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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Since acting Labor Commissioner Jarvis has not yet had his confirmation hearing, this was our first chance to hear him speak somewhat at length about this policy area.

We still don’t know what Governor Sherrill plans to do with the proposed rulemaking, but it’s fair to say after hearing Jarvis’ testimony that we do now have some insight into how the Sherrill administration might attempt to defend imposing what experts say would be the most restrictive anti-independent contractor regulatory language in the nation, creating an existential threat to the very concept of self-employment in my home state.

We also have an idea of how several powerful Democrats in the majority party plan to address—or not address—this policy problem as well.

The Case Law Argument

Republican state Senator Declan O’Scanlon—who has (thank goodness) sponsored a concurrent resolution that would invalidate the Labor Department’s proposed independent-contractor rule—asked acting Labor Commissioner Jarvis a pretty basic question about the proposal and the thousands of public comments filed in opposition to it.

Senator O’Scanlon requested an update on the status of the proposed rulemaking, and asked Jarvis whether he was open-minded, based on the widespread opposition, about changing the proposal.

That simple question resulted in some noticeable tap dancing.

First came a little jig by Committee Chairman Paul Sarlo, a Democrat who previously made clear in writing that he only wants to protect members of the financial services community from overly restrictive independent-contractor policy, and who seems to think it’s funny how New Jersey’s government kills women- and minority-owned small businesses with regulations.

Watch how Sarlo interjects after O’Scanlon asks Jarvis that very basic question about the rule proposal’s status, and about whether Jarvis is open-minded to changing the proposal. It appears as if Sarlo is reminding Jarvis of whatever they discussed prior to the hearing—like a director helping an actor remember his lines:

After that, acting Commissioner Jarvis answered Senator O’Scanlon’s question in ways that any subject-matter expert could have challenged, and in ways that belied what appears to be real concern about calls for New Jersey to abandon the ABC Test altogether, as the regulatory language becomes increasingly weaponized against legitimate independent contractors all across the nation.

Among other things, Jarvis claims that the proposed new rule is based on 90 years of case law—and then repeats, numerous times, that New Jersey’s Labor Department will be sticking with the ABC Test no matter what happens with regard to the proposed rulemaking:

Nobody at this hearing even asked Jarvis whether New Jersey’s Labor Department was considering abandoning the ABC Test regulatory language, though quite a few of us, including me, have urged the state to do just that. The fact that acting Commissioner Jarvis so forcefully defended keeping the ABC Test felt like listening to a Shakespearean character who gives away the real heart of the game: Jarvis doth protest too much, methinks.

As to the claim that 90 years of case law points toward codifying New Jersey’s proposed rule, I’m not a lawyer like acting Commissioner Jarvis is, but we’ve all seen these kinds of claims about case law end up falling apart again and again at the federal and state levels, for years now.

At the state level, in California, there were suggestions of judicial activism in forcing a weaponized version of the ABC Test into the law, as described by members of the California Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights:

“In 2018, the California Supreme Court decided Dynamex v. Superior Court, a classification case. None of the Dynamex parties proposed the adoption of a brand-new test for classification when the case was briefed or in the lower courts. Long after the case had been briefed, and just weeks before oral argument, the California Supreme Court invited the parties to submit letter briefs on whether it should adopt a new test. Less than three months after oral argument, the California Supreme Court, without prompting from the litigants, unilaterally and retroactively, imposed the ‘ABC Test’…”

Here in New Jersey, as I explained in my report “Extremism vs. Entrepreneurism,” our state-level courts were swayed by Governor Murphy’s misclassification task force claims that included numerous instances of mischaracterized statistics and data. New Jersey’s courts were also swayed by the thinking of former federal Wage and Hour Administrator David Weil, who, my report details, has written for decades about independent contractors being a fundamental challenge to unionism, and who—much like New Jersey’s Labor Department is attempting today—tried to reinterpret existing regulatory language in ways that would restrict self-employment.

I wrote:

“The questionable Governor Murphy Task Force report that’s based on mischaracterized data and research, as well as the extremist thinking of David Weil, influenced New Jersey’s Supreme Court in a case about independent contractors—a case that the Labor Department then turned around and cited when proposing its independent-contractor rule in 2025.”

