New York Floats a Crackdown on Independent WorkersLike California’s ruinous A.B. 5, the proposal would greatly harm freelance employment.
DAVID MCGARRY
2.17.2023
A bill before the New York state Senate seeks to reclassify many independent contractors as employees, advancing a standard similar to that of California's ruinous Assembly Bill 5, or A.B. 5. The proposed S2052 would implement the "ABC Test," which classifies workers as employees unless the (a) worker is free from the control of the hiring entity, (b) the work performed is outside the hiring entity's bailiwick, and (c) the worker is "customarily engaged" in the type of work he is hired to do.
S2052's sponsor memo extols that the bill gives "the most basic human rights of American workers to a voice on their jobs and a role in shaping their futures." However, individual agency in "shaping their futures" is precisely what the bill would quash.
The government can't turn every contractor into an employee, so making it impossible for employers to hire many independent contractors will simply make many independent contractors unemployed in their chosen careers. Anti-freelance politicians, backed by unions, tout the benefits of "employee" status, but such benefits accrue to a few at the expense of many others. Following the passage of A.B. 5 in California, for instance, sports network SB Nation opted to terminate roughly 200 freelancers, reportedly to be replaced by just 20 full- and part-time staffers. Those 20 people may have received more in pay and benefits, but 180 other people lost income.
"New York presumes—like every other government entity and Democrats in general presume—that independent contractors are inherently, unavoidably exploited and that they all yearn to be bona-fide employees when that's not the case at all," Ike Brannon, a senior fellow at the Jack Kemp Foundation, tells Reason. "Our survey in 2019 of 1,000 or so independent contractors in the midwest found that few desired to be actually employed." Indeed, in 2021, Pew Research Center found that nearly 80 percent of gig workers "rate their experiences in these jobs positively."
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Source:
https://reason.com/2023/02/17/new-york-floats-a-crackdown-on-independent-workers/
