What caught my attention was that figure—6,600 people—and the fact that almost immediately after Sherrill’s announcement, the spin began with claims that a problem involving 6,600 people is not widespread. Even U.S. Senator Andy Kim of New Jersey used that exact language:

The most direct debate I saw on this point was on CNN, where the left-leaning host and panelists argued strongly that a problem involving 6,600 people is no big deal. These weren’t offhanded comments coming from the Democratic partisans; they argued the point for an entire segment and insisted that a problem involving 6,600 people in New Jersey is not at all widespread.

Here’s part of that segment:

As I watched that exchange play out on CNN, I felt as if I had fallen into a wayback machine.

It was a variation on an argument that we just saw take place a few weeks ago at a hearing in New Jersey’s Legislature about whether there is an actual widespread problem involving the misclassification of employees as independent contractors.

Here in my home state—where an independent-contractor rule scheduled to go into effect October 1 is so overly strict that financial advisers earning six figures a year are seeking legislative exemptions—Republican Senator Declan O’Scanlon asked the New Jersey AFL-CIO’s Eric Richard what figure would actually constitute a widespread problem in a state with an estimated 1.7 million independent contractors.

As it turns out, according to Senator O’Scanlon, the number of independent contractors filing claims with New Jersey’s Department of Labor is only about 700 each year. And almost all of them are coming from a single profession: rideshare and delivery drivers.

Democrats in New Jersey can’t have it both ways. Since at least 2019, in the Report of Gov. Murphy’s Task Force on Misclassification, the partisans have been claiming that the problem of employees being improperly called independent contractors is so “widespread” that we need all kinds of new laws and regulations to restrict everyone’s freedom to be our own bosses.

If the argument now from the left is that a problem involving 6,600 people a year is not widespread, then the argument that 700 people a year is a widespread problem is even more indefensible.

New Jersey’s Legislature Must Act

A lot of the numbers do not add up on the State of New Jersey’s claims that independent-contractor misclassification is a widespread problem.

There’s been mischaracterized state-level data and research that found its way into testimony before the U.S. Congress, where unionists including the national AFL-CIO are trying to restrict independent contracting all across the country.

Shifting claims about eye-popping amounts of missing money from the State of New Jersey’s coffers never seem to add up, just as they failed to add up in California.

Statements about money returned to misclassified employees in New Jersey seem awfully paltry for a so-called widespread problem.

Revelations about stop-work orders in New Jersey appear surprisingly rare if so many companies are actually misclassifying their employees.

And don’t even get me started about how antiquated data and statistics from as long ago as 1984 have been used to weaponize regulatory language and attack legitimate independent contractors across hundreds of professions at the state and federal levels alike.

There are very good reasons that public opposition to New Jersey’s independent-contractor rule stands at 99%. It is unconscionable that Governor Sherrill ignored all of this information—with her acting labor commissioner outright calling the mischaracterized data that citizens brought to the Labor Department’s attention irrelevant. It is absurd that the governor shoved aside the massive, rightful public pushback and put this rule through anyway.

New Jersey’s Legislature must act before the independent-contractor rule takes effect October 1. We need our lawmakers to pass the concurrent resolution that would invalidate this rulemaking, and then we need legislation to protect the livelihoods of independent contractors across hundreds of professions statewide.

Because 1.7 million independent contractors having our incomes and careers threatened—when everyone agrees the majority of us are legitimately in business—is, in fact, a widespread problem.

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That part of the interview scared the heck out of me. The sitting vice president of the United States describes expanded unionism as the way to defeat communism, all while name-checking his friend Oren Cass, who refuses to acknowledge the existence of successful independent contractors at all.

The following clip is cued to begin at this part of the podcast, if you want to hear it in the vice president’s own words:

The problem the vice president describes is real. He’s talking about people, especially younger Americans, feeling like victims of a rigged system where they cannot possibly succeed. Socialism appeals to them more than capitalism. There’s more than a little research out there about this rising red tide.

But the solution our vice president suggests is to “give normal people some power in this system”—in the form of expanded unions.

Giving “normal people” more power makes sense to me.

But doing it by expanding unions, at this moment in time, does not.

Unions today aren’t what they were decades ago. Nowadays, they are politically powerful entities that keep trying to take power away from us “normal people,” so much so that even when 99% of us raise our voices in opposition to a Big Labor power grab over our lives, the unionists call us dangerous and insist that our government must ignore us all.

Where ‘Normal People’ Stand

Let’s start by establishing where most “normal people” in the United States stand on whether joining a union is the best way to try and achieve the American Dream.

For starters, most non-union employees don’t have any interest in joining a union whatsoever:

Beyond that, a majority of Americans say that all things being equal, they don’t want to be employees of any kind, union or non-union. Most of us say we’d prefer to be our own bosses:

And among people who have had the courage and grit to make that leap and become self-employed, a huge majority of 80% tell the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics that we prefer to remain independent contractors:

When Vice President Vance talks about the need to “give normal people some power in this system” by adding more unionized employees, he’s ignoring the fact that millions upon millions of us see a real path to financial and personal power in not being employees at all.

And what’s really mind-bending is that he’s one of us. The vice president is saying these things while he’s out on the media circuit promoting sales of his new book. His financial disclosures show that his publishing deals are a traditional advance-plus-royalties business relationship for his previous book, Hillbilly Elegy, and for this new book too.

That means he’s not a unionized employee of HarperCollins. He’s very likely earning that money the way most authors do: as an independent contractor. The unions he wants to expand are the same ones pushing freelance-busting laws that the Authors Guild says threaten the very kind of business relationship he has with his own publishing house.

It’s these unions that keep pushing government to restrict our ability to be self-employed across all kinds of professions, to the point that here in my home state of New Jersey, they just proposed nearly eviscerating everyone’s ability to be self-employed at all. It’s these unions pushing policies that have become an existential threat to Americans who wish to be our own bosses, something that we all have been free to do since the day this nation was founded. It’s these unions that are dismissing the clearly stated desire of most independent contractors—including millions of us earning at least $100,000 a year—who wish to continue exercising our power to work on our own terms.

I believe in Vice President Vance’s freedom to have that independent-contractor business relationship and income. I believe in everyone’s freedom to work in whatever way works best for us.

It’s incredibly disconcerting to see the vice president of the United States not only standing on the side of the unionists who keep trying to shut down this pathway to the American Dream, but also suggesting that we need to empower and embolden these extremists even further.

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The Union Power Imbalance

Vice President Vance talks in that clip about the robber barons of the 19th century, the industrialists and capitalists who amassed unprecedented wealth that they transformed into power over our government. It didn’t matter what the “normal people” wanted or thought was right; the robber barons could bend our government to their will, no matter how much it angered or hurt everyone else.

He describes this imbalance in the context of today’s increasingly powerful tech companies. Which may, in some ways, be a fair comparison—but it’s not the only comparison we need to be talking about these days if we want to have an honest conversation about the ability to exert far too much power over our government.

If the goal is to “give normal people some power in this system” where we are up against mightily funded, politically powerful forces that go against the will of most “normal people,” then one of the things we need to weaken, dramatically, is the power that some of today’s union leaders have amassed.

Unions today are not the same as unions even a few decades ago, when their overriding purpose was to negotiate things like better pay and working conditions for their members. Nowadays, some unions are throwing around unfathomable sums of money and exercising enormous power over our politicians in attempts to control all kinds of people who aren’t union members at all.

During the 2023–24 election cycle, the four biggest public sector unions—the National Education Association, the American Federation of Teachers, the Service Employees International Union, and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees—reportedly spent more than a combined $915 million in partisan elections. There’s another report that says teachers unions alone have funneled more than $1 billion into political causes during the past decade.

Today’s unions have evolved into a system that, as wealth manager Jay Rogers wrote recently in The Hill, is actually a machine that converts mandatory dues into unaccountable political power.

Unaccountable political power is the same kind of power the robber barons had. It’s the kind of power Vice President Vance is suggesting “normal people” need more leverage to stop.

Empowering today’s unions is the opposite of giving normal people that leverage. It’s strengthening what is already cronyism and corruption run amok.

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The 1% in Control

We’re seeing this modern reality of extremist unionism play out right now in my home state of New Jersey, where we just went through a public-comment process about an independent-contractor rule that the AFL-CIO and other unionists strongly urged the state to put through.

The public hearing was standing room only, and testimony was 3-to-1 in opposition.

The written public comments were 99% opposed, with just 26 favorable comments out of about 9,500 filed overall.

Almost nobody other than unions and union-adjacent groups, like multimillion-dollar think tanks, said this rulemaking was a good idea. The public-comment process revealed that this rule was something Big Labor wanted against the will of virtually everyone else in the state.

And yet, the acting state labor commissioner—a former AFL-CIO employee named Kevin Jarvis—went ahead and finalized the anti-independent-contractor rule anyway. Our state government simply ignored the clear wishes of all the “normal people” and did what the 1% wanted.

We’re now in a window of a few months before this rule takes effect, when our Legislature could step in and block it. Which is why the AFL-CIO organized all kinds of unionists to testify yet again against independent contractors at the State House, with the head of the New Jersey AFL-CIO and the acting labor commissioner mingling in the standing-room-only crowd, looking like a couple of untouchables.

Acting Labor Commissioner Jarvis also gave a media interview in which he tried to justify ignoring the will of the people. His thinking, as he described it, was that if a union boss files a public comment, then that public comment should count as many as a million times, because unions can have a million members. By contrast, when an independent contractor or a company that works with hundreds or thousands of independent contractors files a public comment, it should only be counted once.

Put another way, Jarvis suggested that it was somehow mathematically democratic for the government to bend to the will of the 1%, against the 99% of the public who stood together opposed.

This is not government of, by and for the people. This is government of, by and for the labor unions. It is union power run amok with zero accountability to the people.

And these are the kinds of unionists whose power Vice President Vance says he wants to expand.

The vice president is plainly wrong. Expanding the kind of control these unionists already have is not a way to “give normal people some power in this system.”

It’s a way to help these kinds of relentless, remorseless, anti-entrepreneurial extremists crush tens of millions of people’s chosen pathway to achieve the American Dream.

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And About Defeating Communism…

What’s perhaps most perplexing about Vice President Vance’s thinking is that he says he believes stronger unions are a way to defeat socialism and communism.

Is he simply unaware that all of us have been forced to fight the combined forces of unionists, socialists and communists for years now, just to try and keep our freedom to be our own bosses?

These unionists have been working hand in hand with the Democratic Socialists of America to try and tear down entrepreneurism. These unionists have been pushing federal legislation that the Communist Party USA favors to wipe self-employed people out of our capitalist system. These unionists have been trying to remake our laws in ways that the former chairman of the National Labor Relations Board wrote would “substantially unravel and change large segments of the US economy.”

Forget about today’s unions being a way to “give normal people some power in this system.” These extremists want to blow the entire American system apart.

And they’re trying all kinds of ways to do it. In Massachusetts, for instance, instead of trying to change the definition of a legal independent contractor the way we’re seeing in states like California and New Jersey, there’s an experiment going on with allowing a version of organization called sectoral bargaining—which gives union bosses a new kind of power in the United States, power that extends over employees and independent contractors alike, without many of those people ever getting to vote on unionization at all.

Again, talk about taking away the power of “normal people.” And frighteningly, sectoral bargaining is likely what Vice President Vance meant when he talked on Joe Rogan’s podcast about unions needing to evolve into 21st-century institutions with the ability to negotiate differently. He’s said for a while now that he thinks sectoral bargaining could be a good idea.

It is, in fact, a horrible idea. Giving a union boss control over my work life when I don’t even get a vote about representation has precisely nothing to do with empowering me. Restricting the freedom to be our own bosses is about the least-American thing imaginable, being pushed by some of the most fringe thinkers in our society.

And I do mean looney-tunes, fruit-loop fringe. In the public comments that the State of New Jersey received, the freelance busters cited source material that equates independent contracting with the crimes of human trafficking, child labor and workplace violence. We have also recently seen unionists like Teamsters boss Sean O’Brien sitting on stage and saying that independent contracting is a danger to the nation’s future—the same way racists used to talk about equality for Black people and sexists used to talk about equality for women.

These are today’s unionists. Standing in opposition to where the vast majority of “normal people” in America stand on a fundamental issue of freedom.

We’re in a clear battle of what I recently defined in a report titled “Extremism vs. Entrepreneurism,” and Vice President Vance just said he wants to further empower the extremists. Hence my reaction to hearing that part of Joe Rogan’s interview with him, and feeling scared to death as an independent contractor. I might as well have been back testifying in front of the U.S. Senate HELP Committee, sitting across from Democratic Socialist Bernie Sanders as he mischaracterized statistics and data to suggest that making my business relationships illegal would be good for me.

I was raised in a union household back in the 1970s and ‘80s. For some people, including my parents, being unionized employees gave them a kind of income and benefits they couldn’t figure out how to achieve otherwise.

But I am not of my parents’ generation, and today’s unions are not the same. It’s a half century later, and unions are using their power to launch relentless, remorseless attacks against us smallest of small-business owners.

Akash Chougule, president of the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, got it right yesterday when he wrote the following, in a piece titled “Vice President Vance Agrees with the DSA, and They’re Both Wrong”:

“The American Dream is not only about GDP, prices, or stock indexes. It is about whether people can build a life worth living — one that includes work, family, community, purpose, and a fair shot at upward mobility. Free markets are not the enemy of that dream. They are one of its indispensable foundations.”

I’m one of the “normal people.” I’ve achieved a life worth living as an independent contractor. And I wholeheartedly agree.

