Cleaning Services

The Latest from the DOL Regarding Independent Contractors

The Department of Labor (DOL) ‘s latest Opinion Letter concerning impartial contractors (and how to differentiate them from employees) uses the identical six (6) elements we’ve seen in previous letters.

(1) The nature and diploma of the capability company’s control;
(2) The permanency of the worker’s relationship with the ability of business enterprise;
(3) The quantity of the employee’s funding in facilities, equipment, or helpers;
(four) The quantity of talent, initiative, judgment, or foresight required for the employee’s offerings;
(five) The worker’s opportunities for earnings or loss; and
(6) The volume of integrating the employee’s services into the ability business enterprise’s enterprise.

The Latest from the DOL Regarding Independent Contractors 1

What is precise about the state-of-the-art Opinion Letter is how some of these factors are interpreted in an enterprise-friendly/non-employee classifying way.

The letter becomes asked on behalf of a nameless online cleansing referral enterprise. Like Uber or Lyft for transportation, this business permits individuals and corporations who need their homes or workplaces cleaned to hook up with individuals who perform those offerings.

While applied in this context, the maximum particular interpretation of the six (6) factors indexed above changed into the DOL reasoning that the ones supplying the cleaning services were not “essential” to the cleansing referral service’s enterprise. So, although there might be no one to “refer” to clients who need cleaning offerings if not for the people providing such offerings through the referral carrier, the DOL said that these people had been not “quintessential” to this referral carrier business. Perhaps the concept became for the reason that referral service has a large number of people who have “registered” as being to be had to offer cleaning services; the cleaning referral provider is not reliant on any one or group of unique people to fulfill the needs of its customers as an “enterprise” might be if an entire manufacturing line of employees failed to expose up for paintings.

The second most precise interpretation of the six (6) elements became “permanency.” The cleansing referral commercial enterprise that asked for the Opinion Letter seemingly did not offer any facts regarding this element. Still, the DOL opined that “even assuming that carrier providers preserve a long-running relationship” with this business, “because they accomplish that best on a challenge-with the aid of-project foundation,” “this thing strongly weighs in favor of unbiased contractor fame.”

This Opinion Letter accordingly stands in stark evaluation to preceding ones, which found that, for example, nurses who have been supplied on a quick-time period basis by a placement employer and who had the ability (just like the cleansing employees in the modern-day Opinion Letter) to paintings for different placement organizations while running for the position organization in query have been “personal” of that enterprise.

The DOL no longer takes issue with the existing Opinion Letter because the cleaning workers needed little to no unique abilities or schooling to perform their paintings in line with factor (4) above. The DOL’s attention on this region was entirely on whether or not the cleansing referral commercial enterprise provided the people with any training they no longer needed. The DOL additionally mentioned the people’s “judgment and initiative” as being displayed of their preference of cleaning task assignments (rather than necessarily like the services being carried out as themselves requiring “judgment or initiative”). The DOL additionally becomes not troubled by using the truth the referral service set the quotes the cleansing clients paid for the people’s services based totally on the regional place and kind of paintings to be accomplished.

Unsurprising elements helping the finding that these cleaning people had been unbiased contractors became their potential to decide which cleansing jobs they desired to accept through the referral service and their capability to compete for referral offerings concurrently with the only one who asked for the letter.

Takeaways

This extraordinarily commercial enterprise-friendly Opinion Letter, at the same time as the whole, not applicable to all businesses based totally on the online, digital nature of the cleansing referral services supplied, contains several new interpretations of the six (6) factors the DOL makes use of to differentiate personnel from unbiased contractors.

Prior interpretations that have been deemed to support a DOL finding that the employee becomes an employee, which includes a protracted-term relationship with the business at the problem or the reliance of the commercial enterprise on the work being achieved, have not been determined to suggest an employment relationship. Similarly, applying some “fine management and compliance monitoring” measures had no longer discovered to signify such a relationship – including acting background assessments, the use of client score systems, implementing “fines” on the employees for canceling a cleaning job without good note and even terminating an employee’s courting if their purchaser ratings fall below a positive stage or the worker develops a sample of canceling appointments without adequate observe.

Duane Simpson

Internet fan. Zombie aficionado. Infuriatingly humble problem solver. Alcohol enthusiast. Spent several months exporting UFOs in Jacksonville, FL. A real dynamo when it comes to exporting gravy in Tampa, FL. Spent 2001-2004 implementing saliva in Edison, NJ. Had moderate success getting my feet wet with junk food on Wall Street. Practiced in the art of building Virgin Mary figurines in Tampa, FL. Practiced in the art of marketing Roombas in Phoenix, AZ.

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