Defining ‘employee’ in the gig economy
Defining ‘employee’ in the gig economy
There is a long history of businesses that try to deprive workers of the protections and benefits they are entitled to under the law by wrongly treating them as independent contractors, rather than employees. Now, some workers and regulators are accusing companies like Uber, which connects cars with passengers on mobile apps, of doing the same thing to the thousands of drivers, couriers and others who work for them.
Agricultural businesses, textile mills, construction firms and other enterprises have often classified workers as contractors to lower their costs by, for example, not paying workers the statutory minimum wage and overtime, not making Social Security contributions and not offering workers’ compensation for on-the-job injuries. Just last month, FedEx agreed to pay $228 million to settle a class-action suit brought by truck drivers who said their classification as independent contractors was wrong because they were required to work 10 hours a day, wore company uniforms and drove trucks that carried the company’s logo.
In recent years, app-based businesses like Uber, Lyft and Instacart have grown rapidly, in part because they signed up tens of thousands of people to work on their services as independent contractors. Uber, the most successful business in this sector, has signed up more than 160,000 of what it calls “driver-partners.” There is no question that the companies in what some people call the “gig economy” would not have been able to grow so fast if they had hired all of these people as employees.
Some of those workers are now accusing these companies of skirting federal and state labor laws. Drivers in California, for example, are suing Uber and Lyft in separate cases, demanding that they be treated as employees. And last month, the California Labor Commissioner’s Office ruled that a driver who filed a complaint against Uber was an employee, not a contractor. The agency ordered the company to pay the driver $4,150 in business expenses and interest. Uber is appealing that decision.
Executives at these companies say their business model is so new and different that they cannot be considered traditional employers. They also say that most of their workers do not want to be treated as employees because they would lose the flexibility to work when and how often they want.
Each case involving these companies and workers is different. In some instances, workers should clearly be classified as employees, and in others they clearly should not. The key question that courts will have to answer is “whether a worker is economically dependent on the employer or in business for him or herself,” the Department of Labor said in regulatory guidance it issued to employers on Wednesday.
Courts typically use a six-part test to figure out if workers are being misclassified. For example, courts will look at whether the work being performed is an integral part of the employer’s business, how much control the employer exerts over workers and whether the relationship between the two parties is permanent or open-ended.
Courts could decide that some should be treated as employees while others performing similar tasks for the same company can be considered contractors if they are sufficiently independent. Technology is making it possible for companies to do business in ways that can be good for consumers and workers. But this emerging field still needs to be governed by sensible regulations devised to protect workers.
— New York Times
Why science needs female mice
Scientific research has a gender gap, and not just among humans. In many disciplines, the animals used to study diseases and drugs are overwhelmingly male, which may significantly reduce the reliability of research and lead to drugs that won’t work in half the population.
A new study published in the journal Nature Neuroscience suggests that research done on male animals may not hold up for women. Its authors reported that hypersensitivity to pain works differently in male and female mice. For males, immune cells called microglia appear to be required for pain hypersensitivity, and inhibiting their function also relieves the pain. But in female mice, different cells are involved, and targeting the microglia has no effect. If these differences occur in mice, they may occur in humans, too. This means a pain drug targeting microglia might appear to work in male mice, but wouldn’t work on women.
Failure to consider gender in research is very much the norm. According to one analysis of scientific studies that were published in 2009, male animals outnumbered females 5.5 to 1 in neuroscience, 5 to 1 in pharmacology, and 3.7 to 1 in physiology. Only 45 percent of animal studies involving depression or anxiety and only 38 percent involving strokes used females, even though these conditions are more common in women.
In 1994, the National Institutes of Health confronted gender imbalance in clinical drug trials and began requiring that women and minorities be included in clinical studies; women now make up around half of clinical trial participants. In June, the NIH announced that it would begin requiring researchers to take gender into account in preclinical research on animals as well.
Under the new requirements, researchers applying for NIH grants in January 2016 and later will need to show “strong justification” if they plan to study only one sex. Justifications can include study of sex-specific conditions like ovarian cancer or limited availability of subjects of both sexes (as with primates).
This new policy for grants sends a good message to scientists and drugmakers on the importance of considering sex in designing research projects if they want to understand diseases that appear to affect men and women differently and develop medicines effective for those diseases.
— New York Times