Some legislatures are easier targets than others

One consequence of these industrywide measures is that they could affect far more than current gig workers. According to Maya Pinto of the National Employment Law Project, a nonprofit worker-advocacy group that has just published a report on the topic, the broader measures encourage companies to reclassify employees as contractors. Any business that dispatches employees — such as plumbers or electricians or nannies — could deem them contractors by using a digital interface to coordinate the work and meeting a few other criteria, Ms. Pinto said.

Marla Kanemitsu of Tusk Ventures, who has helped to write such measures, said the motivation for the bills wasn’t just to preserve the contractor status of Handy’s workers, but also to allow companies to provide benefits, like health care and retirement-savings vehicles, that might otherwise suggest an employment relationship.

“Providing benefits was always the driving force for this,” Ms. Kanemitsu said.

In the first six months of 2018, six states passed bills broadly carving out gig workers from employment laws and effectively classifying them as contractors. Mr. Tusk’s book referred to these states as the “low-hanging fruit of Kentucky, Iowa, Tennessee, Indiana and Utah (and medium-hanging fruit like Florida).”

But in other states, the fruit stood at a considerably higher altitude: The efforts came up short in Colorado, Georgia, North Carolina and California.

Colorado, with a large technology sector, was perhaps the most instructive example. The state was the first to pass legislation legalizing ride-hailing companies like Uber, and a local lobbying firm involved in that effort helped spearhead this one, too. It received more than $80,000 in 2018 from Uber and Handy, according to lobbying disclosures compiled by the National Employment Law Project. The carve-out bill glided through the Republican-led Senate on a bipartisan vote last March, but it ran into resistance in the Democratic-controlled House.