'Assumptions That Are Unworkable'

The New Jersey Center for Nonprofits filed a public comment opposing the Labor Department's proposed independent-contractor rule.

One of the estimated 8,300 public comments that the New Jersey Department of Labor & Workforce Development received about its proposed independent-contractor rule came from the New Jersey Center for Nonprofits. As with 99% of all the comments, this one is opposed to the rule-making.

The folks from the nonprofit world wrote:

“New Jersey’s charitable nonprofit community includes a wide diversity of organizations and missions, ranging from human services, physical and mental health, arts and culture, environmental protection, and many others. Nonprofits take the care and well-being of workers extremely seriously, and we believe that addressing abuses that harm workers is of paramount importance.

“Nonprofits are also reeling from a tsunami of federal government funding cuts, rescissions of previously approved funds, and attacks on their efforts to serve their communities, along with rising demand for their services. Retaining workers in this climate is already a huge challenge.

“However, these rules would undermine long-held understanding about proper employee classification, and could subject nonprofits to significant administrative and financial burdens, as well as penalties if even good-faith mistakes are made. They appear based on certain assumptions that are unworkable for key segments of the nonprofit community, such as arts and theatre workers, physicians and licensed mental health professionals, or organizations that may hire paid speakers or presenters on a one-time or extremely time-limited basis.”

Here is the full two-page public comment from the New Jersey Center for Nonprofits:

The Insights Association

Another opposition comment is from the Insights Association, which describes itself as “the leading nonprofit association for the market research and analytics industry.”

This public comment states:

“While it might appear viscerally obvious that research subjects are not employees of companies or organizations conducting market research studies, the firms and organizations that contract with these individuals face troubling challenges to that nonemployee status. Those challenges could worsen dramatically with the Department of Labor and Workforce Development’s proposed N.J.A.C. 12:11 rules. This would threaten the integrity of the research process and the resulting insights that people, companies, organizations and the governments rely upon every day to be able to learn about and understand consumer attitude, behavior and opinion in New Jersey and to make informed and intelligent decisions.”

Here are all seven pages of the insights Association public comment:

It’s hard to imagine that I’ll find a better term than “viscerally obvious” in all these thousands of pages of opposition to New Jersey’s proposed independent-contractor rule, but I’ll have more for you tomorrow.