It’s a New Game for Uber Drivers If New York Passes This Law

Oisin Hanrahan has big plans and a big problem. The plan is for his city-focused startup, Handy—which sends people to your home to clean up or make repairs—to deliver every kind of home service anywhere. Problem is, it’s not clear his business model is legal. Now he’s helping develop a bill that could have big repercussions for Uber, Instacart, TaskRabbit, and other so-called gig-economy businesses.

Like those companies, Handy, which Hanrahan co-founded in 2012 with a fellow Harvard Business School student, treats workers as independent contractors. That means it doesn’t consider them employees entitled to payroll tax contributions, anti-discrimination protections, or collective bargaining rights under federal law. And like Uber, Handy has been sued by former workers who say that given how much control the company exercised over their work, they deserved to have been treated as employees.