The California Supreme Court has an interesting unanimous ruling published today on whether workers are independent contractors or employees:

Workers whose roles are most clearly comparable to those of employees include individuals whose services are provided within the usual course of the business of the entity for which the work is performed and thus who would ordinarily be viewed by others as working in the hiring entity’s business and not as working, instead, in the worker’s own independent business.

That’s going to drastically change the “gig economy.” Especially since it appears that whether someone is an independent contractor is no longer up to the employer:

When a worker has not independently decided to engage in an independently established business but instead is simply designated an independent contractor by the unilateral action of a hiring entity, there is a substantial risk that the hiring business is attempting to evade the demands of an applicable wage order through misclassification. A company that labels as independent contractors a class of workers who are not engaged in an independently established business in order to enable the company to obtain the economic advantages that flow from avoiding the financial obligations that a wage order imposes on employers unquestionably violates the fundamental purposes of the wage order

And the burden in the future will be on the employer to show that the worker was established as an independent business.

Full decision here, if you’re looking for a cure for insomnia.