Terri Gerstein writes today about a couple of cases of employee misclassification in Denver:
At issue is whether dishwashers and others like them, placed in their jobs by online temporary staffing agencies, are employees of the agencies or independent contractors running their own businesses.
....The cases demonstrate the spread of the exploitative gig business model far beyond Uber drivers and DoorDash food deliverers, to encompass a growing number of jobs that have long been performed by employees with legal protections. And the cases illustrate the urgent need for government intervention to safeguard core workplace rights.
I'm all for proper labor protection, but I'm also all-in on correct labor statistics. Here's the number of temp agency workers:
It's lower today than before the pandemic. Here's a BLS estimate of all contingent workers:
The BLS only rouses itself to produce these figures every once in a while, so this chart is fairly out of date. A new one will come out later this year. And recent research suggests the BLS may be undercounting. Still, the trend is pretty obvious: it's going down.
Even op-eds should require a minimal amount of fact checking. You can be against exploitive work arrangements without misstating the facts.
Terri Gerstein isn't saying that the number of temp workers or contingent workers is growing, s/he's saying that a growing number of jobs are being converted from employee to independent contractor. It can be simultaneously true that (1) the number of temp jobs is declining, and (2) the temp jobs that remain are being converted from the employee model to the independent contractor model.
That's exactly right. Truck drivers employed by most trucking companies are considered independent contractors. Fedex is notorious for this. There are countless other cases where companies benefit from complaining that the people working full time for them are independent as with Uber, Lyft and other such outfits.
Temp agencies are a whole different story.
That thing you're worried about (exploitation of gig workers)? It's not a big deal to me, Kevin Drum.
Have you considered the possibility that as a result of several states updating laws on independent contractors and subsequent lawsuits starting in 2021, many 1099s have been converted to W2s?
Who ya gonna believe? Facts, or my Doom Dogma?
I think the amount of misclassification is going up.
Subcontractors, hiring firms, aren't reporting these people as temps.