WASHINGTON — San Francisco’s city attorney last month reached the kind of settlement many gig workers have been seeking for years: An app-based hospitality company called Qwick agreed to reclassify thousands of bartenders, servers and dishwashers as employees, giving them back wages and, for the first time, sick pay and other legal benefits.
But advocates’ dream that such settlements would spur new deals for gig workers across the country appears to be on hold. The San Francisco settlement, the first of its kind, applies only to Qwick’s workers in California, which has one of the most aggressive gig worker protections in the country.
President Joe Biden’s promise to replicate California’s law at the national level has fallen victim to congressional gridlock and industry clout. This month, his Labor Department began enforcing a new administrative rule outlining which employees should be classified as gig workers. But industry experts say it amounts to a half-measure that falls short of California’s protections and is unlikely to result in the same type of benefits for the increasing number of Americans who rely on contract work to pay their bills.
That hasn’t stopped critics from claiming that Biden’s action “takes a destructive California idea national,” as a commentary in the National Review recently proclaimed, or that the president is “spreading California’s war on gig workers to rest of country,” as a Republican senator wrote for Fox News. In reality, experts say Biden’s new rule essentially restores the federal approach to gig work that was in place under President Barack Obama.