Bellevue Hospital was founded in 1736, long before “gig work,”
a term that applies to work that is organized as one-off assignments.
Anetha Barfield, a certified nursing assistant, sued Bellevue
for overtime. For years, she regularly performed work at the hospital, not as
its employee, but as a contract worker who was regularly referred to Bellevue
through several referral agencies.
She occasionally worked more than 40 hours per week, but her
work was divided between among several agencies, all of whom required her to
sign a contractor agreement that she could not work for more than 40 hours in
each week. Thus, she worked 60 hours in some weeks but qualified for overtime
because she was paid a per diem fee—a daily rate.
Essentially, this clever system took a regular nursing job
with consistent work hours, inserted a labor contractor as a middleman each
with its own overtime limits, with the net result that Barfield worked a series
of “gigs” in many weeks that were essentially the sum total of the
fragmentation of her employment at Bellevue.
The Obama Department of Labor rule treats Bellevue—the end-user
of labor who controls her conditions of work— as a joint employer of these
agencies. This, according to a court, it owed Barfield overtime for weeks where
she worked more than 40 hours per week.
When Trump’s policy makers cut “costly red tape” at the “bureaucracy”
known as the Department of Labor, will they keep the joint employer rule in
place? You be
the judge of that.
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