We are at a crossroads today in American law. It’s not just about Trump and his cronies clearing out the agencies that keep consumers, workers, and everyday people safe from corporate abuse. It’s not just about Trump refusing to enforce safeguards for corporate accountability—or worse, weaponizing them against working families. It’s also about the many ways that our law has been shaped that too often make it impossible to protect working people and make a positive difference in their lives.
One of the most important of these problems sounds technical, but is profoundly important for understanding what has gone wrong with the law and how we can fix it. That is the way that our laws have created artificial silos between workers, consumers, and small businesses.
These divisions don’t just harm people individually or make enforcement more difficult—though they of course do both. They also weaken our ability to take the bold action that the present moment demands of us: to organize, build political power, and fight back against an economy and a government that every single day becomes ever more rigged against working people. This fight is the fight: to reclaim agency and dignity in the face of overwhelming corporate greed and unchecked power.
And make no mistake, this work is not only about economic justice—it is about the future of our democracy. To reclaim our democracy from oligarchs and billionaires, we need to build a system that working people can believe in. That means reshaping an economy that is insurmountably stacked against working people and dramatically reform a government that too often seems too incapable or indifferent to help. Breaking down the silos between workers, consumers, and small businesses isn’t just about changing the law—it’s about uniting those with shared interests and a common vision for a better future into a political movement that offers real hope, not the chaos and lawlessness we are living through today.
This effort boils down to a simple proposition: the family selling stuff out of their garage on Amazon has a hell of a lot more in common with the guy stocking the Amazon warehouse than they do with Jeff Bezos. And until our law, policies, and politics reflect that, we are never going to be able to build a future that actually works for working people.
Big corporations and the powerful few who run them dominate our economy, our politics, and our country. Their influence, their riches, and their rigged rules come at the direct expense of the people who actually make America great: workers, small business owners, farmers, ranchers, and everyday consumers.
Time and again, private equity, big tech, and big banks have shown they will bend every rule, break any law, and fight any shred of accountability to extract every last dollar—without any concern for who gets hurt in the process. We’ve seen it in how they treat their workers, how they treat the small businesses that fill their shelves and populate their platforms, and even how they treat their own customers.
We must build a new coalition—a new legal movement—capable of meeting the scale of corporate power that we’re up against. We must unite workers, small businesses, and consumers—groups too often pitted against each other—around a shared recognition: that the economy is not working for them, and that it’s not broken by accident. It’s been made this way, by design.
That means we need to be just as deliberate in pushing back. This is our moment to rethink the law according to how people actually live and the shared sets of harms they are facing, rather than how law schools sort their courses. We must stand together to reclaim fairness and dignity in our economy with sharper tools, a broader coalition, and a bolder vision for what’s possible.
Misclassification and Beyond
Over the last decade, we’ve watched corporations shift their business models in ways that too often maximize profits not by innovation, but by exploitation.
The remarkable work of David Seligman and Towards Justice has exposed the abuses of misclassification throughout the economy. Whether it’s Uber drivers fighting for basic protections or Amazon’s last-mile delivery drivers forced to urinate in water bottles to hit Jeff Bezos’s insane quotas, this tactic is being used to strip people of their rights—from fair wages to health insurance to workplace safety.
Yet misclassification is just the tip of the iceberg.
What we’re seeing is a systematic effort to offload risk and cost from corporate balance sheets onto the backs of working people. And to shift responsibility and risk from those with the deepest pockets to those already on the financial brink.
It’s not just gig workers. It’s also the small businesses, the contractors, and the countless foot soldiers in multilevel-marketing schemes that help these big companies make their billions. The truck driver, the franchisees, the family-run supplier. Too often under the law they are treated as purported “equals” to the most powerful corporations in the history of the world. In practice, these working people are often just as exploited as the driver laboring under the abuse of the Uber algorithm.
For example, when I worked at the CFPB, we talked to state-level franchisee regulators. They shared how local supermarkets used to be a source of well-paying, union jobs. Many of those jobs have now been converted into franchises—from the baker to the sushi counter. Gone are the benefits, the stability, and the good wages. In its place are the risk, junk fees, and predatory financing. The regulators recounted how working people were lured in with the promise of owning a business—of finally being their own boss. And how those deals turned out to be dead-end debt traps.
