The CEO of Waitr Holdings brushed off the threat of lawsuits from the company’s driver network, the like of which have dogged Uber and other companies in recent years in the “gig economy,” where people typically operate under short-term contracts or on freelance work as opposed to permanent jobs.
…The dozens of labor act lawsuits filed against Uber, as well as GrubHub and others, in recent years was a deciding factor for Chris Meaux, Waitr’s CEO, in making almost all of the company’s drivers employees rather than independent contractors when he founded the company six years ago.
…Still, while that largely avoids the central issue in the Uber cases, where the argument has been that drivers were underpaid because they were “misclassified” as independent contractors, the lawsuits filed in the Eastern District of Louisiana court against Waitr in February claim that even directly employed drivers were underpaid because their net compensation fell below the mandated minimum wage.