The agency had been using that policy in enforcing the law, but putting it in writing sent a clear message to employers across the country that the Obama administration was serious about cracking down on worker misclassification. In 2015, the Obama administration gave workers a win on this one: It issued a guidance document explaining how the Department of Labor would interpret the law, outlining the economic tests it employed in determining whether an employer was misclassifying its workers.
According to one recent study, the percentage of workers employed as contractors grew almost 30 percent from 2005 to 2015. But increasingly, regular businesses are also opting to classify their workers as independent contractors, which can cut their labor costs sharply by not obliging them to offer benefits like health insurance or pay employer payroll taxes. It’s the most controversial question in the labor world these days: When is a worker an employee, and when is he or she an independent contractor? That question has been especially controversial for “gig economy” companies like Uber and Postmates. Welcome to the annual wrap-up of our weekly guide to what Trump did while you weren’t looking. After all the rhetoric against China and Mexico, the year’s big trade-war enemy has been (As you’ll see, some of our items are recurring episodes in long-running dramas, like what will finally happen to Obama’s fiduciary standard, which required stockbrokers to act in the best interest of their clients.) And finally, there are some perplexing surprises. Many of the rules are still in progress, or being delayed so long that it’s anyone’s guess what will really happen. Some topics have been largely missing: his infrastructure push has gone nowhere. President Barack Obama’s legacy on everything from labor regulations to environmental protections, and more broadly tearing down rules across the government. What does it look like? There are a few consistent themes: Rolling back This week, we’re pulling them all into one mega-list-a portrait of a quiet but very serious Republican push against the scope and ambition of government. Meanwhile, very steadily, and almost totally separately from Trump’s speeches and tweetstorms, his administration has been ushering in a new conservative era of government-taking specific aim at Obama-era rules, and broader aim at the big regulatory mission of government.Īt The Agenda, we’ve been tracking these policy changes weekly since June, ignoring the noise and explaining what the Trump administrationĪctually accomplished each week. The attention gap between the empty executive order and the real-life mortgage insurance rollback turned out to be representative of the whole first year of the Trump administration.Īgain and again, Trump has taken the stage to an adoring crowd and declared victory on some issue, or announced lavish new promises, without any real results or plans to back them up. If you didn’t hear about the $500 you may have lost that day-well, that’s how the year went.
but came at a real cost to homeowners, who would have saved an average of $500 a year if the Obama-era plan had stayed in place. That change helped shore up the financial health of the FHA’s mortgage insurance fund Less noticed on Inauguration Day was a surprise move by the Federal Housing Administration to scratch a planned reduction in mortgage insurance premiums. For all the theater, it’s hard to say whether that order had any effect at all. The Trump administration did eventually make moves to obstruct the law, but they took months and another executive order to implement. In retrospect, the vaguely worded directive was only symbolic.
In Donald Trump’s first act as president, he signed a high-profile executive order intended to dismantle Obamacare, instructing federal agencies to take any measures they could to roll back the Affordable Care Act.
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