Independent Contractor Classification

The Department of Labor has proposed a stricter, multi-factor test for who counts as an independent contractor under federal wage law, and NANA's position is that the proposed test does not account for how small associations actually staff chapter and event work. A regional chapter coordinator who works 10 hours a month coordinating three chapter meetings a year, paid a flat stipend, looks nothing like the gig-economy arrangement the rule was written to address, but the proposed factors — degree of control, integration into the organization's regular business, and permanence of the relationship — could sweep that coordinator into employee status anyway.

Lorraine Petrakis, NANA's chief operating officer and CFO, has walked the policy team through the budget consequences directly: reclassifying a chapter coordinator as an employee means payroll tax, workers' compensation coverage, and in some states unemployment insurance, on top of whatever stipend the chapter already pays. For a chapter with a five-figure annual budget, that is not a marginal cost.

Two categories of association staffing are most exposed: chapter coordinators paid a stipend rather than a salary, and seasonal event staff hired for a single annual meeting. Both arrangements are common across NANA's six chapters and among member associations that run their own annual conferences, and both involve exactly the kind of recurring, somewhat-controlled work the proposed test treats with suspicion, even when the person genuinely works for multiple clients and sets their own hours.

The independent-contractor classification brief walks through the proposed factors against real chapter-coordinator and event-staff job descriptions, and the honest answer for several roles is that they would likely need to be reclassified as employees under the new test as drafted. Associations that wait until a final rule to check their own arrangements will be doing that audit under a deadline instead of on their own schedule.

NANA is asking the Department of Labor to add a carve-out, or at minimum interpretive guidance, for intermittent, low-hour roles common to volunteer-adjacent nonprofit governance structures — chapter coordinators, committee-meeting facilitators, and single-event staff — where the current stipend-based arrangement reflects the volunteer character of the work rather than an attempt to avoid employee protections. Short of a carve-out, NANA is asking for a longer implementation window than the proposed rule currently allows, so associations have time to either reclassify roles or restructure how chapter-level work is staffed and paid.

The comment period on the proposed rule is open, and NANA's policy team is coordinating comments with other membership associations facing the same chapter-staffing exposure, rather than filing alone.