Justin Fox, Columnist

Uber and the Not-Quite-Independent Contractor

There's a big gap in labor law that misses on-demand companies.

June 23, 2015 at 3:59 PM UTC

Justin Fox is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering business, economics and other topics involving charts. A former editorial director of the Harvard Business Review, he is author of “The Myth of the Rational Market.”

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This question of whether an Uber driver is an employee doesn't matter just to Uber.

As you may have heard, the on-demand car-service juggernaut lost a case early this month before the California Labor Commissioner on whether a driver was an independent contractor or an employee, and thus eligible for expense reimbursement. Uber is appealing that ruling in court, but it already faces a class-action lawsuit over the same issue in federal court in California and similar fights in Florida and Massachusetts.