On Tuesday, Oct. 11, the Department of Labor issued new guidelines for categorizing independent contractors and employees per the Fair Labor Standards Act. The proposed rule is an overhaul of the existing guidelines and is similar to the rule adopted during the Obama administration. In a nutshell, it will make it more difficult for companies to classify workers as contractors instead of employees.
The new blueprint urges an analysis of the “totality-of-the-circumstances” for a specific worker instead of looking at particular criteria. As a result, policies for categorizing an independent contractor are much tighter.