Biden’s attack on those who work on their own

Like Dante’s Inferno, President Joe Biden’s new anti-independent contractor rule — totaling a mind-numbing 339 pages — casts tens of millions of independent professionals into a regulatory hellscape where the fate of countless livelihoods and careers is at stake.

Published by DOL on Jan. 10, the Final Rule is inspired by California’s infamous Assembly Bill 5 (AB 5). The Final Rule’s six factors (plus an open-ended, mysterious seventh factor) will determine whether a worker is an employee or independent contractor under the Fair Labor Standards Act. When the rule goes into effect this March, California’s petri dish of bad ideas will continue to metastasize nationwide.

In an ominous sign of things to come, and on the same day as the Final Rule’s publication, the California-based tutoring company Cambly terminated all its independent contractors in Massachusetts and New Jersey, adding to the casualty count of contractors it had already let go in California because of AB 5. The company cited “recent regulatory developments, effective March 11, 2024,” which not coincidentally, is the Final Rule’s start date.

Chock-full of contradictory interpretative “guidance” that drones on for more pages than “Harry Potter,” the Final Rule provides an unfettered opportunity for a regulator or judge to do the bidding of Big Labor, a.k.a. the ghostwriter of the Final Rule. Fearing for their careers, a group of freelance writers recently filed a lawsuit against DOL and its new rule.

The timing of the new regulation coincides with the renomination of acting Secretary of Labor Julie Su to head DOL. As California’s former labor secretary, Su endorsed and enforced the AB 5 disaster prior to her current tenure in the Biden administration.

During her unsuccessful Senate confirmation hearing on April 20, 2023, Su went to great lengths to distance herself from the hot potato of AB 5 and its draconian ABC test — and with good reason, considering the hundreds of thousands of independent careers that have been destroyed in California since the enactment of AB 5 in 2020. Empirical data from a new study by the Mercatus Center reveals a significant decline in self-employment and overall employment in California due to AB 5 — not exactly a rousing endorsement for duplicating California’s failed policy nationwide.

Not surprisingly, Su and her department cohorts insist the Final Rule does not mimic the ABC test of AB 5. But that’s