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2026 Aflcio Federal Questionnaire

653KB ∙ PDF file

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There’s a lot of interesting stuff in this questionnaire, and of course, the lines about independent contractors caught my attention. The way the AFL-CIO is framing this issue for legislators is more twisted than a ballpark pretzel. A lawmaker would need to have in-depth policy background to realize the questions are dishonest at their core.

For instance, the AFL-CIO asks this:

“Would you support efforts to require corporations to accurately designate workers as contractors or employees?”

Well of course! Who wouldn’t? Being accurate is a good thing, right?

The problem with this question is that the ABC Test regulatory language the AFL-CIO champions doesn’t accurately classify anyone. It instead seeks to reclassify huge swaths of independent contractors into the status of unionizable employees against our will. It completely ignores years’ worth of research that shows 80% of us wish to remain our own bosses.

We’ve already seen the economic fallout from this kind of weaponized ABC Test policymaking in California, where the biggest result of a law that went into effect in 2020 was legitimate independent contractors losing their incomes and careers.

And make no mistake about widespread reclassification being the goal. The unionists demonstrated as much with the way they proposed an ABC Test rule to “accurately” classify us all in New Jersey last year. Their proposed interpretation of the regulatory language, according to attorneys, created an existential threat to self-employment and almost entirely eviscerated the ability of anyone in the state to be an independent contractor at all.

The AFL-CIO telling congressional candidates there’s a need to “accurately designate workers as contractors or employees” is like a drug dealer telling lawmakers there’s a need to “accurately” designate meth and coke as health foods.

And that’s just the start of the false premises that are all throughout this questionnaire the AFL-CIO is sending to congressional candidates nationwide.

Magical Misclassification Thinking

A little farther down in this AFL-CIO questionnaire, there’s a tidy half-page sermon about the glories of the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, which would inject weaponized ABC Test regulatory language into federal law.

The PRO Act would, in reality, subject independent contractors all across the country to California-style freelance busting, forcing millions of us into unionizable-employee status or out of work altogether. This bill would create such a big policy shift that the former head of the National Labor Relations Board wrote that it would “substantially unravel and change large segments of the US economy.”

Yeah. That would be bad.

But here’s the way the AFL-CIO describes it in the questionnaire:

“... the PRO Act guarantees bargaining rights for employees who are misclassified as independent contractors ...”

That’s some magical misclassification thinking right there. The AFL-CIO is suggesting that regulatory language proven to restrict all kinds of independent contractors would only affect the wrongly classified ones. And it would guarantee their ability to join a union, which Gallup research tells us most non-union employees don’t wish to do.

Put another way, the AFL-CIO is asking congressional candidates if they would vote to guarantee something that almost nobody wants, by reclassifying all kinds of people who aren’t misclassified in the first place.

This detachment from reality is similar to how the AFL-CIO continues to claim that misclassification is a widespread and rampant problem across all kinds of industries, when in reality, claims about its scope in California turned out to be totally bogus, and testimony in New Jersey just made clear it’s an issue that the state Labor Department is hearing about from only 0.04% of independent contractors—with most of them limited to just a single industry, rideshare and delivery drivers.

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And Last, There’s This Gem

My absolute favorite line in this AFL-CIO questionnaire is in the section about artificial intelligence.

This is the question the AFL-CIO asks congressional candidates:

“Do you support copyright and intellectual property protections that safeguard the livelihoods of union professionals who rely more than ever on effective intellectual property rights to earn compensation and benefits, as well as to ensure future career opportunities in today’s digital era?”

This question barely even makes sense if you understand how copyright works.

The minute an employee creates anything, the copyright typically becomes the property of the person’s employer. This means the employer can do anything it wants with the work. If an employee’s work becomes really popular—say, a software developer who works for a tech company creates the next big app that everyone is downloading—then the employer is free to make millions of dollars off the creation without ever having to give the employee another thin dime.

By contrast, independent contractors retain the copyrights to our work unless we choose to sell them in a negotiated deal. This is important: It’s why authors are able to negotiate cash paydays for their books, as opposed to the book publishers keeping the bulk of the money. It’s why those same authors can then negotiate film or TV rights to those same books and make even more money. And so on. It’s all about who owns the copyright.

This ability to own a copyright is so important to the livelihoods of creative people that it has its own section in the U.S. Constitution. It’s not something that is specific to “union professionals” in any way, shape or form, the way the AFL-CIO’s questionnaire suggests. Copyright law has always been for everyone, ever since the day George Washington signed the first copyright bill into law in 1790.

Ownership of copyright is the reason why, right now, hundreds of independent-contractor photographers are able to contest a Wall Street Journal contract that would allow AI use of their work without their consent. It’s the reason why independent-contractor writers were able to sue The New York Times—and win—for unauthorized uses of their work.

And it’s a key reason why the freedom to remain an independent contractor is so important to so many kinds of people who want to protect our copyrighted work.

The AFL-CIO asking congressional candidates if they support “copyright and intellectual property protections that safeguard the livelihoods of union professionals” is like asking if the candidates support First Amendment protections that safeguard the free speech of union members.

In reality, lawmakers who swear an oath to uphold the Constitution are supposed to make sure that freedoms and protections apply to us all.

Including the freedom and protection to work as independent contractors, if that’s what we choose to do here in the United States of America.

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As of today, New Jersey’s Legislature shows no indication of doing anything of the sort.

Instead of standing with the people of New Jersey—who have expressed overwhelming objection to what’s happening at in-person hearings and in written comments to the state Labor Department—legislators in the Democratic Party majority are playing favorites and advancing bills to protect only certain favored professions such as financial advisers and insurance providers.

The estimated 1.7 million independent contractors in the state who work in hundreds upon hundreds of other professions remain in the new rule’s crosshairs, very similar to what we all watched happen in California as this same kind of freelance-busting madness ultimately blew apart people’s livelihoods.

I was pleased to see several Republican state senators, including Senator Michael Testa, speak out at a recent voting session of the New Jersey Senate. They rightfully pointed out the insanity of what’s going on with these carveout bills.

As Testa put it about a bill that would protect the financial and insurance professions, “The existence of this bill is truly an acknowledgment that the current independent-contractor system in New Jersey is severely broken.”

Here are his remarks in full:

Senator Testa is correct. When independent-contractor policy based on ABC Test regulatory language is threatening the livelihoods of professionals who earn upward of $100,000 per year, the test is not designed to target misclassified employees.

The ABC Test has been weaponized to attack even the most successful independent contractors. That’s why lawmakers of good conscience need to step in and protect us all from it.

I suggest a two-step process to start.

Step One: Pass ACR73 and SCR62

New Jersey lawmakers should begin by passing ACR73 and SCR62. These concurrent resolutions, already introduced in the state Senate and Assembly, would declare the new independent-contractor rule inconsistent with legislative intent and would invalidate it.

That’s the quick fix to stop the very real threat that is causing even some of the highest-earning professions to seek carveout protections before the rule takes effect October 1.

Lawmakers who don’t want to debate the nitty-gritty regulatory language can simply note that they are alarmed by two specific things the state Labor Department wrote in its new rule:

• The Department said it is not obligated to address economic research showing serious harm related to the ABC Test regulatory language, which economists say is already depressing self-employment, traditional employment and overall employment across the state

• The Department said it’s not relevant to this rulemaking that the administration of Governor Phil Murphy severely mischaracterized data and research to justify ABC Test policies leading up to and including this rule

Those two things alone should be enough to trigger significant legislative action in this policy area. As I noted in my recent report “Extremism vs. Entrepreneurism,” what we have now documented should also trigger an inquest to fully detail just how badly things have already gone wrong.

Lawmakers who need more reasons to step in and invalidate New Jersey’s independent-contractor rule can also choose any or all of the following:

• The disproportionate and negative impact this kind of policymaking has on women

• The fact that the Democratic Socialists of America and the Communist Party USA champion this kind of policy, as a way to cripple capitalism

• The New Jersey Labor Department’s recent acknowledgment that it receives only about 700 filings a year from independent contractors—about 0.04% of people who earn some or all of our income as independent contractors in New Jersey. That’s hardly indicative of a widespread misclassification problem that requires such drastic policymaking

It’s quite the potpourri of problems with this ABC Test rulemaking that lawmakers could cite when they vote to pass ACR73 and SCR72. Policy should be based on facts. Economic consequences should matter. It’s wrong to hurt entrepreneurial women as a way to advance the agenda of Marxists.

This vote shouldn’t even be close.

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Step Two: IRS, Not ABC

That same potpourri of problems is also why lawmakers should then shift the state off the weaponized ABC Test regulatory language altogether.

The easiest solution to this freelance-busting madness, as Senator Testa’s pending legislation lays out, is to reinstate the IRS Test regulatory language that can stop real cases of misclassification without threatening legitimately self-employed people.

Independent contractors and the broader business community have been calling for this shift away from the ABC Test for years in Trenton, including at the marathon public hearing that Senator Testa described from back in 2019. In my recent “Extremism vs. Entrepreneurism” report, I also called again for the ABC Test to be jettisoned entirely. It’s no longer being used as a tool to address misclassification. All across the country, it’s being weaponized to attack independent contractors.

The IRS Test is a longstanding solution that works. It would re-establish what federal research has shown actually stopped misclassification in New Jersey going back more than a quarter century now. It would bring us back from this bleeding-edge regulatory craziness that the Murphy administration so wrongly forced into our lives.

It’s not often that something so severely broken in Trenton can be largely addressed in two basic steps.

This is one of those times, and lawmakers should embrace the moment.

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I’m borrowing that line from MS NOW host Rachel Maddow because it perfectly fits what we are witnessing with the newly dropped “Promise To America.”

Last week, after a number of loud and proud socialists won elections in New York, some self-described moderate Democrats came out with this “Promise To America” that explicitly includes promoting capitalism over socialism.

This was their announcement on social media, with a website that launched a few days later:

The very first item in this promise on the website starts with: “We are capitalist, not socialist.” It goes on to state:

“We believe in a growing, fair, and competitive economy that rewards hard work, innovation, entrepreneurship, and ownership. Full-time work should make it possible to own a home, raise a family, afford healthcare, and retire with dignity. Economic, permitting, and tax policy should expand opportunity and lower costs for workers, families, entrepreneurs, and those striving to join the middle class, not disproportionately favor those already at the top.”

So these are supposedly pro-entrepreneur, anti-socialist Democrats.

There’s just one problem.

All but one of the sitting Democrats in Congress who signed this promise are currently co-sponsoring freelance-busting legislation that threatens the livelihoods of tens of millions of independent contractors—legislation that the Democratic Socialists of America called their highest national priority and that the Communist Party USA promoted as recently as last month.

The Signatories

As I explained last week, the federal PRO Act is a bill that would inject the kind of freelance-busting regulatory language that thousands of us are fighting to stop in California and New Jersey into federal law, so that it would apply to everyone nationwide.

This weaponized regulatory language, known as the ABC Test, is a direct attack on a core principle of capitalism: that we have the freedom in this country to be our own bosses. This regulatory language restricts that freedom. It attempts to force independent contractors into the status of unionizable employees, stripping us of our current status as entrepreneurs.

The Democratic Socialists of America have explained their thinking about the PRO Act. They say that having workers all be unionized would allow the socialists to create a general strike and shut down business nationwide until they get their laundry list of political demands.

Never mind that all throughout American history, we’ve always had the freedom to be our own bosses as independent contractors.

Forget that about two-thirds of Americans say they want to be their own bosses.

And just ignore the 80% of independent contractors who prefer to be our own bosses, including the millions of these entrepreneurs now earning more than $100,000 per year.

The Marxists see us as victims of capitalism. The weaponized regulatory language in the PRO Act fits nicely with the Marxist fever dream of everyone being unionized employees so they can shut down business everywhere. It’s so extreme that the Communist Party has long publicly supported the PRO Act, at one point having organized phone banks to try and get the bill passed:

Also supporting this bill, arm-in-arm with the Democratic Socialists of America and the Communist Party USA, are the following members of Congress who signed last week’s “Promise To America” while claiming to stand on the side of capitalism and entrepreneurs:

• Adam Gray, California

• Tom Suozzi, New York

• Laura Gillen, New York

• Don Davis, North Carolina

• Kristen McDonald Rivet, Michigan

• Josh Gottheimer, New Jersey

• Maggie Goodlander, New Hampshire

• Janelle Bynum, Oregon

• Susie Lee, Nevada

There is currently just one signatory on the “Promise To America” who is a sitting member of Congress, but who is not also a co-sponsor of the anti-entrepreneur PRO Act: Vicente Gonzalez of Texas.

He did vote for it, though.

Which means that if you watch what he does and not what he says, he also stood with the socialists and against the entrepreneurs.

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Governor Sherrill Fits this Description, Too

This same hypocrisy is happening at the state level, as well, with elected Democrats claiming to be moderate and distancing themselves from the socialists while pushing extreme anti-entrepreneur policies the socialists champion.

In my home state of New Jersey, our new governor, Mikie Sherrill, made a big deal of doing a media tour and saying out loud, “I’m not a Democratic Socialist.” Last week, media from the Daily Kos to USA Today held up Sherrill as an example of a non-socialist Democrat who recently won an election outside of New York.

But the reality is that Sherrill, too, is pushing hard against the entrepreneurs as a proponent of freelance busting. She just imposed a rule in New Jersey that’s based on the same kind of ABC Test regulatory language the Democratic Socialists and the Communists are trying to inject into federal law.