Combine those things happening in the California and New Jersey courts, and you realize that in two of the most active freelance-busting states, we have questionable rulings about regulatory language that seeks to restrict independent contracting.

On top of that, at the federal level, the U.S. Labor Department during the Biden administration noted that it could not impose the ABC Test through a regulatory rulemaking change without a U.S. Supreme Court ruling or an act of Congress. And when Congress, under Democratic Party control, tried to do just that with the Protecting the Right to Organize Act that would have injected California’s version of the ABC Test into federal labor law, several Democrats joined with Republicans to block it—citing concerns about legitimate independent contractors getting hurt.

Also at the federal level, the U.S. Labor Department under the first Trump administration explained in 2021 how its team reviewed case law in this policy area going back to 1975. That review, while not specifically about the ABC Test, found that while certain court rulings do lean one way or the other on employee classification based on a number of factors—meaning it’s possible to cherry-pick whatever regulatory language you want from various court cases going back decades—there was a “remarkably consistent trend” where in almost every case, if only two regulatory factors were the focus, then the court ruled the same way on proper classification almost every single time.

Those two factors are what’s known in layman’s terms as control and opportunity:

• Is the hiring entity exerting control over the individual, making the individual an employee, or is the individual free to work whenever, wherever and however she pleases, making her an independent contractor?

• Does the individual have the opportunity to earn more based on initiative or investment, with “no” meaning the individual is likely an employee, and “yes” meaning the individual is probably an independent contractor.

The U.S. Labor Department wrote in 2021:

“These two findings imply that whenever the control and opportunity factors both pointed to the same classification—whether employee or independent contractor—that was the court’s conclusion regarding the worker’s ultimate classification. In other words, the Department did not uncover a single court decision where the combined weight of the control and opportunity factors was outweighed by the other economic reality factors. In contrast, the classification supported by other economic reality factors was occasionally misaligned with the worker’s ultimate classification, particularly when the control factor, the opportunity factor, or both, favored a different classification.”

The currently proposed U.S. Labor Department rule would take the federal agency back to focusing primarily on those two core factors to determine independent-contractor status. So would legislation that’s currently before Congress, called the Modern Worker Empowerment Act.

These efforts, according to former U.S. Labor Commissioner Eugene Scalia and current U.S. Congressman Kevin Kiley, R-California, are direct responses to what we are enduring in states where, as Scalia wrote, “liberal activists and politicians have tried to drastically curtail the recognition of independent contractors.”

With all of that in mind, the testimony that New Jersey acting Labor Commissioner Jarvis gave, stating that New Jersey’s currently proposed independent-contractor rule is based on 90 years of case law, is well worth debating.

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Examples, Please

I was also pleased to see New Jersey state Senator O’Scanlon push acting Labor Commissioner Jarvis to provide evidence of people going to the Labor Department and claiming that they didn’t realize they were working as independent contractors.

Here is that exchange:

The reason I’m happy to see Senator O’Scanlon request this information is because we heard similar claims about the scope of employee misclassification out in California that either never were supported with evidence, or that have since been outright debunked.

Here in New Jersey, claims that Governor Murphy’s administration made repeatedly about the scope of employee misclassification have also failed to pan out.

And perhaps most important, according to all of the oral testimony and thousands of written public comments submitted to New Jersey’s Labor Department, there are zero people being unknowingly classified as independent contractors.

You can download and read here the eight (yes, only eight out of about 9,500) public comments that individuals supporting the proposed rule change filed. Not a single one of them says the person was unknowingly working as an independent contractor.

In fact, the vast majority of public comments and testimony that’s on the record from independent contractors is opposed to the rulemaking. You can read key passages from some of the more powerful comments in my “Extremism vs. Entrepreneurism” report here.

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Senators Sarlo and Johnson

One of my biggest frustrations during all these years of fighting to stop freelance busting is that lawmakers often have no idea who independent contractors are and how we earn a living, or if they do, they simply pretend we don’t exist as they push forward with policy that threatens to destroy our livelihoods.

