Critics are blasting Biden for taking ‘a destructive California idea national’ for gig workers. Here’s what he really did

San Francisco’s city attorney last month reached the kind of settlement many gig workers have been seeking for years: An app-based hospitality company called Qwick agreed to reclassify thousands of bartenders, servers and dishwashers as employees, giving them back wages and, for the first time, sick pay and other legal benefits. That hasn’t stopped critics from claiming that Biden’s action “takes a destructive California idea national,” as a commentary in the National Review recently proclaimed, or that the president is “spreading California’s war on gig workers to rest of country,” as a Republican senator wrote for Fox News. California Half of Republicans say California isn’t really American A new poll shows California’s reputation battered by its high cost of living and by partisanship — half of Republicans say the state isn’t really American The Labor Department said in a statement that the rule “provides helpful guidance for both employers and workers, using a consistent approach” to classify workers. Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, the top Republican on the Senate committee overseeing labor, accused acting Labor Secretary Julie Su of trying to dismantle the gig economy, imposing the rule change to force more workers into “large labor unions who want more workers paying forced union dues.” The issue is key to stalling approval of Su, who previously served as California’s labor secretary, for the permanent post at the federal level. We have so many areas of the economy where there’s been an outsourcing of work,” said David Weil, who worked in labor rules enforcement in the Obama administration and advocated for protections for gig workers.