What’s worse is that Governor Sherrill went forward with her freelance-busting rule despite 99% opposition during a public-comment process. The people of New Jersey said loudly and clearly that we stand on the side of entrepreneurs, on the side of capitalism. Sherrill instead sided with extremists in the public comments whose source material compared being our own bosses to being a crime on the order of human trafficking.

Yes, really.

Actual moderate Democrats in New Jersey’s Legislature still have time to block this rule, which doesn’t take effect until October 1. Much as actual moderate Democrats in Congress can remove their names as co-sponsors of the PRO Act before this November’s midterm elections.

Watch what they do. Not what they say.

And then, if you believe in supporting capitalism and our freedom to be entrepreneurs, vote accordingly.

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As PBS reported:

Even as the election results were still coming in across all kinds of media channels, it became all too clear what messaging we’re going to hear heading into this fall’s general election.

On CNN, speaking from the political left, former Obama administration official Van Jones said: “The roof is collapsing on the Democratic party establishment.” Here’s that full clip:

And from the Republican side of the political aisle, here is just part of what U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson said on C-SPAN. His framing was that “the Democrat Party, the Socialists, the Marxists have nominated some of the most radical candidates to ever run for office”:

State-level missives also started blasting out, including this one in my home state of New Jersey:

It’s beyond evident that moderate Democrats who believe in capitalism and entrepreneurship are going to have to work hard this autumn and long afterward to distinguish themselves from the Democratic Party’s Marxist faction amid this insurgency.

There’s a clear-cut way for moderate Democrats to do that, and to create real distance from the Democratic Socialists of America.

Defend everyone’s freedom to be self-employed as independent contractors.

Freelance Busting is a Socialist Priority

The Democratic Socialists of America have long been a driving force behind freelance busting. The socialists have said point-blank that their “highest national priority” is to pass the PRO Act, a bill that would inject freelance-busting regulatory language into federal law. As they have explained their plan to me, forcing everyone to be employees in unions would allow them to create a general strike and shut down business nationwide until they get their laundry list of political demands.

Union organizers whose ranks are at all-time historical lows envision lots more dues-payers and power for themselves in this plan. But shoving entrepreneurial people into the status of unionizable employees is deeply at odds with what the vast majority of independent contractors want. It cuts hard against what the vast majority of Americans—including most Democrats—say they believe.

The PRO Act is based on the same kind of regulatory language that a majority of Californians voted to protect certain independent contractors from with a ballot proposition. It’s based on the same kind of regulatory language that more recently drew an undeniable 99% opposition in New Jersey’s public-comment process.

Voters in the bluest of blue states could not be clearer about opposing this socialist-based policymaking. The more that voters have had opportunities to express themselves on this issue, the bigger the opposition to freelance busting has grown.

But socialists exerting increasing levels of influence over the Democratic Party love freelance busting. It attacks entrepreneurs and, by association, the very foundation of capitalism itself.

That’s not hyperbole. Independent contractors—what the government often calls nonemployer firms—are the majority of business owners in this country, as shown in this U.S. Census bureau chart:

Wipe out the businesses that are represented on that chart in orange—many of which help to support the businesses represented in blue—and you cripple American capitalism.

This kind of extreme socialist thinking is so key to freelance busting that a few years ago, the head of the AFL-CIO created a virtual town hall that prominently featured a member of the Democratic Socialists of America. Together, they tried to push the idea of the PRO Act in ways that would counter the public opposition coming from American entrepreneurs from coast to coast.

Here is Richard Trumka, then the head of the AFL-CIO, introducing Democratic Socialist Megan Romer to talk about work the socialists were doing to make this kind of freelance busting the law of the land:

This extreme unionist-socialist faction is promoting a policy stance that is the opposite of what most Americans want. The majority of Americans tell Gallup that we treasure the freedom to be our own bosses. That’s the very freedom that freelance busting seeks to extinguish.

Moderate Democrats need to understand that their own supporters already recognize this disconnect. Democratic Party voters have been saying for a while now that the party is failing to support this widely shared understanding of the American Dream. This is what the Democrat-leaning think tank Searchlight Institute found when it polled on this issue last year:

If ever there were an issue that is ripe for moderate Democrats to differentiate themselves against the socialists—and to support what most Americans actually want—protecting our freedom to be our own bosses is that issue.

What moderate Democrats need to do as a start is abundantly clear:

• Withdraw support for the federal PRO Act

• Block New Jersey’s independent-contractor rule before it takes effect October 1

• Repeal California’s Assembly Bill 5

Come out and say that you are squarely on the side of America’s tens of millions of independent contractors in our battle against this extremism. Stand with the majority of Americans who believe the nation’s entrepreneurial spirit is something to be celebrated and supported, not regulated out of existence.

Quite frankly, the way things are going right now for moderate Democrats, saving our careers might be the best way to save your own.

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He then asked a question about that document for the whole world to hear, about the way that only certain professions, but not others, were receiving exemptions from California’s Assembly Bill 5 and the ABC Test regulatory language at its core:

Senator Stone’s accusation—that the AFL-CIO in California was inappropriately involved in deciding which independent contractors got exemptions to keep their incomes and careers—fell on deaf ears in Sacramento that day.

As the California Globe reported:

What happened with that ABC Test law in California’s Legislature in 2019 was eerily similar to what is happening right now with an ABC Test rule that New Jersey’s Department of Labor & Workforce Development just adopted, and that is scheduled to take effect October 1.

But in New Jersey, the AFL-CIO is adding a new element to the influence it is attempting to exert in the deepest, darkest bowels of state government.

The unionists in New Jersey are trying to crank up the freelance-busting extremism beyond what they achieved in California. They’re trying to stop any professions from receiving new exemptions at all.

No New Exemptions

To understand the scale of the escalation that’s happening in my home state of New Jersey, let’s start by making the baseline from California clear. There are three things that New Jersey’s Labor Department is doing as variations on the same theme that we all saw play out in California.

These three things should, in and of themselves, make everyone’s stomachs turn:

• Basic facts and accuracy are being ignored. New Jersey’s public-comment process revealed all kinds of mischaracterized data and research being used to prop up ABC Test policymaking—including in the Report of Gov. Murphy’s Task Force on Misclassification that the Labor Department itself cited when it proposed the current rulemaking. Governor Mikie Sherrill’s Labor Department responded in writing about the mischaracterized data, stating: “The commenter’s critique of the work of 2019 Misclassification Task Force Report is not relevant to this rulemaking.”

Facts and accuracy are irrelevant. Same as California. Check ✔

• Economic consequences are also being ignored in New Jersey, where Sherrill’s Labor Department responded to public comments about the ABC Test’s current harms and its disproportionate, negative impact on women by writing this in the new rule: “The Department is not obligated to address economic research on the impact of the ABC test…”

Economic consequences don’t matter. Same as California. Check ✔

• Pleas from independent businesses are also falling on deaf ears in New Jersey, where Sherrill’s Labor Department sided against the 99% public opposition to this ABC Test rule. Sherrill’s acting Labor Commissioner—a former employee of the New Jersey AFL-CIO—even gave an interview where he tried to spin more than 9,000 opposition comments down to only 250, and where he tried to spin a single public comment filed by a union up to 1 million.

The will of the people is immaterial. All that matters is what the union bosses want. Same as California. Check ✔

There is simply no arguing the fact that in New Jersey’s Labor Department, with the adoption of this independent-contractor rule, we are witnessing government of, by and for the union bosses—but unlike in California, where the union bosses would ultimately see more than 100 professions exempted from the freelance-busting ABC Test law, New Jersey’s AFL-CIO says it now wants no new exemptions from the freelance-busting ABC Test rule.

Zippo. Zero. None.

All kinds of self-employed professionals in New Jersey must now face the threat of financial ruin unless they are lucky enough to be exempted already, like the real-estate agents whose lobbyists got a law specific to their profession passed over the winter. The New Jersey AFL-CIO wants as many independent contractors as possible to remain in the line of fire. This includes insurance brokers, lawyers, translators, therapists—everyone.

On June 3, the New Jersey AFL-CIO blasted out an email making this extreme position clear:

You’d have to be a baby doe lost in the woods to believe that the unionists hanging around the halls in Trenton just now came up with this idea of interpreting the ABC Test in ways that nobody can definitively pass it, and then insisting that no professions get an exemption from it.

Ensnaring everyone—even high-earning professionals who are legitimately self-employed—has been part of these unionists’ freelance-busting plan for years.

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Who’s Responsible Here, Indeed

In 2018, unionists in Congress led in part by New Jersey Democrat Donald Norcross wrote a report that recommended, among other things, redefining everyone as employees across entire industries. Whether or not people were legally operating independent contractors was irrelevant; in fact, the unionists went so far as to suggest that if a company failed to provide contact information for a lawyer who could contest every worker’s independent-contractor status, then the workers should automatically be classified as unionizable employees.

One year later, in 2019, we all watched the AFL-CIO in California get the freelance-busting ABC Test bill into law.

That law took effect on January 1, 2020. Within a year, after all kinds of public outcry and chaos, more than 100 professions had been granted exemptions from the ABC Test law—a fact that clashed mightily with the unionists’ plan to capture every type of independent contractor they could.

So, in 2021, the philosopher king of freelance busting, Professor David Weil, co-wrote a paper to push some new options. That paper’s title is, “Who’s Responsible Here? Establishing Legal Responsibility in the Fissured Workplace.”

This paper lamented what happened with exemptions in California and then laid out the zero-exemptions tactic that the New Jersey AFL-CIO is now attempting to deploy in my home state.

None of this should surprise anyone. Weil, you may recall, is the unionist who became federal Wage and Hour Administrator during the Obama years. He tried to use his appointed position to interpret independent contractors nationwide out of business, much as his former colleague Robert Asaro-Angelo used New Jersey’s Labor Department to set in motion the current rulemaking that attempts to interpret independent contractors statewide out of business.

Weil’s 2021 paper talks about how a law similar to California’s should be the next step in this fever dream of a nation with almost exclusively unionizable employees—but this time, the law should allow zero exemptions for any professions.

The 2021 paper outright acknowledges that certain independent contractors have all the professional leverage we need to succeed as our own bosses. It then goes on to suggest taking steps that would wipe us out anyway, by implementing the core of the ABC Test without any exemptions for any professions:

“Our main concern with the tractability of the ABC test is that if it is truly overinclusive, legislatures will continue to include carve-outs, which often reflect political will and power rather than a need to re-balance power in a working relationship.”

Put another way, Weil argues that with unionists having gotten their “overinclusive”—his word, not mine—ABC Test into law in California, the new problem is legislatures carving out and protecting legitimately self-employed people from it.

Which leads us straight to the New Jersey AFL-CIO today, taking the extreme stance about no new exemptions from the ABC Test whatsoever.

Like I said: We are now inside the deepest, darkest bowels of state government. And yes, the stink is atrocious.

Weil was, however, correct about one thing in that 2021 paper: Politicians playing favorites is exactly what we all saw happen with the exemption process in California, and it’s precisely what we’re seeing happen right now in New Jersey. This coming Thursday, the New Jersey Senate is scheduled to vote on a bill that would exempt only certain financial professionals and tow truck drivers from the Labor Department’s rule, while leaving all the hundreds of other ensnared professions trapped with our livelihoods in the crosshairs of this ABC Test madness.

The question that everyone should be asking is, as Weil wrote: “Who’s Responsible Here?”

But the real answer to that question isn’t in his paper. It’s instead as plain for the world to see today as it was during California’s Senate debate in 2019. It’s right there in Senator Stone’s hand.

The way to fix this policy problem is never going to be found in carveouts from deeply misguided policymaking. We need legislation that eliminates the ABC Test and that actually protects all kinds of independent contractors from this relentless, remorseless freelance busting, once and for all.

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I’ve been hearing statistics like that one from a recent McKinsey & Company report ever since I was a little girl in the 1970s and ’80s. Except back then, the percentage was even lower. The message I received as I entered the workforce and looked around in the 1990s was clear: No matter how smart I am or how hard I work, most of the time, the men will get the promotions.

And the sexism would be overt. When I dished pizza during summers on the Jersey Shore, l quickly learned that the men got to be the cooks with higher salaries while the women were always the waitresses, smiling pretty for tips.

When I became a daily newspaper editor, I had a boss who would only speak to me on the days that I wore miniskirts.

When I earned the job of executive editor at a national boating magazine in the early 2000s, the men informed me that my writing was perfect for “the girlie beat.” That’s really what they called coverage of the global yacht charter industry. They would write about the boats as men do, about construction and how it felt to take the helm—they were captains, all of them, at least in their own minds—while I would write about how to be a guest on board, quite literally sitting in the back with the other ladies.

Entrepreneurial, hardworking women like me had to figure out how to achieve our potential within this reality, which is one reason why, in 2003, I quit my executive editor job and became a freelance writer and editor.

I found success within weeks of working from home, where all the in-office sexism vanished. An AOL dial-up Internet connection was my freedom to be out of sight, out of mind. All the editors ever saw was the copy I produced, which was quite often better than the copy they produced. When they gave me assignments, their jobs as editors became a lot easier.

Within a few years, I was earning more than almost all the men who were still on staff. I was building websites, writing books and doing all kinds of things that allowed me to succeed.

And for the next two decades, that solution to sexism held with precious few problems.

Until 2019, when lawmakers in my home state of New Jersey informed me and every woman like me across hundreds of professions that they were going to “protect” us all from misclassification by legally shoving us back into the category of employees.

We lined up at the State House in droves to tell them no, stop, you’re hurting us.

You’re spreading hysteria, they replied.

