State legislators keep pressing independent contractor issue

Editorial by Burlington Times-News, September 23, 2015.

Allow us to be self-serving for a moment.

One little-known part of the newspaper publishing business is that the folks who deliver our product every morning aren’t employees. They’re independent contractors.

What does that mean exactly? In legal terms, it is a person or business performing services for another person or business under an expressed and implied agreement, and not subject to the other’s control or right to control the manner and means of performing the services.

This is the way newspapers and carriers have operated for years. In many cases, these independent contractors have full-time jobs with other businesses. Some take on the contract to deliver the Times-News and other publications every morning to augment professional jobs, such as teaching. It’s an agreement that allows contractors to make extra money prior to going to their regular employment. Some are simply entrepreneurs out to make a living in a variety of ways.

For reasons known only to themselves, state lawmakers seem determined to take this away not only from newspapers, but from the independent contractors in need of extra money. It’s a change that also would create potential problems for customers of newspapers.

Once more, the independent contractor program at newspapers is under attack from the N.C. General Assembly. According to the North Carolina Press Association, a lobbying group for Tar Heel newspapers and TV stations, the state House — despite previous assurances to the contrary — will take a vote today on a revamped HB482 with recent modifications by the state Senate. This altered version restores provisions that would be harmful to the newspaper publishing industry. Earlier versions of this bill had removed those provisions.

In short, what the bill would do is eliminate the 12-year-old “special “presumption” that carriers are independent contractors, not employees. It would mean that publishers using their own carriers to deliver papers would be subjected to the state worker’s comp and unemployment tax.

We’re not opposed to state lawmakers revising a part of the independent contractor law that is troublesome. There is a well-conceived core part of the proposed legislation that addresses abuses in the construction industry exposed in stories reported in The News & Observer in Raleigh and The Charlotte Observer. Some construction operators were requiring independent contractors to work long days — just as full-time employees are in other operations.

At the risk of sounding paranoid, it seems the most recent Senate changes to HB482 target only newspaper publishing. In fact, newspapers have been a frequent Senate target in the last couple of sessions, including a measure that added a tax on newspaper sales, a move that also impacted newspaper customers. We strongly suspect that the moves are in retaliation for stories or editorials political leaders neither like nor agree with. Such actions are the antithesis of an unfettered press granted by the U.S. Constitution.

 It’s our hope that Alamance County’s state representatives, Republicans Dennis Riddell and Stephen Ross, will vote against this bill that would subvert a right the nation’s founders strongly believed in protecting. People interested in a free press should let them know.

After all, what’s the value of a free press if it can’t be delivered?

http://www.thetimesnews.com/article/20150923/OPINION/150929496/15233/OPINION/?Start=2