the law, and how the two interact, posted on his column a guest post by Richard Reibstein, the publisher of this blog, entitled “Is Your Company On The Independent Contractor Hit List?”  The text of…

The month of June 2015 created more newspaper stories and blog posts on the subject of independent contractor misclassification than any other. Why? Uber lost an IC misclassification case and FedEx Ground agreed to pay $228 million to settle an IC misclassification case with its drivers in California. Those articles …

An Uber driver has prevailed in an independent contractor misclassification wage case in California. This decision involving the ride-sharing leader involved an individual claim by a driver who represented herself before the California Labor Commissioner seeking allegedly unpaid wages, including overtime, as well as unreimbursed “employee” expenses under California law.…

Yesterday, June 12, FedEx announced in papers filed with the SEC that its Ground Division “has reached an agreement in principle with [drivers] in the independent contractor litigation that is pending in …California [federal court] to settle the matter for $228 million.” The proposed agreement, which has not yet been…

The Economic Policy Institute, a respected nonprofit, nonpartisan think tank, has just released a working paper authored by a respected professor who co-authored a number of early academic studies detailing independent contractor misclassification in two Northeastern states. The working paper, entitled “(In)dependent Contractor Misclassification,” surprisingly contains little more…