Not everyone’s favourite ride EVERY few decades there is a sea change in the rules governing labour relations in the United States. In the 1930s Franklin Roosevelt shifted the balance of power towards labour. In the 1980s Ronald Reagan shifted it back towards employers. Two new legal rulings raise the possibility that the balance of power is changing again. On August 27th the National Labour Relations Board (NLRB) ruled that Browning-Ferris Industries, a Californian recycling company, was the “joint employer” of people hired by one of its contractors, thereby obliging it to engage in collective bargaining with the Teamsters union. On September 1st a federal judge allowed a class-action lawsuit to proceed against Uber, a taxi-hailing service, in which three drivers argue they should be treated as employees.

The NLRB, which has a 3-2 Democratic majority, has been getting more assertive since 2011, when it issued a (still ongoing) complaint against Boeing for transferring an aircraft production line to a non-union factory. It is currently mulling a ruling that could define McDonald’s as a joint employer of staff in its franchised restaurants. In June FedEx agreed to pay $228m to settle a court case brought by Californian drivers who complained of being misclassified as contractors. In the same month an Uber driver won a ruling from California’s labour commission that she is an employee (Uber is appealing).

These cases all have a single big question at their heart: what does it mean to be an employee in modern America, with its extensive use of contractors and franchisees, and armies of temporary workers? If rulings go against them, firms like McDonald’s may have to reconsider their business models. Those in the “on-demand economy”, which help freelancers provide rides, cleaning services and food delivery, may face higher costs and less flexibility.

The cases come amid discontent at growing inequality and wage stagnation. And the backlash is already having an effect. Some on-demand firms, such as Luxe, a car-parking service, and Instacart, a delivery outfit, are reclassifying their freelances as employees. Homejoy, a cleaning service, blamed its decision to shut down on uncertainty over labour laws.

Whether there will be a wholesale shift is more doubtful. The Democrats are not united behind radical re-regulation of labour markets, as they were under FDR. Barack Obama has left it to the NLRB to make the running; and Hillary Clinton has stuck to mouthing platitudes. The Republicans, who are likely to control the House for the foreseeable future, are deeply opposed to change, and are plotting legislation to overturn the Browning-Ferris decision.

Both FDR and Reagan worked with the grain of economic change: FDR’s policies were suited to an age of big employers and big unions; and Reagan’s chimed with an age of flexibility and enterprise. Jerry Davis of the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business notes that in the days when far more people worked in manufacturing, and a few workers could close down an entire assembly line, the advantage lay with labour. Today far more people work in shops and fast-food joints, where devastating strikes are harder to co-ordinate. Mobile technology makes it easy to create spot markets in talent. Globalisation enables all sorts of jobs to move abroad. The proportion of private-sector workers who belong to a union has declined from 20.1% in 1980 to just 6.6% now.

The trouble with the latest flurry of cases is that regulators and courts are trying to apply 20th-century solutions to 21st-century problems. Current labour law, still rooted in FDR’s Fair Labour Standards Act of 1938, is based on the idea that there is a binary distinction between employers and employees, and that the typical worker is a full-timer who is his family’s sole breadwinner. That is not, by and large, how the world of work looks these days.