They were going to make all of my hard-won freelance business relationships illegal while trying to convince me it was for my own good, and while trying to make me feel crazy for being angry about it.

I’m Far from Alone

According to the U.S. Small Business Administration Office of Advocacy, among all the businesses that women own, about 90% have no employees. This is a significantly higher percentage than for men, who are more likely than women are to have other people working for them. Women small-business owners tend to go it alone as a sole proprietor, LLC or S Corp, just like I did.

This is why overly restrictive independent-contractor policy has a disproportionate, negative impact on women.

When lawmakers restrict self-employment, they are by definition disproportionately targeting and threatening women-owned small businesses.

Years’ worth of research bears this out. In California, after lawmakers passed the freelance-busting law known as Assembly Bill 5, the Biden administration created the California Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights to examine the law’s effects. Members of that committee listened to hours upon hours of testimony and then issued a report.

It stated:

“Many of the workers we heard from are women, immigrants, people of color and from other politically disadvantaged groups. While some workers had positive experiences with AB5, the bulk of the testimony we heard suggested AB5 had a decidedly negative impact, causing individuals to lose work and no longer have the option to be independent contractors.”

Similarly, when economists from the Mercatus Center (led by a woman, Liya Palagashvili) looked at the effects of New Jersey’s increasingly restrictive “ABC Test approach” to independent contractors, they found not only declines in W-2, self- and overall employment, but also this:

“The New Jersey data reveals stark gender disparities: women’s traditional W-2 employment declined by 7.40%, while men’s showed no significant change—raising concerns about disproportionate impacts on women following the policy change. This pattern suggests the policy may inadvertently create gender-specific barriers in the labor market while failing to deliver its promised worker protections.”

These results are common sense. As the Federal Reserve has noted:

“Compared to their male-owned counterparts, women-owned firms are less likely to be fully approved for the funding that they need to sustain and grow their small businesses.”

If you restrict the way of working solo that a lot of women choose as a way to solve all these kinds of systemic problems, you’re going to hurt a lot of entrepreneurial women.

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New Jersey’s Legislature Should Act Urgently

On October 1, an overly restrictive independent-contractor rule is scheduled to take effect here in New Jersey unless our Legislature steps in to invalidate it.

Assemblywoman Vicky Flynn—one of just 36 women among 120 state lawmakers—is the primary sponsor on the Assembly version of a concurrent resolution that would invalidate the rule and protect us all.

As she rightly stated in opposing the rulemaking from the start:

“These rules punish workers who choose independence. Contracting isn’t a loophole—it’s a lifeline.”

The Legislature should support this concurrent resolution, not just because of testimony in recent months that revealed employee misclassification isn’t a big problem in the first place, but also to make clear that the state supports all of us women who own and operate New Jersey’s smallest of small businesses.

We are the translators, the financial advisers, the graphic designers, the traveling nurses, the dog walkers, the wedding planners, the writers, the photographers and so many, many more types of professionals who are worthy of real protection against this relentless, remorseless freelance busting.

The C-suite isn’t the only path to success. Never has been, never should be.

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New Jersey AFL-CIO, 2019:

“The issue of worker misclassification, where workers are intentionally classified as independent contractors rather than as employees, has been a significant problem in New Jersey and throughout the nation for over 20 years and continues to grow.”

New Jersey AFL-CIO, 2020:

“Six bills seeking to reform the broken system by which certain employers intentionally misclassify their employees as independent contractors are strongly supported by the New Jersey State AFL-CIO.”

New Jersey State AFL-CIO President Charles Wowkanech, 2022:

“This illustrates that the gig is up, companies that intentionally misclassify employees in order to increase their profits at the expense of worker rights are now on notice – this unlawful practice is not tolerated here in New Jersey.”

2025, oral testimony of New Jersey AFL-CIO Legislative Director Eric Richard at the public hearing about the state Labor Department’s proposed independent-contractor rule:

“It needs to be understood that certain industries continue to see widespread, rampant, intentional misclassification. So the job we need to do is far from over. Heightened enforcement by the State Department of Labor is essential, and we look forward to continuing to work with the DOL to bring to their attention to information about what we see in workplaces throughout the state.”

New Jersey AFL-CIO, 2025, written public comment about the proposed independent-contractor rule:

“Despite the significant amount of work done to address the misclassification of workers as independent contractors, certain industries continue to see widespread, rampant, intentional misclassification. For this reason, the job is far from over. Heightened enforcement by the State Department of Labor and Workforce Development is essential and the adoption of these rules are important steps that should be approved to accomplish this.”

New Jersey State AFL-CIO President Charles Wowkanech, May 2026, in defense of the newly adopted independent-contractor rule:

“The intentional misclassification of workers by unscrupulous business negatively impacts workers in all sectors of our economy. From app-based transportation companies to health care to construction to public sector to trucking and entertainment production, among others, workers are being cheated out of earned benefits and wages, and that must end.”

I knew this pattern of claims from the New Jersey AFL-CIO well: Employee misclassification is widespread and rampant, and it’s harming workers across all sectors of our economy. That’s why we need new laws and regulatory rulemaking to crack down on the business practice of independent contracting.

All of which is why it caught my attention on May 11, when I was sitting in the State House in Trenton, and I heard acting New Jersey Labor Commissioner Kevin Jarvis—the former legislative affairs coordinator of the New Jersey State AFL-CIO—say the following as he testified before the New Jersey Senate Labor Committee:

Those “big numbers” of misclassified workers, as the acting Labor Commissioner had just described it, didn’t sound like very big numbers to me.

I did some quick math in my notebook:

• 4,700 people across seven years is an average of 671 people per year

• 1,400 people in the past two years is an average of 700 people per year

My home state of New Jersey has an estimated 1.7 million independent contractors. So, when it was my turn to testify later that day, I began by saying this:

Fast forward to yesterday, when there was another public hearing at the State House in Trenton, this one before the Senate Budget and Appropriations Committee.

It turns out that I’m not the only one who did the math.

‘I Don’t Know the Answer’

At yesterday’s hearing, state Senator Declan O’Scanlon asked Eric Richard, the legislative director of the New Jersey AFL-CIO, how many complaints the state Labor Department had actually received from independent contractors who say they are misclassified.

You can watch yesterday’s full Q&A exchange in the extended video at the top of this page. The highlights are that Senator O’Scanlon explains how he personally asked acting Commissioner Jarvis for the number of complaints the Labor Department was receiving from independent contractors, because what legislators are hearing from the public doesn’t align with the idea of widespread employee misclassification.

Richard replies by saying that a lot of independent contractors don’t know they’re misclassified until they apply to the Labor Department for unemployment.

O’Scanlon says when that happens, it’s indeed a problem, but if it’s a big problem, then the number of independent contractors doing it should be somewhere around 100,000.

Richard ultimately replies to the question that Senator O’Scanlon asked him: How may complaints is the state Labor Department actually receiving?

“I don’t know the answer to that, sorry.”

Senator O’Scanlon then says the figure that acting Labor Commissioner Jarvis gave him was the same figure that I had found so notable when I’d heard Jarvis say it last month: an average of about 700 complaints per year.

That’s 0.04% of people who earn some or all of our income as independent contractors in New Jersey.

And virtually all of the complaints, Senator O’Scanlon said yesterday, came from people working in a just one industry: rideshare and delivery drivers.

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The Hits Just Keep on Coming

Since 2018, based largely on the urging of the New Jersey AFL-CIO, the State of New Jersey has:

• created a governor’s task force on employee misclassification

• issued a report from that task force that said 10% to 30% of employers misclassify at least one employee, and that “misclassification is widespread and especially prevalent in construction, janitorial services, home care, transportation, trucking and delivery services, and other labor-intensive low-wage sectors”

• tried to pass a law severely restricting all kinds of independent contractors the same way California did, with the state Senate President comparing those of us who challenged that legislation to Russian disinformation agents

• enacted 10 other laws to combat employee misclassification

• created a government agency office to combat employee misclassification

• granted what the state Department of Labor & Workforce Development called “first-of-its-kind” penalty power to combat employee misclassification

• ignored 99% opposition during the public-comment process and proceeded to adopt a 200-plus-page rule about the interpretation and application of independent-contractor regulatory language

We have now heard twice, during recorded testimony at the New Jersey State House, that all of this was done when only about 700 independent contractors a year, on average, are filing complaints with the Labor Department.

As much of a gut punch as this realization must be to every legislator who has trusted the New Jersey AFL-CIO, and who voted for and defended all these years’ worth of freelance busting against all kinds of independent contractors across our state, this news is only the latest in a string of revelations that have left quite a lot of us scratching our heads.

There’s been mischaracterized state-level data and research that found its way into testimony before the U.S. Congress, where unionists including the national AFL-CIO are trying to restrict independent contracting all across the country.

Shifting claims about eye-popping amounts of missing money from the State of New Jersey’s coffers that never seemed to add up, just as they failed to add up in California.

Statements about money returned to misclassified employees in New Jersey that seemed awfully paltry for a so-called rampant problem.

Revelations about stop-work orders in New Jersey that seemed surprisingly rare if so many companies were actually misclassifying their employees.

And don’t even get me started about how antiquated data and statistics from as long ago as 1984 have been used to weaponize regulatory language and attack legitimate independent contractors across hundreds of professions at the state and federal levels alike.

I wrote about the disconnect between what the New Jersey AFL-CIO and its fellow freelance busters have been saying, and what has actually been happening in my home state, in my “Extremism and Entrepreneurism” report that came out in February. Here’s the start of that section:

And these are two of the seven recommendations my report makes at the end:

What we learned at yesterday’s hearing at the New Jersey State House, yet again, is that those of us standing up for everyone’s freedom to be our own bosses should have been the ones that lawmakers listened to all along.

New Jersey’s Legislature should invalidate the Labor Department’s newly adopted, deeply misguided independent-contractor rule before it takes effect on October 1, and then stop letting the AFL-CIO run the table when it comes to this policy area.

Instead, give us independent contractors a meaningful seat at the table to fully expose and end this freelance-busting madness that we’re being relentlessly, remorselessly forced to endure.

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You can watch the full hearing here. The Q&A about this bill is at the very end.

Below are three clips that I found highly compelling—including the committee being given an opportunity to fix the ABC Test regulatory-language problem that the Labor Department’s new rule just exacerbated for everyone.

Republicans voted to scrap the Labor Department’s rule altogether.

Democrats, who are in the majority, voted to keep it.

The Clips

The first exchange of note was between Republican state Senator Declan O’Scanlon and witness Eric Richard of the New Jersey AFL-CIO.

Everywhere in the country, for years now, the AFL-CIO has been claiming that we need all these new freelance-busting laws and rules because there is a widespread problem of employees being misclassified as independent contractors.

Quite a few of us have been saying for a very long time that the math ain’t mathin’ on that claim. That the data about misclassification is bogus in California. That the research about misclassification is mischaracterized in New Jersey. That the testimony being presented in front of Congress is ridiculous.

Today, Senator O’Scanlon dropped the mic in proving we’ve been right all along. He got hold of New Jersey’s numbers.

Only about 700 complaints about misclassification are being received each year in my home state, and almost all of them are about app-based work—in a state with an estimated 1.7 million independent contractors in hundreds of other professions.

Next, Senator Michael Testa, also a Republican, talked about a hearing in 2019 where all of us independent contractors packed a State House hearing to stop freelance-busting legislation. Testa notes that he has a bill (say it louder!) to remove New Jersey entirely off the weaponized ABC Test regulatory language that is causing all of these problems:

Finally, Senator O’Scanlon came back on the mic to offer an amendment that would scrap the Labor Department’s newly adopted freelance-busting rule altogether.

All the Republicans voted for it, to try and help all kinds of independent contractors.

All the Democrats, who are in the majority, shot it down.

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The original version, as Senator Johnson previously discussed it with me, was expected to protect the independent-contractor status of some truckers at the Port of NY&NJ, along with financial advisers and insurance agents, which are among the professions that have cited problems with the state Department of Labor & Workforce Development’s overly restrictive ABC Test rule that is scheduled to go into effect October 1.

However, late yesterday, word started to spread here in New Jersey that the bill was being modified. Insiders from the trucking industry told me their drivers were being removed from the bill, a change that would have meant carveouts only for financial advisers and insurance brokers.

And then, an email started to circulate from the New Jersey AFL-CIO. It suggested that a new profession may be added: “This bill declares these types of workers—primarily tow truck drivers, although that is not defined in the bill, as independent contractors and exempt from the ABC test.” It’s unclear what that may turn out to mean, but the suspicion is an exemption based on the public comment that AAA wrote, saying the Labor Department rulemaking would jeopardize public safety by effectively decimating the state’s roadside assistance network.

My testimony opposing this bill, which I submitted to the committee this morning, is in the video above as well as in written form below.

I strongly urge the Senate Budget & Appropriations Committee to reject this bill, and to stop trying to carve out a handful of professions from our state’s overly restrictive independent-contractor policy.

We need to fix the freelance-busting policy that is the root of the problem—and we need to fix it for all of the estimated 1.7 million independent contractors in our state.

My Testimony: New Jersey Senate Bill 2782

Thank you, Chairman Sarlo and members of the committee, for the chance to offer this testimony in opposition to Senate Bill 2782.

I drove an hour each way from my home over the winter to discuss this bill with the primary sponsor, Senator Gordon Johnson, and his staff at his office. This bill, unfortunately, would move the State of New Jersey even farther down the same deeply misguided freelance-busting path that ended up being disastrous in the State of California.

