In school we all learned that the longest river is the Nile. But some say the Amazon is longer. In the atlas “Maps of Useful Knowledge” (1846), the Amazon was listed as 3200 miles and the Nile 2750 miles. The current U.S. Geological Survey shows the Nile at 4132 miles and the Amazon at 4000 miles. Brazilian researchers claim the Amazon is 4331 miles long and the Nile a mere 4258 miles.

So which is it, and how can it be changing? Apparently the controversy involves disputes over where the rivers start, where they end, and how to track changes in the rivers’ course.

Whatever you learned about the test for who is an independent contractor under the Fair Labor Standards Act is subject to change too.

Remember October 2022? Elon Musk completed a $44B deal to take over twitter. Germany took steps to legalize marijuana. And the DOL released a proposed new regulation to modify the independent contractor test.

The proposed rule received more than 50,000 comments. We’ve been speculating about when the DOL might issue a final rule.

We’ve now learned that the DOL is targeting this fall for release of the new rule. The latest version of the regulatory agenda lists August as the target release date. August may be a bit ambitious, but the fall seems likely. On June 9, a federal court of appeals granted a motion by the DOL for a 120-day stay in a pending lawsuit. The DOL asked for the stay to allow it time to release the new rule.

You can read more about the proposed rule here.

So it seems that whatever we know now about the length of the Nile River, the length of the Amazon River, and the independent comntractor test under the FLSA is subject to change. Hopefully we’ll know more about all three by sometime this fall.

We can be pretty sure the final rule will closely resemble the multi-factor balancing test released in October 2022. Businesses can plan accordingly by being proactive in assessing their relationships with independent contractors and taking steps to reduce risk now.

© 2023 Todd Lebowitz, posted on WhoIsMyEmployee.com, Exploring Issues of Independent Contractor Misclassification and Joint Employment. All rights reserved.