Trump Is Quietly Showing His True Feelings About Gig Workers |
Trump Is Quietly Showing His True Feelings About Gig Workers
The president claims to be cutting taxes for independent contractors like DoorDash deliverers. Meanwhile, his administration is working behind the scenes to undo protections they gained under Biden.
On Monday, in the vain hope that Americans might forget about his economically disastrous war against Iran, President Trump attempted a symbiotic stunt with DoorDash in which he summoned Sharon Simmons, a 58-year-old who lives in Arkansas and works for the company, to deliver him lunch from his favorite restaurant: McDonald’s. The goal, with tax day looming, was to remind Americans about the “no taxes on tips” provision in the GOP’s One Big Beautiful Bill that passed last year. Alas, it turned out that this humble “DoorDash grandma” had previously lobbied in D.C. for that provision, and the savings she attributed to the new law most likely were not due to that law at all.
But the event did illustrate a bleak economic reality: Simmons said she needed the money to help pay her husband’s medical bills from cancer treatment, and to do so she is turning, like an increasing number of workers, to the gig economy.
The gig economy—which also includes rideshare services like Uber and handyman apps like Taskrabbit—is relatively new, but some of the issues its workers face are longstanding. One of the biggest is how to determine who counts as an employee versus an independent contractor. The distinction can make a huge difference to both businesses and workers, because the latter are covered by rules on overtime pay, workplace harassment, family and medical leave, and more.
The Biden administration expanded the definition of an employee in order to try to cover more workers employed in the gig economy. Now, though, the Trump administration is attempting to roll back the definition in a way that, as a new report from the Economic Policy Institute Report shows, could cost the most vulnerable workers thousands of dollars and leave them less safe in the workplace.
The question of who is an independent contractor versus an employee might sound easy to answer, but it’s actually a complicated legal test laid out by the Department of Labor. On one end, a truly independent,........