The bill would lock workers out of basic labor rights and protections, while preventing states from enforcing higher standards.

In late July, Democratic Texas Rep. Henry Cuellar along with Republican co-sponsors Elise Stefanik of New York and Michelle Steel of California introduced a bill that, if passed, would gut labor law and exempt millions of workers from a federal minimum wage, overtime, and basic labor rights.

The bill is relatively straightforward: it would amend the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 (FLSA)—the labor law that established minimum wage and overtime protections—to create “worker flexibility arrangements” whereby workers are no longer treated as employees “for federal tax purposes” and thus not protected by the FLSA’s protections. 

“Texas workers have expanded into the gig economy at rapid speed for the flexibility and opportunities that it provides. This legislation promotes that type of independent work,” Cuellar said in a press release. “The bipartisan Worker Flexibility and Choice Act is important to ensure that our gig economy has the room and resources to expand.”

There’s no reason to think, however, that only gig companies would take advantage of this law. Former New York Times labor reporter Steven Greenhouse warned the bill “seems to empower any employer—not just gig companies—to tell any worker: if you want to work for me, you must agree we won’t follow minimum wage or OT rules—That sucks for workers.”

The bill also goes so far as to ensure it “shall supersede all Federal, State, and local laws” and override attempts to modify its amendment of U.S. labor law in an effort to permanently codify these changes. UC Hastings law professor Veena Dubal has argued extensively that this effort is part of a long history in the United States to undermine basic labor laws in sectors that employ predominantly Black and brown workers and so “we must conceptualize these corporate efforts not only as broad attacks on economic security, but also as the insidious development of empires of capital upon the bodies of subordinated racial minorities.” By abandoning basic labor laws and reverting to pre-New Deal regulatory regimes that prioritize “piecework,” the hope is that labor costs can be cut by increasing the amount of unpaid labor each worker does.

“This bill would radically erode fundamental worker protections in the United States to the benefit of big corporations, allowing them to require workers to sign away basic rights as a condition of work,” the National Employment Labor Project wrote in a statement shortly after its introduction. “The bill would also establish a second-tier employment class of disproportionately Black and immigrant workers working in arduous and underpaid jobs without minimum labor protections — growing poverty and racialized economic inequality.”

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