Out there, the Legislature passed an ABC Test law that created chaos for independent contractors in more than 600 professions. To try and fix that mess, legislators carved out some professions from that law. But they eventually figured out that the ABC Test itself was so bad, they had to keep carving and carving. Then the voters used a ballot proposition to carve out some more.

California now has more than 100 carveouts that, to this day, remain problematic for the professions they’re ostensibly there to protect. People are still losing their businesses a half dozen years later. Economists have documented that on average for affected professions, this policy approach led self-employment to decrease by 10.5% and overall employment to decrease by 4.4%.

We’re talking about destroying people’s livelihoods, about killing jobs. Our state should see California as a cautionary tale and never let anything like that happen here.

But instead, with Senate Bill 2782, this committee is poised to turn California’s nightmare into New Jersey’s roadmap.

Our Legislature needs to fix the underlying ABC Test problem that our state’s Labor Department just exacerbated with its recent rulemaking, a problem that we all have been asking our government to correct at standing-room-only public hearings since 2019.

This legislation does the opposite, keeping the bad policy in place and starting the California-style carveout chaos on top of it.

And make no mistake: Chaos is the correct word to describe this carveout process. Senate Bill 2782—in its original form this winter—was an attempt to protect three professions from the Labor Department’s ABC Test rule: certain types of truckers, financial advisers and insurance brokers.

Now, based on what I heard heading into this hearing from folks in the trucking industry, it’s down to only two professions that this bill would protect. The truckers who thought they were getting an exemption were booted out of the bill. But then, the New Jersey AFL-CIO sent out an email that suggested the bill would somehow now exempt motor clubs, primarily tow truck drivers, whatever that will turn out to mean.

No matter what actually happens at the hearing today, we’re witnessing a textbook case of playing favorites. And when you add what’s happening to the fact that this ABC Test rule faced 99% opposition during the public-comment process, the cronyism involved with picking winners and losers is indefensible.

Opposition to the Labor Department’s rule came from people in all kinds of professions seeking help. There were musicians. Bakers. People involved with running the youth leagues at our parks. The public comments detailed how this rulemaking threatens the work of therapists who help disabled toddlers as part of our Early Intervention System. How it threatens the ability of poor people to get legal help from our state’s Office of the Public Defender. And so many, many more.

What this committee is telling us all today, with Senate Bill 2782, is that none of the rest of us matter. That not even all three of the professions from the original version of the bill matter.

And what’s worse is that this bill follows numerous injuries that the administrations of Governors Phil Murphy and Mikie Sherrill have already heaped upon us.

The public comments explained in great detail how, for years, the Murphy administration used mischaracterized data and research to push the very freelance-busting policy that makes these carveouts necessary. But the Sherrill administration wrote, in the newly adopted rule, that this use of mischaracterized data and research is irrelevant.

That’s right—fundamental facts about independent contracting are being considered irrelevant in making independent-contractor policy.

The public comments also explained in great detail how the ABC Test at the root of this rule is already causing economic harm in our state, the same as in California. Economists submitted research in New Jersey that documented a 3.81% decrease in W-2 employment, a 10.08% decrease in self-employment and a 3.95% decrease in overall employment compared to states that do things differently—and with disproportionate harm to women, who are far more likely to be independent contractors than we are to own businesses that have employees.

These results in New Jersey are eerily similar to what members of the California Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights documented happening in that state. They, too, wrote about disproportionate, negative impacts on women, as well as immigrants, people of color and the politically powerless.

Notably, two of the professions that Senate Bill 2782 would apparently still protect are historically male-dominated and white. I understand the logic behind these professions being in the bill—that certain existing federal law should shield these financial advisers and insurance brokers from the State of New Jersey’s freelance busting—but that philosophy is being selectively applied. The original version of this bill made the case that the same philosophy also should protect truckers. Now, I guess, it doesn’t.

And frankly, one could just as easily argue that because language and communications access is required under the Voting Rights Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act, the translators and interpreters should receive a carveout. Or that with copyright law dating back to the very first U.S. Congress and being described in the U.S. Constitution, writers and artists should receive a carveout.

Unfortunately for our right to earn a living, none of us have the kinds of powerful lobbyists that the financial advisers and insurance agents have here in New Jersey.

And unfortunately for the State of New Jersey, all of us taxpayers are now going to be on the path to California Crazytown that included lawsuits with plaintiffs complaining that there were exemptions for delivery drivers hauling milk, but not for delivery drivers hauling juice.

New Jersey Senate Bill 2782 is quite simply unfair. It layers bad legislation on top of awful rulemaking, all to support policy built on mischaracterized data and research.

I strongly urge the committee to reject this bill and instead to advance Senate Concurrent Resolution 62, which would protect everyone from the Labor Department’s deeply misguided independent-contractor rule.

I also urge the Legislature to consider the additional recommendations that I make in my report, “Extremism vs. Entrepreneurism,” which I submitted with my written testimony today. These recommendations include reinstating the much more reasonable IRS Test regulatory language to determine independent-contractor status in our state.

Truth, economic consequences and the clearly stated will of the people should matter. Our government needs to do better.

Thank you, and I remain at your disposal if there is any way I can be of assistance.

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This is a rollover bill that Labor Committee Chairman Gordon Johnson initially put forward during the lame-duck session over the winter. Senate Bill 2782 (previously known as S4839) would carve out a handful of finance and trucking professions to protect them from the state Department of Labor & Workforce Development’s overly restrictive independent-contractor rule that is scheduled to go into effect October 1.

This bill is now co-sponsored by New Jersey Senate Budget Committee Chairman Paul Sarlo, a Democrat who serves as Deputy Majority Leader. Previously, Sarlo:

• has made clear that he only cares about protecting independent contractors in the financial industry

• was caught on camera laughing out loud while standing next to a flag-draped casket, talking about how New Jersey’s regulations kill women- and minority-owned small businesses that don’t have lobbyists

• went out of his way to interject and try to protect acting Labor Commissioner Kevin Jarvis from recent questioning about what the administration of Governor Mikie Sherrill is doing with independent-contractor policy

Apparently, Johnson and Sarlo have now joined forces in taking New Jersey down the disastrous path that California already demonstrated to be an economic failure, of playing favorites with carveouts from bad independent-contractor policy instead of fixing the bad policy itself.

It’s a path that ultimately ended up with the Golden State carving out more than 100 professions in ways that don’t even work to this day, a path that, ultimately, members of the California Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights described as having a disproportionate and negative impact on women, people of color, immigrants and the politically powerless.

The 600+ Affected Professions

Carving out just a handful of professions from a freelance-busting rule is the literal definition of playing favorites. It’s textbook cronyism, and it’s morally wrong.

In California, more than 600 affected professions have already been identified. Karen Anderson, founder of the grassroots group Freelancers Against AB5, took the time to compile the list, which New Jersey lawmakers also have in hand. I included this list, with Karen’s blessing, in the “Extremism vs. Entrepreneurism” report that I published back in February and then submitted as written testimony here in New Jersey last month.

Congressman Kevin Kiley, R-California, read this list of affected professions into the public record a couple years ago while standing in the well of the U.S. House of Representatives, trying to stop the federal government from following California’s ill-fated lead during the Biden administration.

This is who New Jersey is choosing not to protect if lawmakers advance the Johnson-Sarlo bill this week, instead of stopping the bad independent-contractor rule and crafting more reasonable policy for everyone:

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The Right Solution

The better choice that New Jersey’s lawmakers could make right now would be to champion Senator Declan O’Scanlon’s concurrent resolution, SCR62. It would invalidate the Labor Department rule before it can go into effect on October 1.

After that, New Jersey’s Legislature should put in place meaningful guardrails to protect the incomes and careers of all the state’s estimated 1.7 million independent contractors, including people in the hundreds of professions that don’t have lobbyists and have no chance of ever seeing a carveout.

As numerous people (including me) testified last month before the state Senate Labor Committee, the best path to achieving that fair and equitable goal is to reinstate the IRS Test regulatory language that is far more reasonable—and that has not been weaponized against legitimate business relationships the way ABC Test regulatory language keeps being weaponized in California and New Jersey alike.

The mere existence of this Johnson-Sarlo bill is an admission of utter policy failure. When financial professionals and owner-operator truckers who earn six figures a year are among those who need a carveout just to keep working, it’s clear that the regulatory language, and the way it’s being interpreted and applied, are already well beyond the bounds of reason.

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The recipe said “add a dash of salt,” so I would add what I understood to be a dash of salt. I thought the mashed potatoes tasted great. But one brother-in-law would complain that it was too much salt, even if I only dropped in a few grains. One sister-in-law would always admonish me that it was far too little salt, even if I dumped in an entire box of Morton’s Kosher.

My problem was that I was up against the concepts of interpretation and application.

When the recipe says “add a dash of salt,” there’s room to interpret exactly what those words on the page mean, and then to take action and apply that interpretation in ways that other people may find wholly indigestible. Subjectivity comes into play, far more so than if the recipe says “add 1/4 teaspoon salt.”

This is the same concept, interpretation and application, that is causing so much turmoil right now when it comes to independent-contractor policy in my home state of New Jersey.

What the State Just Did

New Jersey’s Labor Department, about a year ago under the administration of Governor Phil Murphy, proposed its own interpretation of ABC Test regulatory language that is used to determine who is, and is not, a legally operating independent contractor.

The ABC Test is already a hard one to pass on its own, but the interpretation of this already difficult test that New Jersey’s Labor Department proposed was so extreme that attorneys said it would almost entirely eviscerate the ability of anyone to be an independent contractor in the state. The proposed interpretation meant that pretty much nobody would be able to pass the test anymore.

Some of the ideas New Jersey’s Labor Department proposed were really over-the-top, such as suggesting that if independent contractors were required to follow basic public safety laws, then those same independent contractors should have to be reclassified as employees. Industry experts said that would have meant things like owner-operator truckers being required to become employees if a contract they signed required them to stop at red lights.

Legal experts also said the proposed version of New Jersey’s ABC Test rule was trying to interpret some parts of the test right out of existence. As if the Labor Department could look at the words of the ABC Test on the page and just decide they meant something else entirely. “Or” became “and.” That sort of thing.

Kind of like if my mother-in-law had interpreted “add a dash of salt” to mean “season liberally with red pepper flakes” and then set everybody’s tongues on fire at the dinner table.

What’s most important to note, though, is that in putting forward this proposed interpretation, the Labor Department didn’t say it wanted to change the actual text of New Jersey’s ABC Test itself. That’s something the Legislature has the power to do, and it is, in fact, what the same unionists first tried to get the New Jersey Legislature to do back in 2019, following California’s disastrous lead. New Jersey’s Legislature rightly shot down that idea after massive public outcry.

So now, with New Jersey’s Labor Department rulemaking, the unionists are taking another crack at the ABC Test. They’re trying to interpret and apply what’s on paper in ways that are causing all kinds of consternation.

New Jersey acting Labor Commissioner Kevin Jarvis, in an effort to defend the rule that the state Labor Department just adopted, is pushing the line hard in publications like Law360 that nothing is changing about the ABC Test itself:

“The final rule ‘does not change the law at all, does not change the ABC test in any way, shape or form, and anyone saying otherwise is simply misinformed and just wrong,’” said Jarvis, who is also Democratic Gov. Mikie Sherrill’s nominee for labor commissioner.

His argument is intended to persuade New Jersey’s legislators that they shouldn’t be concerned about the 200-plus-page rule that the Labor Department just dropped—200 pages about interpretation and application that, according to Jarvis, don’t change anything at all.

Does that sound plausible to you? Or do you think, just maybe, those 200 pages are intended to change the amount of salt in the recipe?

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Try This Interpretation Yourself

The ABC Test is a three-part test with Prongs A, B and C. As just one example of what’s being debated, Prong C of New Jersey’s ABC Test currently reads: “Worker is customarily engaged in an independently established trade, occupation, profession or business.”

This means that to pass Prong C of New Jersey’s ABC Test, the independent contractor would have to meet that definition.

So, what do the state’s regulators consider sufficient to meet that definition? What is their interpretation and application of those words in Prong C of New Jersey’s ABC Test?

You might think, as a matter of common sense, that having a registered business entity like an LLC would satisfy the definition of being an established business.

Or you may imagine that holding a professional license in a trade would mean being customarily engaged in that trade.

But those beliefs would be your interpretation. As attorneys noted about Prong C of the ABC Test under this newly adopted New Jersey rule, the state is choosing to interpret and apply those words differently:

“Under Prong C, the final regulations still specify that holding a professional license, having multiple employers, registering a business entity, receiving a 1099 tax form, or carrying insurance are not individually sufficient to establish an independently established business.”

So what, then, would actually allow an independent contractor to pass Prong C of New Jersey’s ABC Test under this newly adopted rule’s interpretation?

It sure feels to me as if the Labor Department is saying the mashed potatoes may be properly salted, but not based on the use of table salt, sea salt, kosher salt, flake salt, Himalayan pink salt, black salt, smoked salt or chunks from a big ol’ salt lick.

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‘They Just Weren’t Written Down’

Acting Labor Commissioner Jarvis also told Law360 that he can’t imagine why the state’s Legislature might need to take action now to stop this newly adopted Labor Department rulemaking, because:

“This is literally what we at the department have been using to enforce the law. They just weren't written down in regs.”

What our legislators need to understand is that what Jarvis said there may indeed be true—and incredibly problematic.

It is, after all, what numerous business and industry people have been complaining about for years. New Jersey’s Labor Department may have been interpreting and applying the ABC Test in ways the Legislature never imagined, understood or intended.