We have seen this problem repeat at the state and federal levels alike, and it was, unfortunately, on display again last week in New Jersey.

Example one: Watch as committee Chairman Sarlo and Acting Labor Commissioner Jarvis banter about how, in a state where an estimated 1.7 million people earn some or all of our income as independent contractors across hundreds of professions, the only people who might be legitimately self-employed are people who already have traditional jobs and then add side hustles to them:

This whole concept that Senator Sarlo articulates is utter nonsense. Tens of millions of Americans happily earn all or most of our income as independent contractors, without simultaneously holding down a traditional job. Quite a lot of us earn more than $100,000 a year this way, and fewer than 1 in 10 of us say we would prefer a traditional job.

Senator Sarlo’s mother’s handymen are not a representative sample of the New Jerseyans whose livelihoods are at stake with this independent-contractor rule.

Example two: Watch this exchange between Senator Gordon Johnson, a Democrat who also serves as chairman of the New Jersey Senate Labor Committee, and acting Labor Commissioner Jarvis:

Numerous things are frustrating about that exchange.

First is the fact that key representatives of the financial services industry and real-estate industry wrote extensive public comments explaining precisely how the proposed independent-contractor rule could harm them. Here’s a snippet from the public comment filed by Prudential Financial, as highlighted in my “Extremism vs. Entrepreneurism” report:

“[T]he Proposed Rule, as drafted, will upend years of established law permitting independent contractors in the State of New Jersey, especially in highly regulated professional industries like insurance, financial services, and securities. Most importantly … we believe that such a significant change will negatively impact New Jersey consumers by severely limiting, if not eliminating, certain distribution channels through which consumers obtain advice and access insurance and investment products that provide critical financial protection.”

There are also well more than a thousand opposition comments from financial services professionals alone—a figure we know because the state Labor Department admitted that about 1,200 of their written public comments were initially omitted from the process altogether. And some of the most powerful speakers we all heard oppose the rule proposal in person at the public hearing last summer were independent contractors in the financial services industry, including this financial adviser:

After that public hearing, New Jersey’s Legislature passed a law to try and protect real-estate agents from this regulatory mess—a move that would not have been necessary if there was no problem with the proposed rulemaking. New Jersey state Senator Joe Pennachio, a Republican, noted in a press release that the intent of the new law was to let real-estate agents “keep their independence.”

Beyond that, Senator Johnson saying at the end of that video clip that he had heard from a few kinds of professionals—real-estate agents, financial planners and insurance agents—is probably true, but it’s far from the whole truth. He introduced legislation that would also protect certain kinds of truckers as independent contractors, yet another group that made its voice loudly heard at the public hearing and in the written public comments.

And, beyond that, I personally took a half day off work and drove more than an hour each way to meet with Senator Johnson and his staff at his office about all the many kinds of independent contractors who are caught up in this regulatory madness. I explained how California’s experience has taught us all that carveouts for favored industries with powerful lobbyists are not the answer. I also emailed Senator Johnson my “Extremism vs. Entrepreneurism” report, which includes a list that grassroots advocates compiled of the more than 600 affected professions in California.

You may also recall my testimony before New Jersey’s Senate Labor Committee this past winter, when I looked Senator Johnson in the eye and said this:

How many times, and in how many ways, do we have to say these things before all of our elected and appointed officials will hear us?

I am deeply grateful to elected officials like Senator O’Scanlon who are listening to the people of New Jersey, treating all of us who are self-employed with respect, and trying to help us overcome these relentless, remorseless attacks against some of the most entrepreneurial people in our state.

It’s my hope that despite some of the things we heard at this committee hearing last week, rational thinking will ultimately prevail, and Governor Sherrill will abandon the proposed independent-contractor rule.

There is still time for our government here in New Jersey to do the right thing and be more accountable to the people it is supposed to serve.

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The 71-year-old Seinfeld has still got it, turning out belly-busters about things as commonplace as riding a Jet Ski and making a cup of tea. He’s a master of his craft who received a well-deserved standing ovation at the end of his set. There wasn’t a single fan still in a chair. Everyone was on their feet, cheering.