This is not an isolated example. It is part of a coordinated, calculated playbook to strip benefits and protections from working people.
A New Path Forward
To fight back, we must first understand the legal arbitrage that created this dark reality. The laws we rely on to protect people were often written for a world that no longer exists. Our legal system is fragmented—divided into rigid silos that no longer reflect the realities of how people work, live, and do business. And corporations know this. In fact, they’ve built entire business models around exploiting these gaps.
During my time as General Counsel at the CFPB, I saw firsthand how outdated legal categories and artificial distinctions make it harder to protect the people who need it most. One of the clearest examples is consumer financial protection laws, which are often limited to transactions for “personal, family, or household” use. That distinction may have made sense in another era—but today, it often breaks down. A rideshare driver taking out a small cash advance, a solo commercial truck driver financing her rig, a small supplier getting paid through an app, a small restaurateur using a digital point-of-sale system that steers him into a predatory loan, an online seller forced to pay fees for platform access and then more for “ads” that are nothing more than glorified kickbacks. If these are considered consumer transactions, the individuals involved would get significant protections. But there’s a different, weaker set of rules for business-to-business transactions. Given the power dynamics at play, does it really make sense to treat that family selling stuff out of their garage as an equal to Amazon? The answer is: obviously not.
And while we at the Bureau worked hard to go after predatory practices wherever we could justify doing so under the law, these distinctions often created unnecessary hurdles—especially in a judicial climate that is increasingly skeptical of anything counter to the US Chamber of Commerce’s ideological crusades.
After years of this work, I’ve become increasingly convinced that our laws are forcing us to ask the wrong questions. And the result is that working families—already bearing the brunt of endless economic exploitation—are often left vulnerable simply because the law hasn’t kept pace with how the modern economy actually functions.
The result is that we have a system where if you are financially stable enough to get a loan to purchase a car, you can drive your kids to school with a series of protections for that debt. But if you use that car loan to help you start driving another family’s kids to school so you can make money on a ride-sharing app, you don’t.
Corporations are fully aware of these blind spots. They know that if they can push a person just outside the definition of a “consumer” or an “employee,” they can largely avoid legal responsibility for their own misconduct. It’s not a coincidence; it’s a business strategy. And it’s one that regulators and policymakers must catch up to—fast.
Take ride share companies. Are they satisfied with exploiting potential legal loopholes in the employment context? Of course not. We now see them using the same playbook for predatory lending schemes. They offer their drivers credit that walks and quacks like a payday loan, but does not—they claim—come with even the most basic consumer protections—because the drivers are in a business relationship with them. For example, they claim that critical protections against people being locked into a particular payment account and prohibitions on offsetting one’s pay to pay off existing debt do not apply. And of course, they use their favorite trick—buried fine print—that purports to waive away these legal protections.
This is just one of many examples. It’s not just gray areas or differences in opinion—it’s entire products and even industries specifically designed to take advantage of people through the tool of the law.
The path forward is clear: to build real protections in today’s economy, we need to stop thinking in these narrow legal categories, where outdated ideas of markets—including the labor market—are catnip for corporate lawyers and manna for Silicon Valley’s obsession with regulatory arbitrage. We need to start designing systems that recognize the actual experiences of people in our economy—whether they’re workers, small business owners, contractors, or the ever increasing number of people who don’t cleanly fit into these boxes at all. Because as long as the law stays stuck in the past, corporate power will keep racing ahead—unchecked.
In short, we must focus on power, and the imbalance of it, wherever we find it.
Where We Go from Here
So where do we start? If we are serious about taking on corporate abuse—for workers, consumers and small businesses alike—we need to act boldly, and we need to act together in three important ways.