The Labor Department, with this newly adopted rule, may have simply admitted the quiet part out loud about just how far out of bounds its own interpretation and application of the ABC Test has already become—so far out of bounds that the original proposed version of this rule drew concern from Democrats who chair the New Jersey Senate Labor, Commerce and Government Oversight committees. They wrote:

“[U]pon reviewing the rule proposal, we are concerned that it departs from the existing statute and case law controlling worker classification.”

The Labor Department had also called that original, proposed version of this independent-contractor rule an attempt to codify its own interpretation of the ABC Test. To use the words Jarvis chose, it was arguably what the Department had already been doing.

If that’s indeed the case, then it’s well past time for legislators to step in and put a stop to this bureaucratic overreach. If regulators can use the ABC Test to threaten legitimate, mutually beneficial business relationships, then there’s a problem with the test itself, with the interpretation and application of the test, or both.

Hence the standing-room-only public hearing earlier this month in front of the New Jersey Senate Labor Committee, with all of us yet again asking our lawmakers to protect the state’s independent contractors and broader business community from this madness.

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We’ve Seen this Tactic Before

This interpretation and application strategy we are seeing put into play in my home state of New Jersey right now is not new for the freelance-busting brigade. As I detailed in my recent “Extremism vs. Entrepreneurism” report, a unionist in the Obama administration tried a similar maneuver at the federal level more than a decade ago.

Lawyers didn’t hold back about the threat to legitimate independent contractors back then, either. They wrote things in 2015 that sound awfully similar to what we’re hearing lawyers say about what’s going on in New Jersey today, all based on an appointed bureaucrat’s interpretation:

“Purportedly spurred by the receipt of ‘numerous complaints from workers alleging misclassification’ and the history of ‘successful enforcement actions against employers who misclassify workers,’ the interpretation ignores decades of legal precedent concerning the classification of employees and independent contractors in a way that will now challenge many legitimate independent contractor relationships.”

That intepretation at the federal level in 2015 foreshadowed what’s happening in New Jersey right now. The federal interpretation came from an Obama Labor Department appointee named David Weil, who had previously written about independent contractors being a fundamental challenge to union organizing. A member of that same Obama administration team was Robert Asaro-Angelo, who would go on to become New Jersey’s labor commissioner and propose the state’s extreme ABC Test interpretation after a meeting in 2017 that unionists working with Weil coordinated.

Asaro-Angelo dropped his extreme interpretation of the ABC Test and then left office when the new administration of Governor Mikie Sherrill took over this past January. We all had hoped, at that point, that cooler heads would prevail. Sherrill could have just let this proposed rulemaking die.

But our new governor, who got elected with major support from Big Labor, chose to side against New Jersey’s smallest of small-business owners. Under Sherrill’s direction, the state’s Labor Department, now with acting Labor Commissioner Jarvis in command, finalized an edited version of the proposal that Asaro-Angelo had put in play.

This newly adopted independent-contractor rule is scheduled to go into effect October 1 unless the Legislature steps in to stop it.

To paraphrase what a parade of witnesses (including me) told our state Senate Labor Committee at a public hearing on May 11 that dragged on for hours, this adopted version of the rule still has way too much salt in the recipe.

This interpretation and application still threatens the incomes and careers of New Jersey’s estimated 1.7 million independent contractors.

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We’ve Seen Gaslighting Before, Too

Between now and October 1, you’re going to hear a lot of people on both sides of this issue debating what, exactly, New Jersey’s Labor Department just did. The freelance-busting unionists are going to claim variations of “nothing changed with the state’s ABC Test,” while all the rest of us are going to keep banging home the point that this interpretation and application of the ABC Test regulatory language is simply untenable.

I know, it’s more frustrating than listening to somebody’s mother-in-law argue about mashed potatoes on Thanksgiving.

That’s why I recommend thinking about this debate from a more basic level. Instead of trying to understand the policy intricacies, just try to decide which side in the debate you should trust, based on how each side’s claims have panned out in the past.

Back in 2019, all of us independent contractors went to the State House and testified that New Jersey was trying to change our state’s ABC Test in a way that would copy California’s freelance-busting law, Assembly Bill 5. The unionists clapped back that we were all confused and hysterical. The top-ranking unionist in the Legislature, then-Senate President Steve Sweeney, went so far as to write an op-ed that compared us to Russian disinformation agents for even suggesting he might be trying to do such a thing. He insisted that we were dead wrong when we said New Jersey’s Senate Bill 4204 was trying to copy California’s Assembly Bill 5.

Sweeney even swore up and down that all he was trying to do was codify the existing version of the ABC Test in New Jersey. As Insider NJ reported in 2019, under the headilne “Senate Will Amend Employee ‘Misclassification’ Bill That Codifies Existing Regulations”:

“These bills will simply codify into law existing regulations so that future administrations can’t ignore, change or discard the protections already in place to protect workers against the loss of basic rights by being misclassified,” said Senator Sweeney, the sponsor of the Senate bill. …

“The legislation is not the same as the California law.”

Today, we know that was all unionist gaslighting.

Don’t take my word for it. Read what the Sherrill administration just wrote about what happened back then, on pages 90 and 91 of the newly adopted independent-contractor rule:

“As to the 2019 New Jersey bill (S4204), as introduced, it would have altered New Jersey’s statutory ABC test in ways that made it virtually identical to the ABC test in California AB5.”

Virtually identical to California’s freelance-busting law.

The truth, it turns out, was exactly what independent contractors and the broader business community have been saying all along.

But wait—before you decide which side you should trust right now in Trenton, compare the way Sweeney described what he was doing in 2019 with what’s happening today. Sweeney assured legislators from here to eternity that he just wanted to codify existing regulations.

Now, look at what acting Commissioner Jarvis said earlier this month in testimony before the New Jersey Senate Labor Committee. As reported by the New Jersey Monitor:

“The rules do not change the law or the test,” Jarvis told the panel. “The analysis performed as part of the ABC test is no different since we adopted the regulations than it was before, meaning what was in place on May 4th remained in place on May 5th. The only thing we did was codify 90 years of case law and final agency decisions.”

Once again, the claim is that they just want to codify what already exists—the same language that Labor Commissioner Asaro-Angelo used when he dropped the extreme proposed version of this rule that the Sherrill administration just scaled back.

And lest we forget, the state merely wants to codify is also the same claim that then-California Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez made when she argued that California’s Legislature should pass Assembly Bill 5 because all it would do is codify a California Supreme Court ruling.

Now, Gonzalez—a card-carrying Teamster at the time, and currently the head of the California Federation of Labor Unions, AFL-CIO—failed to tell California’s legislators what eventually came out years later in a report by members of the California Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. They noted in their report that none of the parties involved with the court ruling Assembly Bill 5 supposedly codified had actually proposed the adoption of this brand-new ABC Test in California. The California Supreme Court had just injected it into the case—in a ruling that cited the work of David Weil. Yup, the same David Weil who had issued the federal interpretation that threatened legitimate independent contractors.

Gonzalez pushed this kind of freelance busting into California law through that state’s Legislature and Assembly Bill 5 by saying this:

Assembly Bill 5 is necessary to codify what the courts have already ruled.

What we know today is that California’s Assembly Bill 5 didn’t just codify that court ruling; it expanded on it in ways that ultimately led California’s Legislature to carve out more than 100 professions. The version of the ABC Test at the heart of Assembly Bill 5 created too much chaos for businesses and legitimate independent contractors trying to operate in the state.

Now, watch what New Jersey acting Labor Commissioner Jarvis testified earlier this month as he defended the New Jersey Labor Department’s interpretation of the ABC Test. The language he uses is eerily similar to what Gonzalez said in California:

Most legislators trying to figure out whom they should trust in this debate are just like you: They likely don’t know the intricacies or backstories of the court rulings that any of these people are describing when they say they just want to codify what the courts have already ruled.

In New Jersey, for instance, legislators may not realize what actually happened with regard to the East Bay Drywall case that both the Murphy Labor Department cited and the Sherrill Labor Department cited as being fundamental to this independent-contractor rulemaking:

• The New Jersey Supreme Court, in its 2022 East Bay Drywall ruling, relied in part on information from the 2019 Report of Gov. Murphy’s Task Force on Misclassification. The court referenced the Task Force Report on page 26 of its ruling, specifically with regard to the construction industry.

• That East Bay Drywall ruling was handed down several years before it came out, in 2025, that there is mischaracterized data about the construction industry in that Murphy Task Force report.

• The specific line of the Task Force Report that the New Jersey Supreme Court cited in its 2022 East Bay Drywall ruling is, according to the Task Force Report itself, based on work by the National Employment Law Project. It’s a progressive nonprofit in New York City whose highly questionable circular report-writing became the subject of fiery debate before the U.S. Congress in 2025.

• Most recently, earlier this year, NELP lost a significant portion of its funding and began layoffs expected to cut the size of the staff by more than half.

Does that sound to you like the kind of organization or information we want our courts, agencies and state Legislature to be relying on to make independent-contractor policy?

I say once again, go with what feels true in your gut.

Which real-world effects do you believe will result if New Jersey’s rule is allowed to go into effect on October 1?

Do you believe that nothing is actually changing after the adoption of this 200-plus-page rule? Or do you believe that we’re watching a playbook being put into motion in New Jersey, yet again, attempting to follow California’s lead?

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Final Considerations

There are a few more things you should take into consideration before you make your final judgment about which side you should trust in New Jersey’s independent-contractor policy debate:

• The Murphy administration used mischaracterized data about far more than the construction industry in its Task Force Report about misclassification, a report that was used to get New Jersey to this point with the Labor Department rulemaking. Numerous unionists then cited that Task Force Report, along with other highly questionable research, in their public comments supporting this rulemaking. Opponents filed public comments explaining that there are serious problems with the Task Force Report. But the Sherrill administration, on page 192 of the adopted rule, wrote that “critique of the work of 2019 Misclassification Task Force Report is not relevant to this rulemaking.”

• Economists documented in a public comment that New Jersey’s ABC Test is already having a disproportionate and negative impact on women. Those findings highlighted real-world consequences that mirror what members of the California Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights documented happening as a result of overly restrictive independent-contractor policy in that state. But the Sherrill administration, on page 183 of the adopted rule, stated: “The Department is not obligated to address economic research on the impact of “the ABC test…”

• The only people who testified in favor of this rulemaking at last summer’s public hearing overseen by New Jersey’s Labor Department were either on a union payroll or affiliated with organizations that had strong union ties. A standing-room-only crowd outnumbered them 3-to-1.

• The only written public comments in support of this rulemaking came almost entirely from that same unionist bunch.

• That same bunch of unionists was yet again the only real source of support at the public hearing this month before New Jersey’s Senate Labor Committee, where acting Commissioner Jarvis was mingling with the head of the New Jersey AFL-CIO prior to giving testimony.

Now, make your decision.

Do you believe that New Jersey’s legislators would be wise to listen to the unionists and let this newly adopted rule stand?

Or should legislators listen to all the rest of us now and step in to block this rulemaking, just as they correctly listened to us back in 2019 and stopped our state from copying California’s Assembly Bill 5?

It’s OK to trust your own judgment here. After all, you don’t have to know anything about labor or employment policy to understand the difference between salt and pepper, and to realize that some people need to be thrown all the way out of our kitchens.

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Well, folks, as of yesterday in Massachusetts, we are officially living in the age of radically different union organizing.

App Drivers Union, an affiliate of 32BJ SEIU and the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, won recognition from the commonwealth's Department of Labor Relations to represent nearly 70,000 rideshare drivers all across Massachusetts.

It’s the first union of rideshare drivers to be certified in the United States. And not a single one of those drivers was reclassified as a unionizable employee first. The union is now positioned over the independent contractors, whether they like it or not.

To better understand what just happened in Massachusetts, and what is likely to happen next, I reached out to Alex MacDonald, an attorney with the Littler Mendelson law firm who is also co-chair of the Workplace Policy Institute. He wrote this paper a couple years ago about the perils of sectoral bargaining for rideshare drivers in Massachusetts, a situation that he described at the time as “legally dubious” and “economically disastrous.”

Here’s his take on what just happened in the Bay State, and what it could mean for all kinds of industries nationwide next.

Q&A with Alex MacDonald

Let’s start by giving readers a basic understanding of what sectoral bargaining is, since most people have never heard of it. Even the unionists who support the idea of sectoral bargaining have called it “admittedly radically different” from how union organizing has always been done in the United States. Would you agree with that characterization?

Yes, that’s the right way to put it. In the United States today, we have what’s called “enterprise” bargaining. That basically means workers decide whether to join a union workplace by workplace. If they do decide to join a union, they bargain with the employer only for their own workplace. (This is sometimes called the “bargaining unit.”) The employer and the union can agree to bargain at a higher level—say, for multiple plants at the same time. But they don’t have to do that. The default rule is that bargaining is local and affects only a single workplace.

Sectoral bargaining is different. Instead of organizing workplace by workplace, the union organizes an entire industry at once. It negotiates a single agreement with all employers in the industry. That agreement then applies to every workplace. You can think of it as collective bargaining at a higher level of remove: It means that the same terms apply in every workplace.

That’s why unions like sectoral bargaining. For them, it’s efficient. They don’t have to organize hundreds of workplaces and negotiate dozens of agreements. They can organize all the workers at once and negotiate a single contract. It gives them more power for less work.

So the union organizers like sectoral bargaining because it makes their lives easier. What’s the flip side of that equation?

There are downsides for everyone else. For one, it means that employees cannot choose to work in a nonunion firm. They can’t go work for a different employer because that employer is covered by the same agreement. They’re stuck with a Hobson’s choice: the union’s contract or nothing at all.

