Why Trump is bad news for America’s freelancers
For a company like Uber to provide health or retirement benefits to its drivers would increase the risk that it has to reclassify them as employees rather than contractors.
“The legal system regards supplying non-cash benefits to workers as evidence of the control and leverage a firm has,” e-mailed Anne Hobson, an analyst with the free-market-minded R Street Institute.
A large fraction of the workforce is at stake. A study released in November by the Pew Research Center found that some 24% of American adults earned money in the “platform economy” over the last year—about 59 million, extrapolating from 2015 Census data. And of those, 29% termed this income “essential” and 27% labeled it “important.”
