View from K Street: Battle of the Titans

While the trials of Donald Trump draw all eyes like a powerful magnet, too many are not noticing a titanic battle that will fundamentally change workplace law—and much of American society.

Biden’s vision of the workplace

For perhaps the first time since the Franklin Roosevelt administration, the workplace enforcement agencies of the executive branch are working in a coordinated manner to remake the law of the workplace—and the lives of millions of Americans along with it. It’s no accident that within weeks, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has published a dramatically expansive joint employer regulation that will significantly alter the franchise business model and the Department of Labor’s (DOL) Wage and Hour Division (WHD) issued both an ambitious overtime regulation and an independent contractor rule openly designed to reclassify tens of thousands of workers as employees.

Advocates of these new policies defend them as an overdue effort to reconfigure our workplace laws to respond to the realities of a 21st Century economy. The “gig economy”—with its masses of remote, part-time, and even nomadic workers—is only the most widely discussed aspect of a workforce no longer centered on one single workplace or on one single employer. Subcontracting, job-sharing, off-shoring, and many other innovations have been made much simpler by advances in technology, all of which have profoundly altered the traditional employer-employee relationship.