Noah Feldman, Columnist

Uber and Strippers Have Something in Common

A court says exotic dancers are club employees, not contractors. What's that say about sharing-economy drivers?

June 9, 2016 at 3:58 PM UTC

Noah Feldman is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A professor of law at Harvard University, he is author, most recently, of “To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People."

New paradigm.
Photographer: Sean Gallup/Getty Images

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You might not think that Uber and strippers belong in the same sentence. But both are deeply interested in the great legal question of the sharing economy: who’s an independent contractor and who’s an employee?

Now a federal appeals court has weighed in with a ruling that strippers are employees. Its reasoning provides an important window into the legal question on which a whole business model depends.