The effort to
rein in misclassification of workers is one of the best things to come out of Obama's Department of Labor under Secretary Hilda Solis;
California is also taking steps to crack down on this practice that cheats workers of wages and benefits
and cheats the government of revenue. This CBS News clip is a nice illustration of the problem; Salon has also
profiled a driver for Shippers Transport Express, the company misclassifying the man in this clip.
The best part of this video, though, is the slip-up by a spokesman for the American Trucking Association. He claims workers like the independence part of independent contracting, ignoring that misclassified workers by definition lack the independence of a true independent contractor, going where and when their employer tells them, while also lacking the wages and benefits of an official employee. Then he tries to explain why companies favor so-called independent contractors, and that's where he's more revealing than he intends, saying "they believe they get a more productive employee—excuse me, a more productive worker." Substitute "illegally cheaper" for "more productive" and leave his inadvertently truthful use of "employee," and that pretty much sums up what we're talking about here.
The Coalition for Clean and Safe Ports has much more on misclassification of the particularly hard-hit workforce of short-haul truck drivers.