Time to 30% of employers misclassify their workers.

It's a huge problem in the United States and accounts for, I think, a really significant shift in income from working people to the top 1%.

People lose so much when they are misclassified as independent contractors.

You don't get overtime and if you get paid less than the minimum wage, they're not breaking any laws.

From the home offices of civic ventures in downtown Seattle, this is pitchfork economics, with Nick Hanauer, the best place to get the truth about who gets what and why.

I'm Nick Hanauer, founder of Civic Ventures.

I'm David Goldstein, senior fellow at Civic Ventures.

Goldie, today we're going to talk about worker misclassification because it's a huge problem in the United States and accounts for, I think, a really significant shift in income from working people to the top 1%.

I had been a contractor for much of my professional life and the difference was big.

I had to pay from my own health care and more importantly, I've had to pay the full fight attacks, which is 15.3% for Social Security and Medicare insurance.

And when you are an employee, your employer pays half of that.

Yeah, no, it's true. And our dear friend Heidi Scherholz from the Economic Policy Institute is with us today to share this amazing report. They've written on the implications and, you know, just the impact of worker misclassification, which is shocking.

A lot of money gets transferred from worker's pockets to owner's pockets.

But with that, why don't we dive in with Heidi and find out what's up.

My name is Heidi Scherholz and I am the president of the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, DC.

And we do a ton of work on making sure that low and moderate income people's issues are a part of the broader discussion around economic policy, like helping make a fairer economy.

One of the things we've done recently is a report that looks at the cost of misclassification for workers.

That means when workers who should be classified as employees with all the rights that are associated with that are not classified as employees, instead they are misclassified as independent contractors and they lose a ton as the result of that.

And you can see all of that work on our website at epi.org.

So Heidi, before you jumped on Ashley Goldie and I had a quick conversation about contractors ourselves, because Goldie reminded me that when I hired him 10,000 years ago, whatever it was, that he started out as a contractor.

And because basically we didn't have an org that sent out W2s, but the dazzling Ashley, who is the producer of this podcast is also a contractor.

And we were we were trying to get to the bottom just in of ourselves of what is a legitimate contractor and when it when are people being misclassified.

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