Three customers sat on Bottle & Barlow’s patio Wednesday afternoon, sipping cocktails and soaking up the last bits of summer sun. That was a crowd compared to the scene inside, where owner Anthony Giannotti was the only person left to cut hair.
Giannotti’s entire seven-person staff of independent contractors quit rather be reclassified as employees, he said. It’s one of the first local dominoes to fall as a result of the state Supreme Court’s decision in April of Dynamex Operations West Inc. v. Superior Court, which redefined who can work as an independent contractor.
The Dynamex decision narrowed the definition of an independent contractor to those who ran their own business outside of the job they were hired for, performed work outside the usual scope of the hiring company’s main function and were “free from the control and direction” of the company.
Many hairstylists get into the trade for its flexible hours and opportunity for entrepreneurship, leaving the prospect of being an employee with set work times and withheld taxes unappealing, Giannotti said. On his end, it means paying workers upwards of $30 and hour in the next 2 to 4 years. “They have really gutted us,” he said. “You can’t hire and structure things the way (barbershops) have for decades. They’ve just destroyed the pay structure for the barber and cosmetology industry.”
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