DARK BRANDON STRIKES AGAIN

For those who wonder how the guy who had a reputation he worked hard to get as a “moderate’s moderate” in the Senate can be the most progressive Democratic President since Lyndon Johnson, or maybe even Harry Truman, believe him when he talks about growing up working class in Scranton. The man remembers where he came from and it affects who he chooses to carry out policy.

The Silly-Con Valley scumbags at Uber and Lyft just found that out today.

All that money they spent in 2020 convincing Californians to vote to let the scumbags keep classifying their employees as “independent contractors” just went up in smoke this morning.

A proposed rule released by the Department of Labor today would effectively guarantee a raise for the thousands of Uber and Lyft drivers in California, who are mislabeled as independent contractors and thus not covered under state or federal minimum-wage legislation. According to a recent study, when the expenses they have to pay to buy, lease, and/or maintain their cars are subtracted from their income, their real hourly income comes out to be a less-than-princely $6.20.

Today’s proposed rule would raise that level by about a dollar, to the Federal minimum of $7.25 (the California minimum wage is now $15.50). More importantly, it will qualify those drivers for overtime pay and require their employers to pay into Social Security and unemployment insurance.

Those changes would take place because the new rule establishes real-world standards for what constitutes employment, criteria such as determining the rate the drivers charge and what share they pay to the parent company, or, if they drive trucks for FedEx or other companies, whether those trucks can be used for other work or driver use.

It’s a "if it quacks like a duck, it’s a duck" rule. Which stands in sharp contrast to the rule by Trump’s Labor Department, which said if it quacks like a duck, all that matters is what’s most advantageous for the duck’s owner.

Federal rulemaking is a prolonged process; the department will spend the next month and a half collecting comments on its proposal and then take more time to finalize and effectuate its ruling. Once the rule is made official, however, its ramifications will be considerable. And considerably positive.

Take that, Techie Bros. SMACK!

The Department of Labor isn’t the only part of Biden’s administration considering this change. Under the leadership of General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo, the National Labor Relations Board is inching toward a decision that would rule the misclassification of workers as independent contractors to be an unfair labor practice, which would change their status to employees and make them eligible to form a union.

Though it’s nowhere to be found in today’s 184-page proposed rule from the Labor Department, the reclassification of workers as employees that it envisions would also make them eligible to form unions.

This reconfirms the happy reality that the Biden administration is the first since Lyndon Johnson’s that understands progressive government and the Democratic Party need unions if they are to prevail.

So, take that Silly-Con Valley scumbags. POW!

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