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USDOL's announcement contained no rationale for why it took these actions. Neither did it indicate whether either or both of these interpretations will be re-issued or replaced in a different form in the future.
The U.S. Department of Labor
announced today that it has withdrawn:
Administrator Interpretation
No. 2016-1, entitled "Joint Employment under the Fair
Labor Standards Act and Migrant and Seasonal Agricultural Worker
Protection Act", about which we
wrote last year, and
Administrator Interpretation
No.2015-1, dealing with "The Application of the Fair
Labor Standards Act's 'Suffer or Permit' Standard in
the Identification of Employees Who Are Misclassified as
Independent Contractors", which was the subject of our related
post at the time.
USDOL's announcement contained no rationale for why it took
these actions. Neither did it indicate whether either or both of
these interpretations will be re-issued or replaced in a different
form in the future.
The release did caution that employers' legal
responsibilities remain the same, and it said that USDOL will
"continue to fully and fairly enforce all laws within its
jurisdiction". It remains to be seen whether the agency's
principal enforcement priorities will shift away from matters of
joint-employment or independent-contractorship, but for now
employers should not assume that this will be the case. And even if
it turns out that USDOL's attention is directed to other
things, individual workers can still independently pursue their
claims.
Employers should continue to be sure that their compliance
evaluations correctly take into account all applicable,
longstanding independent-contractor and joint-employment
principles.
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