Gov. Andrew Cuomo is talking about “protecting” New Yorkers from employment as independent contractors. He’d be wise to see how it works out in California, first.

“More people should be considered employees because what has been happening is companies have been going out of their way to hire independent contractors to get out” of offering them benefits, the gov said recently. Really?

California’s new law aims to force the likes of Uber, Lyft and Postmates to classify workers as employees, not independent contractors. But the main force pushing for the law is organized labor, because these arrangements make unionizing difficult.

Sure, advocates claim the idea is to make companies to offer benefits like health insurance and end exemptions from minimum-wage and overtime laws. Yet everyone working as an independent contractor knows the deal before they sign up. They take it because they see other benefits, from the ability to work for many different “bosses” to the power to control their own work schedules.

And the California law already has lots of happy workers worried: Travel agents, for example, see their livelihood threatened. Freelance journalists would also be panicking if the law hadn’t specifically exempted them, along with other professions that mobilized in time, such as doctors, securities dealers, insurers and real estate agents.

Uber and Lyft, meanwhile, will fight the law in court — so it may only hit much smaller businesses, with far tighter profit margins.

If Cuomo really means to stand up for workers, rather than do another favor for unions, he’ll at least put this idea on hold until a lot more evidence rolls in.

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