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The report presents the results of an empirical study of ten years of employee misclassification summary judgment decisions by U.S. district courts, in which judges were asked to determine whether a worker was an employee or an independent contractor. Using text mining, machine learning classifiers, and regression analysis, the research reveals among 747 opinions that the judge ruled that the plaintiff was an independent contractor in thirty-eight percent of cases, and that the plaintiffs’ occupation was a strong predictor of outcomes. The findings also suggest that the law’s failure to define “employee” effectively may lead courts to adopt decisional shortcuts, using a feature like the plaintiff’s occupation as a proxy for employee status. Courts’ decisions may then influence plaintiffs’ lawyers’ own decisions about claim viability, producing a feedback loop in which certain occupations are heavily selected for litigation.

Citation

Alexander, C. S., Feizollahi, M. J. (n.d.). Decisional Shortcuts and Selection Effects: An Empirical Study of Ten Years of U.S. District Courts' Employee Misclassification Decisions. Chief Evaluation Office, U.S. Department of Labor.

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This study was part of CEO’s Labor Research and Evaluation Grants, and was produced outside of CEO’s standard research development process.