A big year for fans of maple syrup
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What new Labor Department rule affects gig workers and employees?
Who is your boss? Sometimes it's hard to tell. From Marketplace, I'm Sabri Beneshour, in for David Brancaccio. Who your boss is makes a huge difference in taxes, worker protections, benefits. If your boss is you, because you're an independent contractor, aka a gig worker, you're on your own in a lot of ways. But if your boss is somebody else, that employer has obligations to offer benefits, take out taxes. Workers and employers and governments often fight over this. The Labor Department has just proposed a new rule on the question. Marketplace's Nancy Marshall-Genzer has more. The proposed Trump administration rule would make it easier for companies to classify people as gig workers. The Labor Department's wage and hour division administrator, Andrew Rogers, makes it sound simple.
Generally, if a worker is in business for him or herself and isn't dependent on an employer for work, the worker is an independent contractor. The proposed Trump administration rule puts more weight on how much control workers have and whether they face a profit or loss. That standard tends to favor employers. But there are gray areas, and the ultimate deciders here are the courts, says Richard Reibstein, a partner with the law firm Troutman Pepperlock. He says this proposed new rule is... Much ado about nothing from a legal standpoint. Reibstein says that's because anyone disagreeing with the rules goes to court. Besides, he says, the gig worker rule changes every time there's a new president. President Obama's regulations were erased by the first Trump administration, which was overridden by the Biden White House.
Now the world is ping-ponging back to where it was during Trump's first term. Therefore, the courts are saying we don't need any help. That's why they've essentially disregarded these prior rules on independent contractor status. And Reibstein expects this latest Trump administration rule to also wind up in court. But first, it has to be finalized. And that can only happen after a 60-day public comment period. I'm Nancy Marshall-Genzer for Marketplace. A federal judge has ruled that companies that paid tariffs that were then struck down by the Supreme Court as unconstitutional a couple weeks ago are, in fact, entitled to refunds. The Supreme Court didn't get into that in its ruling, so that question has fallen to lower courts to get sorted out.
The government collected more than $130 billion in unconstitutional tariffs.
If you live in the Northeast and Midwest, you do not need me to tell you it has been a brutal winter there. And you might be longing for warmer weather to come as soon as possible. But farmers who make maple syrup are not. This merciless winter has been nothing but good news for them and for future pancake breakfast needs. Marketplace's Kaylee Wells drove to a maple farm about an hour east of Cleveland to find out why. Every winter, John Cermak and his family drill holes into 2,200 maple trees on their 45-acre farm. They hammer steel spouts into those holes, and then they wait. So the ideal weather for us is when it freezes at night and then thaws during the day. This last winter was Greater Cleveland's coldest in more than a decade.
Perfect for making maple syrup. Then the temperatures warmed a little, and... A slow drip of sap falls into a bucket or a tube. This is how maple syrup starts. This tree will produce dozens of gallons of sap this season, which is good because it takes 40 gallons to make one gallon of syrup. Today, the Cermaks are boiling down giant tubs of sap. I think we probably have about 7,000 or 8,000 gallons. They all have day jobs, so they're just getting started as dusk arrives. Maple syrup is not a get-rich-quick scheme. It's not even a get-rich-slow scheme. They'll be camped in the sugar house till roughly one in the morning, throwing logs they harvested last fall into a furnace every five minutes, reducing that sap into a golden syrup.
For the Surmax, this mid-February start is pretty normal. Adam Wild is director of Cornell University's Maple Research Forest.
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