It’s odd, I know, to think about freelance busting in the context of a moment like that. And yet, I can’t help but realize how similar that moment felt to a recent video call I was on—a call with hundreds of participants that the U.S. Small Business Administration Office of Advocacy organized to get feedback about the independent-contractor rule that the U.S. Department of Labor has proposed.

There might as well have been cheering at the end of that video call, too. It was yet another overwhelming display of support for a government effort to protect the business model of independent contracting.

Among hundreds of people who participated in that video call, only a few seemed less than enthusiastic about the direction the federal rule proposal is taking. And those few naysayers weren’t particularly memorable. They didn’t make compelling arguments. Their words were a whole lot of what Seinfeld fans know as the yada, yada, yada.

By contrast, supporters of the proposed rule were specific about what they liked in the federal regulatory language, and about what else they’d like to see to strengthen support for independent contractors even more.

It is simply undeniable at this point that when lawmakers or regulators try to restrict independent contractors, they face massive public pushback, but when they try to protect us, the crowd cheers—and wants more.

The Right Direction

I used my speaking time during the U.S. Small Business Administration Office of Advocacy video call to draw attention to what’s happening right now in my home state of New Jersey. We could not be putting on a clearer demonstration here in the Garden State of just how disgusted the public has become with attempts to restrict our freedom to be our own bosses.

We have a proposed state-level rule for independent contractors here in New Jersey that comes from the opposite philosophy of what the federal Labor Department is trying to do. New Jersey’s Department of Labor & Workforce Development proposed a rule that attorneys say poses an existential threat to self-employment and would almost entirely eviscerate the ability to be an independent contractor.

That proposed New Jersey rule did not receive anything even remotely like the warm welcome that the federal proposal is enjoying. Instead, New Jersey’s proposal saw 3-to-1 opposition in testimony at the standing-room-only public hearing, followed by about 9,500 written comments being filed—with a staggering 99% of them opposed.

The contrast in these responses is as bright-line different as it gets. Regulatory language that restricts independent contracting is wildly unpopular. Regulatory language that protects and preserves this way of earning a living is what the public wants. (Need yet more convincing? See California’s Proposition 22 vote.)

What’s happening in New Jersey right now should give the U.S. Labor Department (and lawmakers everywhere) confidence that the direction we are seeing in federal rulemaking is what the public wants, what the business community wants, and what independent contractors want. Anyone who has spent recent years participating in these meetings and hearings knows this isn’t even a close call.

Policymakers who want to hear more directly from the public about this policy issue can take a look at my recent “Extremism vs. Entrepreneurism” report. It amplifies the voices of all kinds of independent contractors and businesses who spoke out in New Jersey, and at the same time uses my state’s public comments to document just how ridiculous the arguments for trying to restrict independent contracting have become.

That report came out in February, and there’s already new material that I could add to it. Just a couple weeks ago, we saw yet more indefensible claims from the New Jersey AFL-CIO, which is brazenly still encouraging lawmakers here in my state to support regulatory language that threatens the incomes and careers of an estimated 1.7 million independent contractors.

We need laws and regulations that protect us from them. For that reason, I’m glad to see the U.S. Department of Labor moving in its current direction, and I hope that states like mine will correct course and begin to do the right thing soon, too. Targeting actual cases of employee misclassification is necessary. Trying to wipe out a way of earning a living that has existed since the day our nation was founded is not even remotely OK.

Our laws and regulations should be based on the principle that everyone is free to earn a living in whatever way works best for us.

Any and all arguments to the contrary are just more of the yada, yada, yada.

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And boy, ain’t that especially true in the workplace. When I was still a staff employee more than two decades ago, I was forced to tolerate every conceivable kind of jerk. There was the boss who only spoke to me on days when I wore miniskirts. The boss who bellowed at the top of his lungs for me to come to his office like a trained circus animal. The guys from the office who thought it was OK to put their hands on me when they were drunk at work functions I was required to attend.

One of my favorite things about being an independent contractor has always been the ability to choose who gets to be on my client roster, and who receives the reply email that says: “I’m sorry, but my schedule is full.” I choose the clients, eliminating the kinds of obnoxious behavior I was forced to endure as a staff employee.

