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Drilling Deep: Independent contractor minefield gets even more treacherous

Also on the podcast: Why retail diesel prices don’t drop as fast as declines in wholesale

John Kingston
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Photo: Jim Allen/FreightWaves

With the continued rise of gig economy jobs, the implementation of AB5 in California and changes in Washington, defining independent contractors has never been trickier or more uncertain.

On this week’s Drilling Deep podcast, host John Kingston speaks with Aaron Hageman, the owner of Delivery Drivers Inc., a firm that works with both independent contractor workers and the companies that employ them. Hageman discusses California’s AB5 law and prospects for expanding its reach nationwide, as well as what changes in the Department of Labor will mean for federal regulation on the question of IC classification.

Also on the podcast, Kingston discusses the always frustrating development when wholesale diesel prices fall and retail diesel prices don’t follow along.

More articles by John Kingston

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One Comment

  1. Art

    Why dont they just legalize employee misclassification and pay all workers as 1099 contractors?

    Big business loves cheap labor, no benefits and taxes to pay and no lawsuits for firing lazy bums.

    Everyone can then be “entreprenuer” of their own 1 person “small business”.

Comments are closed.

John Kingston

John has an almost 40-year career covering commodities, most of the time at S&P Global Platts. He created the Dated Brent benchmark, now the world’s most important crude oil marker. He was Director of Oil, Director of News, the editor in chief of Platts Oilgram News and the “talking head” for Platts on numerous media outlets, including CNBC, Fox Business and Canada’s BNN. He covered metals before joining Platts and then spent a year running Platts’ metals business as well. He was awarded the International Association of Energy Economics Award for Excellence in Written Journalism in 2015. In 2010, he won two Corporate Achievement Awards from McGraw-Hill, an extremely rare accomplishment, one for steering coverage of the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster and the other for the launch of a public affairs television show, Platts Energy Week.