By Diane Ring
On Thursday, my co-author (Shu-Yi Oei) and I had the opportunity to present on “Tax Related Challenges for Platform Workers” at the United States Government Accountability Office in downtown Boston. We enjoyed discussing our past and current research regarding taxation, platform workers, labor and emerging workforce trends with GAO researchers.
Our talk at GAO was particularly timely because we’re in the process of writing a book chapter for a new empirical volume, tentatively entitled “The Law and Policy of the Gig Economy: Qualitative Analysis,” which is forthcoming at Cambridge University Press (ed. Deepa Das Acevedo). This volume will address the promise of qualitative empirical approaches to studying the gig economy. Our contribution will build on our previous work in which we looked at the public online conversations among Uber and Lyft drivers regarding challenges they face in tax compliance.
Even without considering the impacts of the 2017 Tax Reform on both the gig economy and the broader workforce (which we have examined here, here and here), significant empirical questions remain regarding the tax and economic pressures faced by gig and contingent workers. Some, but not all, of those questions can be addressed by examining tax return and survey data. Add in tax reform to the mix (think the new section 199A deduction, the suspension of employee business deductions and the offshoring international provisions (section 250 and 956A)) and it’s clear we have a lot of work to do to better understand the interplay between tax and labor policies across many fields and how this will impact the future of the workplace. Our view is that it will take a combination of empirical approaches to get a well-textured picture of how tax impacts work.
The Surly Subgroup 