Biden Administration Moves to Snuff Out Freelance Work

Cooking the Great Reset omelet will require breaking a great many eggs. That is, imposing leftist dominance on every aspect of everyone’s lives will require throwing millions of people out of work. Biden and his radical handlers have no qualms about doing this:

On Thursday, US Secretary of Labor Marty Walsh said gig workers should be classified as employees, not independent contractors, a move that could deal a huge setback to gig companies.

If forced to reclassify drivers as employees, companies like Uber and Instacart would need to pay for employee benefits such as unemployment insurance and health insurance for millions of Americans.

The list of goodies employers are required to provide is likely to grow with every year Democrats are in power.

In theory, providing all manner of benefits to everyone sounds wonderful. In practice, forcing companies to shoulder the enormous burden Big Government has placed on having regular employees would destroy millions of jobs. Unlike the government, businesses cannot confiscate or print money, nor can they indefinitely operate at a loss. When it is not feasible to meet bureaucrats’ requirements, the job disappears.

That is of no concern of the government, which has been paying people so much not to work that businesses are having a hard time reopening after the lockdowns because employees can make more by staying at home watching Netflix.

The main point is to pander to unions, which shovel massive amounts of dues money into the Democrat Party and which cannot stand the thought of workers who are not under their control. Increased unemployment is an added benefit, because people without jobs are more dependent on the government and therefore likely to vote Democrat.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimated in 2017 that 55 million people in the US were gig workers, or about 34% of the US workforce. This workforce, typically made up of people hired to complete a single project or task through an online marketplace, was expected to grow to nearly half the workforce as of last year.

Potentially all of these people could be coercively thrown out of work by the Biden Administration. Those gig jobs that can go overseas will. Other jobs will cease to exist. This illustrates why the cost of Big Government is vastly greater than the $trillions it confiscates in taxes every year.

Federal plans to crush freelance workers mirror California’s catastrophic AB5. That tyrannical law threw countless Californians out of work. Thankfully, it was partially repealed through the passage of Proposition 22. The maniacs comprising the Biden Administration are in no mood to learn from California’s mistakes.

On a tip from Bluto.

The post Biden Administration Moves to Snuff Out Freelance Work appeared first on Moonbattery.