Bulletins

Labor Secretary says gig workers should be classified as employees

Lyft stock has fallen by more than 10%, DoorDash's 8%, and Uber's 5% since Marty Walsh's comments were made public.

An Uber Eats delivery bike

U.S. Labor Secretary Marty Walsh said gig workers should be classified as employees in a lot of cases.

Photo: Matthew Horwood/Getty Images

U.S. Labor Secretary Marty Walsh said that "in a lot of cases, gig workers should be classified as employees" in an interview with Reuters on Thursday.

"These companies are making profits and revenue and I'm not (going to) begrudge anyone for that because that's what we are about in America … but we also want to make sure that success trickles down to the worker," he said in the interview.

Lyft stock has fallen by more than 10%, DoorDash's 8%, and Uber's 5% since Walsh's comments were made public. Fighting is still ongoing in the California legislature and in other state houses over how to classify gig workers, though the gig-worker companies won a major victory after the passage of Proposition 22, which exempts them from California's AB 5 contracting law.

Anna Kramer

Anna Kramer is a reporter at Protocol (Twitter: @ anna_c_kramer, email: akramer@protocol.com), where she writes about labor and workplace issues. Prior to joining the team, she covered tech and small business for the San Francisco Chronicle and privacy for Bloomberg Law. She is a recent graduate of Brown University, where she studied International Relations and Arabic and wrote her senior thesis about surveillance tools and technological development in the Middle East.

gig workworkers
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