Insights
Andrea Kirshenbaum Examines the Wage and Hour Challenges for the Sharing Economy for The Legal Intelligencer on Nov. 2
In her November 2 column for The Legal Intelligencer, Andrea M. Kirshenbaum examines recent cases filed across the country challenging worker classification of sharing-economy workers, as well as the Department of Labor's Misclassification Initiative and recent Administrator’s Interpretation on “The Application of the Fair Labor Standards Act’s ‘Suffer or Permit’ Standard in the Identification of Employees Who Are Misclassified as Independent Contractors.”
She notes in the article:
"Much has changed in the United States since the country’s foundational wage-and-hour law, the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), was enacted more than 75 years ago in 1938. although the FLSA has been amended multiple times, the central aspects of the law remain intact—workers who qualify as “employees” are entitled to the minimum wage and overtime protections of the law, while workers not so classified are not. Yet, as the country moves further and further away from the world that existed during the Great depression, the concepts enshrined in the law—from the classification of employees as exempt or nonexempt, to a determination of time worked in the digital age, or even identification of workers as employees or independent contractors—have become exponentially more difficult to apply."
