The front page of Tuesday's New York Times featured labor reporter Noam Scheiber celebrating Obama as (finally!) the champion of workers' rights, belatedly beating back the retrograde efforts by Ronald Reagan and free-market conservatives to "roll them back," with Scheiber portraying all of the administration's new regulatory burdens on emerging jobs as wholly positive developments: "Obama Aids U.S. Workers In Late Push -- Series of Acts Meant to Deliver on a Promise." The online headline was more celebratory: "As His Term Wanes, Obama Champions Workers’ Rights."
With little fanfare, the Obama administration has been pursuing an aggressive campaign to restore protections for workers that have been eroded by business activism, conservative governance and the evolution of the economy in recent decades.
In the last two months alone, the administration has introduced a series of regulatory changes. Among them: a rule that would make millions more Americans eligible for extra overtime pay, and guidelines suggesting that many employers are misclassifying workers as contractors and therefore depriving them of basic workplace protections. That is an issue central to the growth of so-called gig economy companies like Uber.
National Review's Rich Lowry called such alleged concerns about Uber's exploitation of drivers part of the Democratic "economics of nostalgia."
In the liberal imagination, the sharing economy is hurting workers by substituting part-time, contractor work for higher-paying full-time jobs that come with the full panoply of traditional benefits and protections. This line of attack creates the impression that these new firms are sucking workers from stereotypical 9-to-5 jobs so they can be dispossessed by tech-savvy entrepreneurs. But obviously something is drawing workers to this kind of work. In a study for Uber, Princeton University economist Alan Krueger found “drivers who partner with Uber appear to be attracted to the platform in large part because of the flexibility it offers, the level of compensation and the fact that earnings per hour do not vary much with hours worked, which facilitates part-time and variable hours.”
(Tuesday's ruling against Uber on its classification of its drivers as contract workers, not employees, makes the Uber issue even more volatile.)
Another regulation that could backfire on those it purports to help was also celebrated by Schieber, once a senior editor for the liberal New Republic magazine, as an unalloyed positive good:
A little more than a week ago, a federal appeals panel affirmed an earlier regulation granting nearly two million previously exempted home care workers minimum wage and overtime protections. And on Thursday, President Obama’s appointees to the National Labor Relations Board pushed through an important ruling that makes it easier for employees of contractors and franchises to bargain collectively with the corporations that have sway over their operations.
Scheiber criticized Obama from the left with disappointed supporters.
Labor unions complained that he failed to throw his energy behind a measure that would have made it easier for workers to organize by requiring employers to recognize a union once a majority of workers had signed cards, rather than allowing employers to insist on a secret ballot election.
Schreiber lazily slapped on the phrase "pro-worker" to all of Obama's regulations, without questioning whether they would actually help or hurt workers.
After spending several months in 2011 on a failed effort to negotiate a deficit-cutting “grand bargain” with the new House Republican majority, however, Mr. Obama did an apparent about-face, deciding that he would use every tool available to enact what he considered to be a bold pro-worker agenda on his own.
There were two brief paragraphs devoted to free-market critics of Obama's agenda.
Meanwhile, critics abound across the ideological spectrum.
Oren Cass, a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute who served as Mitt Romney’s domestic policy director in 2011 and 2012, said that calling the Obama economic agenda pro-worker “misses the forest for the trees -- or perhaps, more precisely, misses the trees for a few stray weeds.”
In an email, Mr. Cass said that “increasingly onerous employment regulation is driving employers to avoid employment relationships altogether, which benefits no one.”
Liberals and union supporters, while applauding Mr. Obama’s record in the narrow realm of labor rights, complain that he has undercut workers with his efforts to promote global trade agreements and balanced budgets.
....
Still, there is little doubt that the Obama administration has become more ambitious in pursuing worker rights during the president’s second term.
Economic puritanism abounded. Where some might see increased employment opportunity, Scheiber sees only "a yawning regulatory gap" to be filled.
Consider the home health care decision. The Labor Department wrote the original rule exempting home care professionals employed by staffing agencies from minimum wage and overtime protections in 1975, back when very few home care workers of that sort existed. In recent decades, however, the field has exploded, turning what was once a small exemption into a yawning regulatory gap at the heart of the service economy.