There are also downsides for consumers. Unions raise labor costs; economists used to peg the cost premium at about 14%. That premium has come down over the years, in part because unions represent a smaller slice of the workplace and so have less bargaining power. But in a sectoral-bargaining system, they represent everyone. So they have more leverage to extract higher costs. And because every employer has to pay those costs, each individual employer is less worried about passing the costs on. The result is that consumers pay more across the board.

Consumers also may have less choice. Some economists think that sectoral bargaining slows innovation. The sectoral terms are usually written by big, entrenched businesses with a lot of power at the bargaining table. These businesses have an interest in getting terms that work well for them and not necessarily their smaller rivals. They’re OK with complicated seniority, benefit and grievance provisions because they have sophisticated human resources and labor relations departments. They can spread the cost. But small businesses can’t do that so easily. They grow slower or get driven out altogether. The result is less diversity, less competition and, ultimately, less innovation.

Unionists figuring out how to get sectoral bargaining into U.S. law sort of began in California with the fast food industry back in 2022, right?

Kind of. The California Fast Food Council was labor’s first big sectoral win. The council is essentially a quasi-sectoral forum, where employers and unions jointly set terms with government officials. At the time, it was the closest thing we’d seen to sectoral bargaining in the pure private sector.

But even before that, unions had been experimenting with sectoral systems in public-supported industries. For example, the SEIU had been active in the home-care industry. Home-care workers are often private employees, but their pay is supported by state money. The SEIU pushed for (and got) laws that allow it to represent these workers on a statewide level. It now represents these workers in California, Washington State, Illinois and elsewhere. It used these laws to add hundreds of thousands of new members—a huge success in an era of otherwise declining union membership.

And what it took from that success is that it can organize without really organizing: It just needs a friendly state to pass a friendly law.

And then in November 2024, while the whole country’s attention was on President Trump versus Vice President Harris, unionists in Massachusetts managed to expand this sectoral bargaining idea in a way that specifically targeted the rideshare industry, correct?

That’s right. The Massachusetts sectoral law was based on a ballot initiative, which was sponsored and funded by the SEIU. It passed with about 54% of the vote. It was pitched just as a way to give rideshare drivers the same right to join a union that employees have.

But during the campaign, there wasn’t much talk about how this law differed from normal collective bargaining. The press coverage was muted at best.

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After that ballot measure passed in Massachusetts in November 2024, what needed to happen for a union to gain control over all the rideshare drivers in the state?

First, the union had to get signatures from 5% of all “active” drivers. Those signatures got it access to contact information for the rest of the drivers.

It then had two options: It could demand an election, or it could keep collecting signatures. If it collected signatures from at least 25% of active drivers, it could be automatically certified as the bargaining representative of every driver in the state. It seems to have taken the second option.

The term “active driver” is misleading. It includes only drivers who have completed at least the median number of rides in the last six months. In other words, it includes only half of all drivers.

The other half don’t count. Their signatures are unnecessary, and they never vote. They basically have no voice.

This unionization effort has the full backing of Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey. She called Monday’s news a “historic day for the state, for the country.”

Am I right to be frightened when I hear that kind of language? It reminds me of September 2019, when California Governor Gavin Newsom called Assembly Bill 5 “landmark legislation”—right before AB5 smashed the incomes and careers of all kinds of independent contractors in that state.

The comparison to AB5 is interesting. AB5’s all-but-acknowledged purpose was to convert a lot of app-based workers from contractors into employees. It didn’t work: Even while AB5 affected a whole lot of other workers, app-based workers were carved out by a ballot initiative.

The Massachusetts law seems to have learned from that experience; it takes a different tack. It acknowledges that these workers are still independent contractors. But even so, it covers them with a system of unionization that gives them less voice than if they were employees.

By some measures, it is the worst of all worlds for these workers.

Is there any way for an individual rideshare driver in Massachusetts to opt out of union representation? Or is it accurate now that if you are a rideshare driver in Massachusetts, you are represented by this union whether you like it or not?

No, there is no way to opt out. Once the union is certified, it is the exclusive bargaining representative of every driver—even the ones who couldn’t vote.

What is the likelihood of lawsuits being filed over this sectoral-bargaining arrangement in general, and on what grounds could those cases be brought?

Some lawsuits have already been filed to challenge similar schemes. For example, a few months ago, a coalition representing nursing homes challenged a Minnesota law establishing a quasi-sectoral board for the nursing-home industry. (Full disclosure: I am part of a team representing that coalition.)

The lawsuit argues that the board violates the First Amendment, the Due Process Clause, the Sherman Antitrust Act and the National Labor Relations Act. Similar arguments could be made against the Massachusetts law.

I’m trying to wrap my mind around the enormity of what might come next, both for rideshare drivers all across America and for all kinds of other industries. Where do you think things will go from here?

In the short term, these laws will likely spread. One has already been adopted in California. Others have been proposed in Minnesota and Illinois. Whether they spread any further may depend on what happens on the ground. If costs shoot up and work opportunities disappear, other states may hesitate before going down this road. But that will depend on whether consumers, workers and voters reject the system.

What else do you think it’s important for readers to know about what just happened in Massachusetts?

People should understand that this isn’t just about the rideshare industry. It’s about a new way of organizing. Unions see this kind of law as a road back to their former influence in the workplace.

They aren’t going to stop with rideshare. This system will come to other sectors.

For updates on this and other labor and employment issues, follow Alex MacDonald on LinkedIn.

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We talked for about six and a half minutes about what the State of New Jersey just did with regard to independent-contractor policy through Labor Department rulemaking, and why so many of us now hope that cooler heads will prevail as the Legislature looks to make changes before the newly adopted and deeply misguided rule takes effect on October 1.

In This Interview

Some things you’ll hear me mention in this interview, if you want to do a deeper dive for more information:

• a public hearing that happened in Trenton on May 11 before the New Jersey Senate Labor Committee

• evidence that research and data the State of New Jersey used to get us to this point is mischaracterized and in some cases wholly indefensible

• economic research that shows New Jersey is already being harmed by this ABC Test policy

• California research that, like the New Jersey economic research, found a disproportionate and negative effect on women with this kind of overly restrictive independent-contractor policy

You’ll also hear Bill mention the New Jersey Business & Industry Association’s opposition to this rulemaking. You can find what I believe is the NJBIA’s most recent story here (and lots more if you search the NJBIA website, such as this story published one day earlier).

As you watch the interview on Bill’s show about all of this and more, please forgive all the toys you can see behind me on my den floor. Molly the Beagle mix is now 4 months old. When I’m not fighting to stop freelance busting, I’m in an epic battle against teething.

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The rule is scheduled to go into effect October 1, which gives legislators several months to pass legislation and fix this freelance-busting mess.

I live-tweeted the testimony over on X, if you want to check out the play-by-play from the four hours that the hearing dragged on. You can also listen to the entire hearing here on the state’s website.

The upshot is that it was a rerun of the public hearing the Labor Department held last summer, where the only real support in the room for this rulemaking came from unionists—with organized labor standing against pretty much everyone else in the entire state.

Extremism vs. Entrepreneurism on Display

Independent contractors and the business community spent hours yesterday urging lawmakers to step in and pass legislation that would create more reasonable policy, while unionists once again testified against us, one after the next, in support of the Labor Department rule that targets independent contracting.

Prior to the hearing, in a scene that demonstrated just how close the administration of Governor Mikie Sherrill is to organized labor, acting New Jersey Labor Commissioner Kevin Jarvis mingled with Charles Wowkanech, head of the NJ AFL-CIO.

Jarvis then gave testimony that several witnesses (including me) challenged later in the hearing.

Unfortunately, my camera failed to record video of my testimony, and there is no video from the state—only an audio recording of the hearing. But suffice it to say that, as usual, I found myself in a hearing room largely dominated by men, testifying before a panel of senators who are all male, as debate raged about policy that economic research shows is already having a disproportionate and negative impact on women.

Prior to reading from my prepared notes, I testified about three things that happened earlier in the hearing. You can hear me do that in the audio clip below, followed by excellent testimony from attorney Alex MacDonald on behalf of the Flex Association, after which I add a bit more that’s based on this public comment filed by economists at the Mercatus Center:

If you’d like to read my full five-page written testimony, it’s here:

Kim Kavin Written Testimony Nj Senate May 2026

74.1KB ∙ PDF file

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And the “Extremism vs. Entrepreneurism” report that I also submitted as part of my testimony is here:

Final Extremism Entrepreneurism Feb 2026 (2)

1.67MB ∙ PDF file

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There is no question about what happened at the State House yesterday, just as there was no question about the 3-to-1 opposition to this rulemaking at last summer’s public hearing, where the only people who testified in favor were either on a union payroll or affiliated with organizations that had strong union ties. There is also no question about the 99% opposition we all saw in the written public comments to this rule that the Sherrill administration just adopted, with only a couple dozen of the estimated 9,500 public comments in support—and most of those couple dozen comments from union and union-friendly groups, too.

The only question now is whether the New Jersey Legislature will act differently than the Sherrill administration, and give us government that is of, by and for the people instead of government that is of, by and for the union organizers.

I continue to hope that my home state will end up with independent-contractor policy that’s based on truth, economic consequences and the will of the people.

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The State House is going to be a madhouse. The New Jersey AFL-CIO put out a bulletin saying that those of us who will be showing up to insist that the Legislature do something to fix this mess are “attacking” the newly adopted rule:

In reality, those of us who will be urging the Legislature to act are the same people who were part of the 99% public opposition to this rule—a rule that pretty much nobody except unionists supported, and that the Sherrill administration finalized in defiance of the clearly expressed will of the people. Governor Sherrill sided with the extremists, not the entrepreneurs. It’s our hope that our legislators will now step in and protect the people they were elected to represent.

I’ll be doing my best to share what’s happening in Trenton today live on my X handle, if you want to follow the proceedings there.

Suffice it to say, there’s probably going to be some yelling.

‘Jersey Thing’

In the meantime, I also just received the video clip above of an appearance I made last week on the NJ101.5 “Jersey Thing” show with host Eric Scott.

This video was taped the morning after New Jersey’s adopted rule dropped, when I was in Washington, D.C., for meetings about federal labor policy and hadn’t yet had a chance to read all the way through the state’s document.

I have since published this article about some of the most notable things I’ve found in New Jersey’s adopted rule, including what’s most clear to me: The Sherrill administration is taking the position that truth and economic consequences are irrelevant when it comes to independent-contractor policymaking.

As host Eric Scott makes clear in this clip, it’s pretty unbelievable that this is happening at all.

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In a nutshell, these attorneys are saying publicly what I have heard other attorneys say privately the past couple days: What the administration of Governor Mikie Sherrill just did is an improvement compared to what the administration of Governor Phil Murphy originally proposed, but the root of the policy problem remains the same, and the State of New Jersey is nowhere near good policy for independent contractors or the broader business community.

One lawyer I spoke with made an analogy that I think is easy for anyone to understand. He asked me to imagine a dog-walking service that said there was a 90% chance they would kill my dog.

“You wouldn’t hire that dog walker, right?”

Then he asked me to imagine the service said, “Hey, good news, we made changes and now there’s only a 25% chance we’ll kill your dog.”

You still wouldn’t hire that dog walker, right?

Nobody would. We would all take our business elsewhere to protect the dog.

This is akin to the position of companies trying to work with independent contractors in New Jersey based on this rulemaking, the attorney told me. What the Sherrill administration adopted may be incrementally better than what the Murphy administration originally proposed, he said, but there is still too big of a risk that a company will be accused of employee misclassification and then be forced to pay significant fines for working with independent contractors.

The most predictable outcome, he added, is companies walking away from the independent contracting model to protect their business—which would in turn mean a loss of income and careers for all kinds of self-employed people when the rule takes effect on October 1.

A Real Stunner

In a fascinating turn of events this week, even some of the people who usually disagree with our side in this policy battle are now singing from our hymnal.

The New York-based Freelancers Union, you may recall, is the organization that joined forces with the AFL-CIO and the Democratic Socialists of America about five years ago to try and convince us all that California-style ABC Test regulatory language in federal legislation would be great for independent contractors nationwide. We all disagreed strongly, having seen the horrible outcome in California. And we said things would only keep getting worse with this ABC Test language that unionists are finagling and reinterpreting all across the country to hurt independent contractors.

Well, now, lo and behold, here is what the representative of the Freelancers Union told WPIX this week about New Jersey’s newly adopted ABC Test rulemaking:

“I just want to say to freelancers across the state that we have their back, we’re fighting for them,” said Andrea Gordillo, Chief of Staff at Freelancers Union, a non-profit group.

Gordillo says the rules, as written, don’t surgically target exploitative misclassification and instead make broad sweeps and threaten freelance work.

“The problem isn’t freelancing, it’s forced freelancing,” said Gordillo, “and we want to stamp out one, but not both.”

Yes, you read that correctly. Even the people who stood shoulder-to-shoulder with socialists while all of the rest of us fought for entrepreneurism are now saying New Jersey just went too far with ABC Test regulatory language.

They are, in fact, echoing exactly what I testified last year before the U.S. Senate HELP Committee:

“This is not targeting employee misclassification. This is weaponizing regulatory language to attack independent contractors.”

It’s almost as if independent contractors like me have been right all along.

Which, also astonishingly, is what the Sherrill administration just admitted in this newly adopted rule.

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At Last, One Truth Comes Out

Reading through the Sherrill administration’s 200-plus-page adopted rule can feel like a slog. But boy, was there one bit that I stopped and read a few times because I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.