That ability to choose who gets to be part of my day is a huge part of why I love being a freelancer. Being an independent contractor is the best way in the world to avoid horrible people at work.

So, I was happy to see this research from MBO Partners get a push over on X earlier this week. It says 92% of independent contractors report having either a lot of choice (53%) or some choice (39%) about the organizations they work with. This is up from 2019.

High-earning independent contractors (those with annual revenues of $100,000 or more) report even higher levels of choice, with 99% saying they have a lot of choice (58%) or some choice (41%) in clients.

Perhaps most important, the research also shows that 98% of independent contractors are either very satisfied (44%) or satisfied (54%) with their client relationships.

Compare that with how employees are feeling these days, according to Harvard Business Review:

“Everywhere you look, the data points in the same direction: People are miserable at work. One in five employees say their job hurts their mental health. Nearly a third of employees describe their workplace as isolated or impersonal, and over 40% report significant stress.”

It’s almost as if the nearly two-thirds of Americans who tell Gallup we’d prefer to be our own bosses actually mean it—and that most of us feel better when we actually make the leap and do it.

Add It to the List

The research from MBO Partners suggests a core reason why so many people report feeling happier and healthier as independent contractors.

A fair bit of other research also exists about the health benefits of being your own boss. There’s research into how, especially for women, it’s good for your heart health. And how it allows for a healthier work-life balance. And how it helps you feel more optimistic as well as more in control of your life. And how—again, especially for women—self-employment correlates to a lower risk of developing high blood pressure, obesity and diabetes compared to women who have a salary or work for wages.

Mental health improves with self-employment too, according to this research as well as this research about women, in particular, feeling less stress when we’re self-employed. And there’s this research about self-employed men and women alike saying their mental wellbeing improved.

I guess someone, somewhere needed all this research to understand that when you have the ability to kick jerks out of your life, you feel better.

Which leads me to one more notable finding in the MBO Partners research—a key insight that is important to understand when government agencies are developing regulatory language to determine who is a legal independent contractor, and who is not.

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‘Strategic, Lasting Relationships’

One of the challenges with freelance busting is that the people pushing this awful concept seem to think that having a lucrative business relationship with a client should equate to employee status.

I don’t know any independent contractors who believe this is true. When we find good clients—people who are easy to work with, people we get along with, people who respect us as much as we respect them, people who pay on time and pay well—we want to engage in repeat business with them. This desire is as natural as wanting to avoid jerks at work. It’s common sense. When we find people we like to work with, we want to keep working with them.

In the MBO Partners research, that sentiment showed up in this finding:

“Independent contractors prefer long-term partnerships with clients who offer career growth and ongoing opportunities. They also value firms that help them develop new skills: 88% consider learning opportunities either significant (49%) or important (39%), and 62% seek strategic, lasting relationships over one-time projects.”

Back in the old days, freelance writers used to call these kinds of strategic, lasting relationships “anchor clients.” You’d get on the radar of a few great magazines you really enjoyed working with, take on work from those same clients again and again, and have them as anchors for your freelancing business while you added other, smaller clients around them.

None of this has anything to do with being treated as an employee. You’re not under their control, and you’re free to work simultaneously with anyone else. It’s about developing long-term, mutually beneficial business relationships with good people.

But some regulators nowadays are trying to twist that kind of relationship into evidence that we’re not independent contractors at all.

Take the currently proposed (and widely opposed) independent-contractor rule in New Jersey, which says an independent contractor can be deemed an employee based on (among other things):

• The number of customers we have and the volume of business from each of those customers

• The amount of money we receive from the customer compared to the amount of money we receive from other customers in the same industry

Think about that. It could mean that if you’re a freelancer with a strong anchor client, then you could be deemed an employee because of a lucrative, strategic relationship.

Now, compare that kind of thinking to what the U.S. Department of Labor just proposed as a federal rule, focusing on these two core factors:

• The nature and degree of control over the work

• The worker’s opportunity for profit or loss based on initiative and/or investment

In simple layman’s terms, the federal rule proposal is suggesting that what matters most are things like who controls when, how and where we do the work, and whether we have the opportunity to take on other work from other clients.

