Okieriete Enajekpo needs money.

It’s not that the Nigerian-born Maryland resident is unemployed.

But as a driver for the airport van service, SuperShuttle, he must pay the company upwards of $900 a week before he takes home any money of his own.

And going into his fourth day this week in January, Enajekpo is still more than $100 short of paying off his weekly debt and starting to earn cash for himself.

“People back home [in Nigeria] think, ‘Oh you’re in America so you must be doing well,’” he says. “They don’t understand.”

It wasn’t always like this.

Once, drivers of this ubiquitous blue-van airport shuttle service were full-fledged employees, earning a moderate (and dependable) hourly wage. But over the past 13 years SuperShuttle has transformed its cadre of drivers into so-called franchisees — what the company calls independent business owners. In doing so, SuperShuttle has shifted, in its own words, “hard to manage variable costs from the company” to the drivers, making “gross profits more stable and predictable.”

“It was too expensive and, frankly, almost all of our businesses were losing money,” says Thomas LaVoy, chief financial officer of SuperShuttle.

Some drivers say the shift has allowed them greater flexibility and a chance to start their own business. But Enajekpo and hundreds of SuperShuttle drivers across the country say the changes have done more harm than good — and in a series of lawsuits claim the company doesn’t allow them independence and is cheating its drivers out of wages and benefits they should be entitled to as employees.

Like generations of college students, Caprice Taylor needed a job to help pay her school and living expenses. For the 24-year-old student of fashion merchandise management at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City, sales work at a retail clothing shop seemed like a good option.

Taylor was hired last year at Club Monaco, a high-end clothing and apparel retailer owned by Polo Ralph Lauren. But her scheduled shifts at the Manhattan store were not guaranteed. Instead, she was given call-in shifts, which required her to call the store two hours before she was scheduled to arrive to see if she was needed.

Most often, she was not.

For months, Taylor said, she arranged her personal life around work days, waiting in her apartment, only to call in and learn the store wasn’t busy enough. On some weeks, Taylor logged as few as six hours, not earning enough to keep up with her living expenses.

“It puts your day on complete hold,” Taylor said. “It pressures you.”

After four months of unpredictable paychecks, Taylor quit. She later found work at a Polo Ralph Lauren store that does not have on-call shifts. She was lucky to find it. Retail watchers say big-box stores and shopping-mall stalwarts are increasingly hiring workers for on-call shifts, a trend that cuts labor costs for employers, but leaves workers like Taylor struggling to get by.

The clothing and accessory retail industry is a relative bright spot in the moribund jobs market. Yet like Taylor, many workers are finding the jobs unpredictable at best, providing smaller paychecks and less stability than in the past.

From 2002 to 2011, the number of nonsupervisory jobs in the retail clothing industry rose 7 percent to 1.13 million, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The industry declined during the recession, but the decline was not as dramatic as for the jobs market as a whole.

Gary Terrio used to work for himself driving lost luggage from the airport in Manchester, N.H., out to the owners’ homes. “Working with my own business I could deliver whatever I wanted,” he says. “If it was something that was ridiculous, I could say no.”

When he and his wife started a family, he started looking for something more lucrative and stable. He heard that FedEx Ground drivers in the shipping giant’s home delivery division bought their delivery routes and worked them as their own business, which sounded pretty good. He could earn more and still be his own boss.

“And is that how it panned out?” Terrio laughs. “It was nothing, nothing, nothing of what they said.”

Rather than making his own schedule, he had to be at the package terminal for pick-up at 6:00am FedEx Ground paid by the delivery, not the hour, and assigned the roster of packages each day. If Terrio delivered the package outside the window of time that FedEx assigned or if a customer complained, his paycheck got docked. He had to buy his own FedEx specified truck and financed and insured it by refinancing the mortgage on his house. After all the expenses and deductions, he says he’d be lucky to bring home $500 a week. “I would have loved to have been just an independent contractor,” he says. Instead, “I felt like an employee.”

You might think it’s easy to know the difference between an employee and an independent contractor. It’s not. The distinction sits in a stubbornly murky corner of the law, and workers, employers and governments have a lot riding on the outcome. Meanwhile the number of people who are working but not considered employees continues to grow.

Seeking to channel the spirit of Teddy Roosevelt, President Obama skewered his ideological foes Tuesday for abetting and condoning a new Gilded Age of greed, economic inequality and vanishing opportunity for the working families of America.

“This is the defining issue of our time,” Obama told a crowd in Osawatomie, Kan., where Roosevelt laid out the progressive agenda in his “New Nationalism” speech of 1910. “This is a make or break moment for the middle class….At stake is whether this will be a country where working people can earn enough to raise a family, build a modest savings, own a home and secure their retirement.”

Obama deplored how forces like globalization and computerization have combined with political gridlock to leave workers with lost jobs and less pay, while the top 1 percent has disproportionately prospered.

“The rungs on the ladder of opportunity have grown farther and farther apart,” Obama said. In the years after World War II, a child born into poverty had a better-than-even chance of climbing into the middle class. Today those odds have shriveled to one-in-three. “For most Americans, the basic bargain that made this country great has eroded.”

Republican National Committee spokeswoman Kirsten Kukowski told the Associated Press that the president was “desperately trying new slogans and messages to see what sticks because he can’t figure out how to sell his last three years of high unemployment and more debt.”

Indeed, the president placed the blame for the stagnant economy on avarice, Republican obstructionism and laissez-faire policies—not on any failures of his own economic policies during three years in office.