If states won’t crack down on businesses breaking the law as a moral imperative, I suppose at least something can work:

Federal and state officials, many facing record budget deficits, are starting to aggressively pursue companies that try to pass off regular employees as independent contractors

  And another good reason to have former NY Labor Commissioner on the job as the new Solicitor of the U.S. Labor Department:

One factor in the push for more aggressive enforcement is the Labor Department’s new top law enforcement official, M. Patricia Smith. As New York’s labor commissioner the past three years, she was known for cracking down on misclassification.

Ms. Smith oversaw a task force comprising various state agencies that conducted 2,413 misclassification investigations and 65 joint sweeps in which teams descended on companies’ offices to examine payroll records.

In a Feb. 1 report to New York’s governor, Ms. Smith noted that since late 2007, the task force had identified more than 31,000 instances of misclassification and assessed $11 million in unpaid unemployment taxes and $14.5 million in unpaid wages.