You've probably noticed that we've been covering the bill on providing unemployment insurance coverage to people who deliver newspapers for a living.
The issue is whether the people who work for the newspapers, getting the paper to your door, should be considered employees, which would make them eligible for unemployment coverage, or independent contractors, which would kick them out of the system. It's important to me, not because I'll ever have a job delivering newspapers, but because I think we need to stand up to the decades-long trend to reduce unemployment coverage and benefits, especially for low-wage workers.
As I posted earlier, two things are clear: first, newspaper drivers are employees, not independent contractors. They don't come close to the standard to be met to establish the independent contractor relationship. Second, the law has been clear since 2006 that newspaper carriers are not considered independent contractors, but when the law was passed the Douglas administration adopted a secret policy to continue to apply the exclusion to these workers, so until union advocates unearthed this secret policy earlier this year the workers were barred from the unemployment system.
Two weeks ago we reported that the Senate had voted to screw the workers out of their unemployment protection, which meant that the bill went back to the House. (Note that the Senate rejected a substitute amendment from Mark MacDonald to protect the newspapers without screwing the workers, but that wasn't something the Republicans or the Democratic majority wanted to do.)
I'm pleased to report that in one of the last acts of the legislative session, both the House and the Senate adopted the conference committee report that preserved the argument by kicking the issue to a summer study committee. I've heard that Vince Illuzzi was fond of saying “summer studies are for losers”, but in this case, given that the senate conference committee had two of the anti-worker members among their three appointees, I think the House conferees did well to hold the line and prevent the legislature from kicking the carriers off the program altogether.
Thanks and congratulations to House conferees Bill Botzow, Mike Marcotte, and Warren Kitzmiller for standing up to pressure on this important bill.
when I saw an ad in the Messenger looking for paper carriers. It featured a kid on a bicycle and said something like, “how’d you like to earn your own money?”
Well, there are still some kids delivering the Messenger after school, since it is an afternoon paper; but I’d guess that the vast majority of paper carriers are adults for whom their paper job represents a lot more than just “mad-money.”
If you perform the same task for the same employer every day of the week, every week of the year, it isn’t “contract work;” it’s a job.
Weren’t it the summer studies that produced the death with dignity and marijuana decrim laws in the session?