There’s a lot more to these two rule proposals than these bits I shared above—I have oversimplified things to make a point. And that point is that when we think about these kinds of regulatory factors, philosophy matters. It should take into account what a lot of successful independent contractors are saying in the research.

Our regulations around independent contracting should be designed to stop actual cases of employee misclassification, not to reclassify independent contractors who have built mutually beneficial, lucrative business relationships with good clients.

At the end of the day, I’m with Andy Rooney: “The average dog is a nicer person than the average person.” My favorite clients are the ones who think it’s fantastic that I head out in the middle of every afternoon to walk my dog in the park. They know what I know: that when I feel better, I work better.

And that benefits us all.

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Let’s play a round:

1. In my work writing about the boating industry, I’ve been to the Galapagos Islands and Fiji two times each.

2. In my work writing about the dog industry, I’ve attended auctions where breeders and rescuers had bidding wars into the thousands of dollars for puppies.

3. In my work writing about the franchising industry, I’ve interviewed the CEOs of McDonald’s and Burger King.

Now, you guess which two of those statements are true, and which one is the lie.

That’s the fun version of this game based on a believable lie. The not-so-fun version happens all the time in the political world, where individuals or groups pushing various policies will make statements that sound an awful lot like they could be true, but that in reality are totally false.

These lies are most believable when they’re embedded around a single statement that actually is true, to lend them credibility.

Last week, in my home state, the New Jersey AFL-CIO demonstrated this technique in the following email, which went out to legislators statewide. The email is about the independent-contractor rule that the previous administration of Governor Phil Murphy proposed, and that the current administration of Governor Mikie Sherrill has rightfully now paused to reconsider:

In that email’s six paragraphs, I count four lies and one truth.

And the truth, when it comes to the proposed independent-contractor rule, is just as damning as the lies.

Lie Number One

Let’s start with paragraph two of the New Jersey AFL-CIO’s email, which claims that the state’s proposed independent-contractor rule doesn’t make new policy, but instead simply clarifies the ABC Test that’s used to determine independent-contractor status.

Here is the actual press release that the Murphy administration distributed when it put forward the rule proposal:

The term “new rules” appears a dozen times in the headline and body copy of the Murphy administration’s own press release. And right there in the first paragraph, as you can read for yourself, the press release makes clear that these “new rules” would “codify the NJDOL’s interpretation of the ABC Test for independent contractor status.”

That interpretation would, according to all kinds of experts, make new policy. It would go beyond the bounds of existing statute and case law; would redefine independent-contractor status throughout the state; would defy the will of the state Legislature; and would impose the most extreme and rigid independent-contractor policy in the nation, according to:

• Three of the most powerful Democrats in the New Jersey Senate

• The Democrat who serves as New Jersey Senate majority whip

• Numerous Republicans in the New Jersey Senate and Assembly, including these and these

• Various lawyers including this one and this one and this one and this one

• The New Jersey Business & Industry Association

• The New Jersey Chamber of Commerce

It would also risk undermining access to justice, according to the state’s Office of the Public Defender; jeopardize public safety by decimating the roadside assistance network, according to AAA; be potentially catastrophic for the Early Intervention System that helps infants and toddlers with disabilities, according to people who provide such services; risk children’s safety, according to the New Jersey Recreation and Park Association Public Affairs Committee; and create unworkable assumptions for nonprofits dealing with everything from mental-health issues to the arts, according to the New Jersey Center for Nonprofits.

Indeed, this is all different ways of describing some pretty horrible new policy.

And sadly, we’ve heard this variety of the believable lie in the Garden State before, back in 2019, when unionist and then-state Senate President Steve Sweeney proposed legislation that would have imposed California’s career-crushing version of the ABC Test on New Jerseyans, while claiming his bill was simply a codification of existing regulations.

That bill, which also faced enormous public opposition, rightfully failed to advance—even despite the New Jersey AFL-CIO pushing hard for it, too.

Lie Number Two

The second lie in the New Jersey AFL-CIO’s email to legislators is in paragraph three, which claims the proposed rule would provide clarity for the benefit of those of us who would be subjected to it.

