Commentary: A legitimate independent contractor should actually be independent

Working people in New Jersey are getting squeezed from every direction.

The cost of groceries, housing, healthcare, utilities, and almost everything else remains too high. Federal policies are pulling back investments working families depend on. New Jersey is fortunate to have recently elected a pro-worker governor who cares about these issues, but there are limits to what any state can do when federal policy is moving in the opposite direction.

At the same time, something quieter but just as consequential is happening in the workplace: more corporations are trying to turn jobs into gigs.

For generations, a job came with certain basic understandings. If you worked for a company, that company had responsibilities to you. It followed wage-and-hour laws. It paid into unemployment and disability systems. It carried workers’ compensation. Workers had protections if they were hurt, lost a job, or were denied wages they had earned.

Increasingly, some corporations and business lobbyists want a different arrangement: the company gets the work, while the worker carries the risk.

No employee. No employer. Just an ever-growing universe of so-called “independent contractors.”

That should concern every working person in New Jersey — and every taxpayer.

This debate is often discussed in connection with ride-share and delivery work, where abuse of workers is widespread.  But it is much bigger than those industries. Worker classification affects construction, trucking, nursing, healthcare, cleaning services, logistics, and many other corners of the economy.

The app-based transportation industry is one of the nation’s biggest offenders of classification laws. Here in New Jersey, Uber paid a $100 million fine in 2022, but admitted no guilt, so they continue to operate using the same labor model. Lyft paid the state of New Jersey $19.4 million in 2025 to resolve allegations that the company misclassified its drivers. Via, the state’s largest micro-transit contractor, was investigated and audited by the New Jersey Department of Labor and was subsequently fined over $1.5 million in April of this year for misclassifying their drivers and for failing to pay into essential worker protection programs, including unemployment and temporary disability funds. 

The New Jersey Department of Labor and Attorney General’s Office are currently in the process of auditing Amazon Flex, which began in 2025. These are massive, multimillion-dollar businesses that could easily afford to follow the law and not exploit their workers. But they chose not to, simply to further increase profits.

New Jersey has an important protection against that race to the bottom: the ABC test.

The principle is straightforward. A legitimate independent contractor should actually be independent. A company should not be able to make someone an independent contractor simply by putting those words on a piece of paper.

The principle behind New Jersey’s employment protections is as necessary as ever: Businesses should not be able to avoid basic responsibilities to workers simply by changing the label attached to the work.

There is a reason classification matters. Employee status is connected to real responsibilities and real protections — minimum wage and overtime, unemployment insurance, temporary disability, earned sick leave, workers’ compensation, and other safeguards.

When companies improperly push those responsibilities off their books, the costs do not disappear.

They move.

They move onto workers and their families. They move onto responsible employers that continue playing by the rules. And eventually they move onto taxpayers and public programs.

Working families are already being boxed in by high costs, economic uncertainty, shrinking public investment, and an increasingly precarious labor market. The answer cannot be to make stable jobs and basic workplace protections even harder to find.

New Jersey’s employment protections were built over generations because working people understood what happens when the balance of power in the workplace becomes too lopsided.

Technology changes. Business models change. The economy changes.

But some principles endure.

When someone is truly running an independent business, the law should recognize that independence.

And when a company is using classification simply to shed responsibilities to workers and the public, New Jersey should be enforcing the important laws it already has on the books, while also expanding and protecting the freedom of workers to join unions for a better life.

A job should still be a job in New Jersey.