First, we need to tell the story—and tell it well. We must shine a light on how today’s economy really functions, and who is paying the price. That starts with deep, sustained investigations and reporting—into franchise agreements, gig contracts, retail platform terms, and financial deals that trap small firms in cycles of debt and dependence. These are not theoretical harms. They are real, and they are documented. We need to bring them to the surface, build the narrative, and make sure journalists, lawmakers, and the public see what’s really happening. That means convening stakeholders like we’re doing today, compiling records, and publishing reports that expose abuses.
Second, we must take the fight to the courts and to regulators. There are legal tools already on the books that are underused—and often overlooked entirely—when it comes to the abuse of small businesses. We need to deploy state protections where they exist, the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, federal and state antitrust laws including the Robinson-Patman Act, and new commercial finance laws in creative, aggressive ways. That means supporting private litigation, but also pushing public enforcers—state attorneys general, banking regulators, franchising examiners—to step up. Many of these regulators already have the authority they need to begin getting to work. And we should recognize when legal silos are more a product of norms and habits than anything written in the statutes themselves.
To be clear, fighting misclassification remains essential. Companies should not be allowed to label employees as independent contractors just to dodge basic responsibilities like paying into Social Security, providing healthcare, or following labor protections. That fight continues to be vital.
But even as we hold corporations accountable for misclassification, we also need to recognize the economic reality: millions of workers have been pushed outside the traditional employment structure—not because they chose it freely, but because corporations designed the system that way. So beyond stopping companies from misclassifying employees, we also have to make life better, safer, and more sustainable for those who really are operating as independent contractors or small business owners today. In addition to being the right thing to do for those people, if we raise standards for those roles—through fair contract terms and protections against abuse—we weaken the incentive for companies to misclassify in the first place. Workers deserve protections and stability whether they’re driving for an app, running a franchise, or selling on a platform.
In other words: the goal is not just to close one loophole—it’s to change the playing field so that no one gets stuck in a system where the path to profit is squeezing working people and dodging responsibility. That means extending protections, enforcing against predatory practices, and making sure our laws reflect the real economy people are living in today.
Third, we need to push for stronger, bigger, and bolder policies. We’ve already seen important work get started, with an eye toward what’s possible. For example, in California, remarkable work by a broad coalition of small business advocates and consumer groups has resulted in new laws to rein in predatory commercial lending, require meaningful disclosures in small business financing, and crack down on unscrupulous practices in business debt collection. These are real, concrete steps that begin to recognize that small businesses are not on equal footing with the corporate titans. This bold effort should be a model for statehouses and city halls throughout the country.
And if we’re serious about building power for working people, one of the most foundational things every state must do is ensure they have a strong, modern UDAAP statute—laws that prohibit unfair, deceptive, and abusive acts and practices—and that those protections clearly extend to small businesses. Because when a small restaurant is pushed into a predatory financing deal, or a seller on a major platform is subject to hidden fees and manipulated terms, that’s not “just business.” That’s abuse. And until our laws are equipped to recognize and stop it, we will continue to leave millions of people vulnerable to the very forces hollowing out our economy.
Seizing the Moment
None of this will happen unless we build the coalition to make it possible. This is a moment for advocates—across labor, consumer, and small business—to come together. To align not just around a shared set of values, but a shared understanding of who holds the power in this economy—and how we’re going to take some of it back for the guy who runs the halal cart, the mom working a shift before picking up her kids, and the restaurant owner trying to make it work.
Big business has been playing by its own rules for too long. And those rules have crushed too many workers, too many small businesses, and too many dreams.
We are not powerless. In fact, for the first time in a long time, we are seeing the potential for a united front, standing together to demand fairness, accountability, and a better system.
This is a moment to build a new coalition, united by a common enemy—corporate abuse.
Let’s not miss the moment. Let’s use every legal, policy, and political tool we have. Let’s tell the story clearly, act boldly, and build the coalition we need to take on corporate power and win.
Let’s get to work.
Seth Frotman is a Senior Fellow at Towards Justice and UC Berkeley Center for Consumer Law and Economic Justice. Previously, he served as General Counsel and Senior Advisor to the Director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. This post is adapted from remarks at a conference hosted by Towards Justice and Small Business Majority.