Senate committee approves bill cracking down on gig, freelance workers.

Byline: Daniel J. Munoz

On Thursday afternoon, lawmakers approved a measure that would classify thousands of New Jersey independent contractors, freelance and gig economy workers as employees following hours of testimony from industry trade groups vying for carve-outs and exceptions to the new proposal.

Senate Bill 4204 is worded in a way that could profoundly impact businesses that rely on independent contractors, such as DoorDash Inc., Uber Technologies Inc. and Lyft Inc. with the latter two having shown their opposition to the New Jersey measure.

Its passage in a 3-1 vote by the Senate Labor Committee comes hours after a report by Bloomberg Law that New Jersey labor officials told Uber, and its subsidiary Raiser LLC, they owe the state $523 million in employment taxes for workers who were wrongly misclassified as independent contractors over the past four years on top of $119 million from interest and penalties.

"[It] tells you they've gone well beyond what the intent of the independent contractor is and it's been abused," the bill's sponsor, Senate President Stephen Sweeney, D-3rd District, told reporters at an unrelated event later that day.

Uber said it would fight the labor department's decision.

The measure has several aspects of a recently signed California measure - Assembly Bill 5 - which goes into effect Jan. 1, and limits when companies can classify their workers as independent contractors. In New Jersey, S4204 would tweak two of the three prongs in the "ABC test" that is used to separate employees from independent contractors.

The "A" prong of the test evaluates whether the worker would be free from any direction or control from the company. Under the "B" part, the work has to fall outside a company's "usual course of business," and under "C," the worker has to be engaged in their own established and separate business.

Sweeney's bill tweaks the "B" prong so that workers could not be exempt from employee status "solely because the service is performed outside of all the places of business of the enterprise for which the service is performed."The language would bypass Uber's arguments that their drivers would not be considered employees because those services fall outside of its "usual course of business," which the company used to argue exemption from California's Assembly Bill 5.

S4204 also tweaks the "C" prong so that even if someone does work for a company and also runs their own endeavor, they could only be exempt from...

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