Labor Secretary Marty Walsh said that a lot of gig workers are misclassified as contractors on Thursday, sending stocks of tech companies such as Uber, Lyft and DoorDash falling amid speculation about the future of the fraught business model in the Biden administration.
“We are looking at it, but in a lot of cases gig workers should be classified as employees,” Walsh told Reuters. “These companies are making profits and revenue and I’m not (going to) begrudge anyone for that, because that’s what we are about in America. But we also want to make sure that success trickles down to the worker.”
The comments, which were pulled from a larger interview with Reuters that was not published in full, were interpreted as signal that the Labor Department could move more aggressively to crack down on the use of contract labor by some of Silicon Valley’s most prominent companies. Continue reading.