Department of Labor Issues Final Rule on Worker Classification
The U.S. Department of Labor recently announced a final rule intended to help employers and workers better understand when a worker qualifies as an employee and when they may be considered an independent contractor under the Fair Labor Standards Act.
The guidance provided by the final rule aligns with longstanding judicial precedent on which employers have previously relied to determine a worker’s status as either an employee or independent contractor. The department stated that the new rule will preserve essential worker rights and provide consistency for entities covered by the Fair Labor Standards Act.
The new “independent contractor” rule restores the multifactor analysis used by courts for decades, ensuring that all relevant factors are analyzed to determine whether a worker is an employee or an independent contractor. The rule addresses six factors that guide the analysis of a worker’s relationship with an employer, including any opportunity for profit or loss a worker might have, the financial stake and nature of any resources a worker has invested in the work, the degree of permanence of the work relationship, the degree of control an employer has over the person’s work, whether the work the person does is essential to the employer’s business, and a factor regarding the worker’s skill and initiative.
The rule separately rescinds the 2021 Independent Contractor Rule that the department believes is not consistent with the law and longstanding judicial precedent.
In crafting the new rule, the department’s Wage and Hour Division considered feedback provided by stakeholders at forums in the summer of 2022 and during the comment period after the proposal’s announcement in October 2022. The final rule takes effect on March 11, 2024.