It’s on pages 90 and 91, and it’s about what happened here in New Jersey back in 2019, when a slew of us independent contractors descended upon the State House to stop lawmakers from passing Senate Bill 4204. We said again and again that S4204 was an attempt to copy California’s disastrous Assembly Bill 5 that threw all kinds of independent contractors out of work. As the New Jersey Chamber of Commerce noted at the time, there were so many of us at S4204’s public hearing in Trenton that our testimony:

“… used up about four hours of a six-hour hearing intended to examine 10 proposed pieces of legislation.”

We were told, again and again, that we were all just confused. That New Jersey S4204 wasn’t trying to copy California’s AB5 at all. That we women were being hysterical.

The head of the New Jersey AFL-CIO, Charles Wowkanech, insisted that passing S4204 would be a good thing. Then-Senate President Steve Sweeney, also a longtime unionist himself, went out of his way to tell the press that New Jersey’s S4204 was different from California’s AB5.

In fact, Sweeney went so far as to write an op-ed that compared us to Russian disinformation agents for even suggesting that the opposite might be true. He called out this op-ed that I wrote in The Washington Post, where I noted the New Jersey bill was “a version of California’s recently passed law.”

Fast forward to this week. According to the rule that the Sherrill administration just adopted, what happened in 2019 was indeed New Jersey’s Democratic Party leadership and AFL-CIO leadership gaslighting us all.

Pages 90 and 91 of the newly adopted rule state:

“As to the 2019 New Jersey bill (S4204), as introduced, it would have altered New Jersey’s statutory ABC test in ways that made it virtually identical to the ABC test in California AB5.”

It took the better part of a decade, but the truth is finally right there in black and white.

As this freelance-busting battle rages on in New Jersey, I urge you to remember who told the truth, and who lied, as you consider the newly adopted rule’s claim that it “has nothing whatsoever to do with either California AB5 or S4204.”

Remember who told the truth, and who lied, as we all get into debate anew about what this newly adopted independent-contractor rule actually is.

And while you’re at it, remember who helped get Governor Sherrill elected.

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‘Not Obligated’

Numerous written comments that were part of the 99% public opposition to this rulemaking called out the following section of the original proposal. This section, shown below in its entirety, represented the New Jersey Labor Department’s effort to determine the jobs impact of this rulemaking.

Public comments said that writing these 16 words was akin to making no effort at all to provide a proper impact analysis:

The Sherrill administration responded to those pubic comments by stating in the adopted rule:

“The Department is not obligated to address economic research on the impact of ‘the ABC test…’”

Yup. That’s really what the adopted rule says. The state isn’t obligated to care about economic research that lays out the effects of this regulatory language.

And what a convenient position that is for the Sherrill administration to take, given that in one of the public comments, economists from the Mercatus Center presented new research that shows New Jersey’s use of the ABC Test has already led to harmful effects compared to states that do things differently:

• a 3.81% decrease in W-2 employment

• a 10.08% decrease in self-employment

• a 3.95% decrease in overall employment

That public comment also noted that “the New Jersey data reveals stark gender disparities: women’s traditional W-2 employment declined by 7.40%, while men’s showed no significant change—raising concerns about disproportionate impacts on women following the policy change. This pattern suggests the policy may inadvertently create gender-specific barriers in the labor market while failing to deliver its promised worker protections.”

All good, apparently. Let the women struggle. There’s no obligation to discuss it at all.

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‘Not Relevant’

Also notable in this newly adopted rule is the Sherrill administration’s response to those of us who pointed out that a startling amount of the data and information the Murphy administration used to get New Jersey to this point with independent-contractor policymaking is mischaracterized, highly questionable and strongly deserving of a full inquest to figure out what the heck actually happened.

Several of us referred specifically in our public comments to a document that the Labor Department itself—in its press release announcing the proposed rulemaking—highlighted with a link as being a key element underpinning all this policymaking. That document was the 2019 Report of Governor Murphy’s Task Force on Misclassification, which the Labor Department calls “comprehensive” in that press release—but whose data is mischaracterized beginning in the very first paragraph.

Here’s how the Sherrill administration responded to the public comments taking issue with the premise, participants, substance, accuracy of related press releases, and transparency of the process that resulted in the report being issued:

“The commenter’s critique of the work of 2019 Misclassification Task Force Report is not relevant to this rulemaking.”

That’s right. The Labor Department said this information was relevant and comprehensive when it proposed the independent-contractor rule, but now says the same information is not relevant as the rule is being adopted.

Again, a convenient position to take when the information we’re all talking about is wholly indefensible.

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See You (Yet Again) on Monday

What’s most clear to me in the pages of New Jersey’s adopted rule is that the Sherrill administration is taking the position that truth and economic consequences are irrelevant when it comes to independent-contractor policymaking. The data underpinning this policy is highly questionable, and economists say people are already getting hurt, but the administration is simply not going to discuss such things.

This situation should be deeply disturbing to everyone, no matter what the lawyers and legislators and partisans and pontificators all end up saying as this policy battle continues to play out between now and October 1, when the rule is scheduled to go into effect.

The New Jersey Legislature should take action before then to stop it.

Last night, the state Senate Labor Committee announced online that at a hearing has been scheduled for 10:30 a.m. Monday: “The committee will receive testimony from the public concerning the Department of Labor and Workforce Development’s recently adopted regulations codifying the department’s interpretation of the ABC test for independent contractor status.”

I guess it’s not enough that we all showed up to pack a conference room standing room only with 3-to-1 opposition at the public hearing last summer, or that we all took the time to write thousands of public comments demonstrating 99% public opposition to the rulemaking, or that key lawmakers have at their fingertips this 98-page report based on those public comments that I personally took the time to compile and send to them with clear lists of key findings and recommendations.

Nope. We all now have to take yet another day off work, pay the sitter, and schlep down to Trenton to argue yet again in front of the cameras about this freelance-busting insanity.

We’re all going to see a lot of information and disinformation in the press and on social media about what this rulemaking actually does. We’re going to hear all kinds of competing arguments in the days, weeks and months to come. It’s going to get geeky and weedy.

That’s OK. You don’t have to be a labor-policy expert to know in your bones what’s happening here. All you have to do is remember these three things:

• Which side has been telling the truth, and which side has been spewing lies for the better part of a decade now?

• Which side figured out the real-world economic impact and sounded the alarm about harm that’s already occurring in New Jersey, and which side said they’re not obligated to even think about that research?

• Which side sniffed out the fact that the data underpinning this entire kind of policymaking is highly questionable at best, and which side said those findings are irrelevant?

And then ask yourself this: Would you trust the people who wrote this independent-contractor rule enough to walk your dog?

See you all in Trenton on Monday morning.

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The Department of Labor & Workforce Development issued a press release with this quote from acting Labor Commissioner Kevin Jarvis:

“We heard from New Jersey’s business community and workers — and we acted on it. We removed provisions in the draft rules that created uncertainty and built a framework shaped by their input, one that protects legitimate independent contractors, supports employees, and respects businesses that follow the rules. At its core, this action has always been about protecting workers through fairness and clarity. When expectations are set, responsible employers can compete on a level playing field, without being undercut by those who misclassify workers.”

The final rule, which is more than 200 pages long, is available to read here.

Early Reactions

Almost immediately, the New Jersey Business & Industry Association issued a press release that stated:

“For over a year, NJBIA has been out front explaining the significant challenges our job creators, our gig workers and our entrepreneurs would face if this Murphy era rule proposal was adopted as stated, effectively grinding significant portions of the gig economy to a halt in New Jersey.

“That proposal significantly reduced flexibility and opportunities for freelance workers who choose to be so, as well as the added costs facing businesses. It is significant to note that the rules would have a negative disproportionate impact on women, working mothers and minorities, not to mention the further hit to New Jersey’s affordability agenda.

“Over the past 90 days we reiterated these extensive concerns and strongly encouraged the Sherrill administration to abandon that misguided proposal through transparent and open dialogue, which was provided. While some of our suggested changes were included, it is definitely a disappointment that any form of a new ABC rule proposal is advancing toward adoption.”

Republican state Assemblywoman Vicky Flynn, on social media, called the state’s action “unprecedented”:

The newly adopted rule, according to the Labor Department, will be operative on October 1, 2026, which is 120 days from the anticipated June 1, 2026, publication/effective date.

Flynn is the Assembly’s primary sponsor of a concurrent resolution that has already been introduced there, as well as in the state Senate, that could invalidate this rulemaking.

Two dozen lawmakers on both sides of the political aisle raised their voices publicly with concerns during the rulemaking process.

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Molly is a Beagle mix who arrived in April at 8 weeks old…

… and is now 14 weeks old ….

… and is in the thick of everything from teething and learning basic commands to trying to run and play while going through growth spurts that make her legs a different length pretty much every day.

Having Molly here has reminded me of two major things that involve independent-contractor policy, and that I hadn’t felt with this level of intensity in a long time.

• Puppies don’t sleep through the night. They know nothing. They’re destructive. They need near-constant attention and have to go potty every two or three hours. As a freelancer, I was able to dial back my workload significantly so I could sleep or work when Molly slept, and so I could devote lots of time to basic training during those key early weeks. Nobody with a W-2 job has that kind of freedom.

• Puppies are expensive. Have you been to a pet store or veterinarian recently? Hired a pet sitter? Signed up for puppy kindergarten? And there’s an endless need for new squeaky toys and teething bones. My den is like the first 20 minutes of Saving Private Ryan. A steady stream of new cadets is required to throw into the jaws of attack. These things all cost money, which my freelance business provides.

All of which makes it incredibly scary that my home state of New Jersey has continued to threaten my livelihood by keeping the Department of Labor & Workforce Development proposed independent-contractor rule alive for possible finalization until today—the last day before the rule is set to expire, one year after its publication in the New Jersey Register.

Far too many of our elected officials think it’s OK to keep threatening the livelihoods of people like me. They still defend this horrible concept of freelance busting, or at best ask for carveouts for favored professions like financial advisers and golf caddies, while leaving people like me with the fear of our entire income being destroyed.

I’m a New Jersey native, middle-aged homeowner, taxpayer and hard worker who is trying to take care of a puppy while writing and editing articles as a freelancer. When this whole policy mess began a number of years ago, I gave lawmakers the benefit of the doubt. I thought they must be confused about what they were doing and whom it would hurt. I, along with many other people, have spent inordinate amounts of time testifying before Congress and before state Legislatures to educate them that when they support freelance busting, they’re hurting people like me.

I’ve demonstrated a lot of patience, but now I’m tired, and Molly will be waking up and needing me again soon. So, let me be succinct.

The fact that New Jersey’s rule proposal made it this far is morally indefensible. This freelance busting needs to stop, once and for all.

The Far Better Approach

At the same time that my home state of New Jersey is demonstrating all the wrong ways to approach independent-contractor policy, we also just had the deadline pass for public comments to be filed about the U.S. Department of Labor’s proposed independent-contractor rule.

The federal rulemaking takes a far better approach to this policy area, one that focuses on two core factors to determine who is, and is not, a legitimate independent contractor:

• whether the company or the individual is in control of the way we work

• whether we have the opportunity to earn more or less through our own initiative and investment

As I just explained above, these two core elements are exactly the two things that have been paramount in my life as an independent contractor during these first six weeks with Molly at home. I’m in total control of when, where and how I work, and I’m able to dial my workload down or up depending on what Molly needs in her earliest weeks.

While the federal rule proposal isn’t perfect—I’m among the people who filed a public comment in support, but with suggestions to improve the language—the federal government is taking a much better approach than my home state. The U.S. Department of Labor is attempting to treat independent contractors like me with respect.

For that reason, I’m a big fan of the following idea with regard to those two core factors in the federal proposal. This idea is from a public comment filed by Wilson Freeman at Pacific Legal Foundation, who previously represented me pro bono in a lawsuit against the Biden administration’s independent-contractor rule:

“The Department could convert the core-factor alignment into a rebuttable presumption. When control and opportunity for profit or loss both indicate independent contractor status, the worker is an independent contractor, absent extraordinary circumstances that the Department or private plaintiff must affirmatively establish.”

What a smart idea. Make the regulatory language that matters far more definitive, so people like me no longer have to worry about activist regulators trying to strip us of our livelihoods.

I also really like the way the attorneys at the Littler law firm used their public comment to describe the overall situation that independent contractors are facing in this never-ending battle between good and bad policy. This bit below is from the Littler public comment, written by Alex MacDonald and Jim Paretti (who also helped me pro bono in the past):

“Even as businesses find it easier to buy services on the market, and even as workers find it easier to sell those services independently, regulators are trying to box them into old models. That, in our view, is a mistake. Regulation works best when it works with the market—accommodating rather than combating the trends moving through the economy. The Proposed Rule takes that approach. It would empower independent work, not stifle it. And for that reason, we support it.”

That’s this policy debate in a nutshell, right there. It’s about whether our state and federal governments are going to empower or stifle people like me. It’s about whether our policies are going to be on the side of extremism or entrepreneurism.

It is also, at a personal level, about whether this cutie-pie and I get to keep living here in New Jersey and going to parks like this one that my tax dollars pay to support, or whether I’m going to be forced to sell my house and move to a red state just so I’ll be able to continue earning income as a freelance writer and editor.

What an utterly ridiculous sentence to have to write, and what a senseless fate to have to contemplate when I should be working with Molly on “sit,” “stay” and “come.”

Having a puppy forces you to focus on only the things that truly matter. We need to do the same with independent-contractor policy at every level of government, before this madness gets any worse.

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