Anyone who has read the proposed rule knows this is false. New Jersey’s Labor Department states outright that the factors it lays out to determine independent-contractor status would not be the only factors it may consider when determining whether someone is properly classified. The Department phrases this in various ways, with this being one example:

“Proposed new N.J.A.C. 12:11-1.5 would also state that the factors are not exhaustive and that the factors listed should not be used as a checklist.”

In other words, if this rule were implemented, none of us would have any way of knowing how to stay within its bounds, because the bounds would be undefined. We couldn’t go down a checklist of requirements and figure out whether we had satisfied them or not. Any random factors could be used to determine legal independent-contractor status. The Labor Department could use a Ouija Board, the fact that a groundhog sees its shadow, or a Polymarket wager to determine independent-contractor status, and it would still technically be within the proposed rule’s wording about stated factors being non-exhaustive.

That’s not providing clarity. It’s doing precisely the opposite.

As one attorney wrote: “The Proposed Rule will likely lead to needless litigation as it does not provide clarity, consistency, or an accurate, even-handed application of New Jersey legal principles to either traditional or modern work relationships that independent workers enter into with New Jersey businesses.”

Another attorney put it like this: “Almost only counts in horseshoes. In the law, likely counts for nothing. Businesses need clarity. … [W]hat certainty can any regulated party have that they are correctly applying the test?”

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Lie Number Three

Lie number three is in paragraph four of the New Jersey AFL-CIO’s email, which claims that the organization itself in no way opposes legitimate independent contractors.

The rest of the paragraph then conflates legitimate independent contractors with misclassified employees, calling us “these same workers.” It says that being a W-2 employee is no different from having the kind of flexibility that independent contractors enjoy, going so far as to say that the very idea of choice in how we achieve the flexibility we want in our lives is a false concept.

This paragraph in the New Jersey AFL-CIO’s email isn’t a one-off, either. It’s a variation on what the organization wrote in its public comment about the state’s proposed independent-contractor rule:

“Workers can perform the same exact jobs they currently are performing—including app-­based delivery and transportation services—when classified as an employee. There is no prohibition of a worker holding multiple part-time jobs with several companies, performing the same work they do as independent contractors, but filing a W-2 as an employee rather than a 1099 as an independent contractor.”

The New Jersey AFL-CIO is not demonstrating respect for independent contractors, or even basic comprehension of how we are different from part-time employees. Instead, the organization is trying to convince legislators that there’s no difference between being an independent contractor who has total control over her work, and an employee who has multiple bosses telling her what to do.

This is an utterly ridiculous claim on its face. Also ludicrous is the idea that companies will create traditional jobs for people currently working as independent contractors. The Labor Department’s own proposed rule states outright that it will not create any jobs—full-time, part-time or otherwise.

Just as we all saw happen in California with overly restrictive independent-contractor policy, the most likely outcome would be independent contractors losing the income and careers that we currently have, and that the vast majority of us wish to keep because we prefer to be independent contractors.

For us, the choice is quite real.

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Lie Number Four

The fourth lie in the New Jersey AFL-CIO’s email is in paragraph five, which states that because independent contractors fall outside the National Labor Relations Act, we have our right to join a union stripped away from us.

That’s not how rights work here in the United States of America.

We have lots of rights, which we may or may not be exercising at any given time. We have the right to free speech whether we choose to speak or not. We have the right to bear arms whether we choose to own a gun or not. We have the right to a speedy trial whether we are involved with the justice system or not.

When we choose to be independent contractors, we are not having our ability to be an employee and to join a union stripped away from us. We are choosing to exercise a different freedom: the freedom to go into business for ourselves, to be our own bosses, something that about two-thirds of Americans tell Gallup they would prefer to be. The ability to make this choice is a freedom that has existed since the day the United States was founded.

The essence of freelance busting is that unionists like the New Jersey AFL-CIO are trying to strip away our freedom to be self-employed, because if we are our own bosses, then they cannot unionize us. By law, they have to respect our choice and leave us alone.

Overly restrictive independent-contractor policy isn’t about granting new rights to us. It’s about granting new rights to union organizers who have become so detached from reality, they now call the business model of being our own bosses—a business model that has helped millions of entrepreneurial Americans to thrive—a danger to the nation’s future.

