By Richard J. Reibstein, Pepper Hamilton LLP ( November 10, 2016, 10:49 AM EST) -- In the past eight years, the Obama administration has spearheaded enforcement initiatives on independent contractor misclassification through the U.S. Department of Labor and the IRS. That crackdown, however, seemed to be focused on the low-hanging fruit — companies that often had little or no defense to the claim that they were misclassifying employees as ICs. In contrast, private class action lawyers focused and continue to focus on more challenging cases or larger or more well-known companies, like Uber, FedEx, Amazon, Macy's, Lowe's, DirecTV, BMW, Google, Sleepy's and Jani-King, to name just a few. During that same period, Congress did not pass a single bill to address the issue of independent contractor classification....