Twenty years ago a law professor went out to eat at a New Jersey diner with his wife and 15-month-old son. The toddler threw a tantrum and all his food on the floor; the waitress expertly defused the tensions and mopped up the mess; and the official, Seth Harris, made some polite small talk with the woman who, as it turned out, was a single mother of three.

Having been on the tantrum-defusing, chucked food removing end of this transaction literally hundreds of times — I’ve also been the fool who took a small screaming barbarian to a nice restaurant, but you kind of give up eating out once the second kid comes along — I am very intimate with the brand of guilt Seth Harris was feeling in that moment. Guilt is an extremely valuable emotion for a waitress, especially during the slow hours people with toddlers generally arrive, worth at least 25% if it’s an expensive restaurant and closer to 50% at a place with a low check average like pretty much every New Jersey diner that exists. And to his credit, Seth Harris says he left a “generous” tip; a good night, then, was had by all.

But Seth Harris wasn’t just any affluent guilty liberal. He was a high-ranking Clinton labor department official freshly liberated to the private sector, and he was also, as it happened, feeling guilty about a Faustian bargain his administration had struck with the National Restaurant Association a few years earlier, to raise the minimum wage 90 cents in exchange for agreeing to leave the minimum wage for tipped employees like his waitress at $2.13 — “a few dimes an hour more than a garment worker in the Dominican Republic earns,” he noted later. The bargain had backfired: the percentage of political donations the NRA political action committee appropriated to Democrats had plunged from 29.5% in the 1994 cycle to 12.2% in 2000 campaign cycle, all so the waitress picking up after his kid could get screwed even worse.

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Six years later, as Seth Harris has been quietly named the president’s top advisor on labor issues, his vision of a minimum wage free 21st century workplace is rapidly becoming reality. As the CARES Act funneled hundreds of millions of dollars in unemployment checks to their “independent contractors,” the gig app companies spent $203 million passing a California ballot initiative striking down that state’s formidable efforts to get them to acknowledge their workers as employees. Buoyed by their victory, the gig apps have brought the movement national; astroturf groups opposing measures to force apps to observe labor laws and/or promoting Prop 22 copycat bills (like one masquerading as a “portable benefits” law in Massachusetts) have sprouted up in Illinois, Connecticut, New York and New Jersey; the New York coalition has even been aggressively endorsed by Arc of Justice, a “social justice” nonprofit ostensibly formed to fight police brutality that also receives funding from Airbnb and the United Federation of Teachers.