July 21 2016
Richard J. Reibstein
Yesterday, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo signed Executive Order No. 159 expanding the existing Joint Enforcement Task Force on Employee Misclassification into a Joint Enforcement Task Force on Worker Exploitation and Employee Misclassification. Those who follow IC misclassification developments in all 50 states, such as the publishers of this legal blog, were wondering why the annual Task Force Report issued by New York each February 1 for the past eight years had not yet been issued this year. Executive Order No. 159 tells us why – New York has now subsumed IC misclassification into a subset of “worker exploitation.”
Analysis of the New Executive Order
The Executive Order issued in 2007 establishing the Employee Misclassification Task Force required the Task Force to issue an annual report each February 1; this new Executive Order, however, has no such reporting requirement. Nonetheless, simultaneous with the issuance of Executive Order No. 159, the new and expanded Task Force issued its 2016 Report.
The Executive Order recites in its Preamble the reasons for the Governor’s action, and includes the statement that “an increasing number of employers in New York improperly classify individuals they hire as ‘independent contractors,’ even when those workers should be legally classified as ’employees’ . . . .” Neither the Executive Order nor the 2016 Task Force Report, though, provide any empirical data or basis on which the Executive Order based its conclusion that more and more employers in New York are either classifying workers as independent contractors or, more to the point, are misclassifying employees as ICs.