This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, November 18th, 2022.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Independent contractors are increasingly critical to a smoothly functioning economy

and the rules that govern independent

contracting could be quite a bit simpler for the people who choose that kind of work.

Those states and the feds are actively considering ways to penalize workers just for being independent.

Scott Linscombe is author of a chapter in Cato's book Empowering the New American

worker.

We spoke last week.

Scott, you may recall, there was a piece of legislation in California called

AB 5 and that piece of legislation pretty significantly limited the amount that is

to say the dollar value of independent work people could do for any given

contractor, that is for musicians who play gigs in bars people who write short pieces for

publication and get paid by those those publications as a contract employee.

That is more of an arm's length relationship

than a lot of employees have that you and I have

with Cato, for example. And Joe Biden championed it and it hit right before a pandemic.

And it was for independent workers, I think for the most part, a disaster.

Yeah, yeah. So of course now apparently congressional Democrats want to nationalize

AB 5, which is like you said given the fallout from AB 5 in terms of protests by court truckers who don't

want to be traditional employees or mass layoffs of freelancers at various online publications

located in California, or the frantic scrambling of the California legislature to exempt all sorts of occupations

...