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The One Truth

Arguably the most damning part of the New Jersey AFL-CIO’s email is the one paragraph that’s entirely true. That’s the first paragraph, which states that several other unions—including LIUNA, the United Brotherhood of Carpenters, the Health Professionals and Allied Employees, the Teamsters and the New Jersey Building and Construction Trades—all support the state’s proposed independent-contractor rule.

That’s accurate. Union organizers are the only real base of support for freelance busting here in New Jersey, with independent contractors ourselves, the broader business community and pretty much everyone else in the state standing 99% opposed among the estimated 9,500 written public comments on file.

In fact, at the public hearing in Trenton last summer, the only people who testified in favor of this proposed rule were either on a union payroll or affiliated with organizations that have strong union ties. That was the only support in the standing-room-only crowd of witnesses who testified for more than three hours straight, 3-to-1 in opposition. I noted the full list of these unionist witnesses in my testimony last year before the U.S. Senate HELP Committee, where I also said in my opening statement that what’s happening is not targeting employee misclassification. It’s weaponizing regulatory language to attack independent contractors.

We are supposed to have government of, by and for the people. Not government of, by and for the union organizers. New Jersey’s proposed rulemaking pits extremism against entrepreneurism, which is why the only way to support it is by playing games like Four Lies and a Truth.

Nobody should be playing this game. Ever. Not here in New Jersey, and not anywhere else, either.

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We discuss a number of things on this episode, including:

• The overwhelming 99% public opposition to New Jersey’s currently proposed independent-contractor rule

• The fact that some of the research and source material being used to push the proposed rule is highly questionable

• The way that overly restrictive independent-contractor policy disproportionately and negatively affects women, based on results that have already been documented in California and New Jersey alike

• What New Jersey’s public comments suggest is really going on in the construction industry (the big problem doesn’t actually appear to be employee misclassification)

• My 2025 testimony before the U.S. Senate about the need for our government to protect independent contractors everywhere from regulatory language that is being weaponized to harm us

• The way that more reasonable independent-contractor policy would tie directly into all the current concerns about affordability

• The very real opportunity that New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill has right now to put our state on a far better path, and to become a national leader in this policy area with a more reasonable approach than the previous administration

To view the whole episode with this segment and more, and to see additional episodes of “Minding Your Business,” check out the show’s home page here.

You can also follow the NJBIA on YouTube to catch all the latest episodes.

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Into this mix comes new research from the employment platform iHire, which surveyed 2,250 U.S. candidates across 57 industries this past January.

The survey results included this nugget:

“63.5% of workers who found freelance work appealing said the rising cost of living has influenced their interest in freelance or project-based work, and 51.4% said freelancing is ‘extremely important’ or ‘very important’ to their overall financial stability.”

Politicians who pontificate about affordability should be doing everything in their power to protect the freedom to be independent contractors. Just as we saw during the Great Recession and the pandemic, when times get tough, hardworking people turn to freelancing.

Play It on Repeat

Quite a few of the iHire research findings line up with results from other recent research—including the fact that most people who are freelancing are doing so by choice.

Contrary to the freelance-busting brigade’s claims that independent contractors are all a bunch of victims who need traditional jobs and unions, iHire found that flexibility (73.2%), remote work (71.3%) and the ability to strike a healthy work-life balance (60.5%) were the top three reasons respondents were drawn to freelance work. These findings line up with findings from:

• U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics: only 8.3% of independent contractors would prefer a full-time job

• MBO Partners: 63% say independent work is fully by choice

• Upwork: only 10% of freelancers want to return to traditional employment

• Soundings/Temple University: “Many freelancers choose this path to achieve a healthier work-life balance, seeking more sustainable work environments compared to traditional roles”

• Wripple: 90% of freelancers and 99% of companies that hire them reported being satisfied or somewhat satisfied with the work arrangements they have

• Fiverr: “Nearly 25% of Gen Z respondents now believe that freelancing is more stable than a traditional full-time job”

And lots more research that you can find here in a list that I regularly update with links to recent findings.

The new iHire survey also asked an interesting question about how people who are freelancing would describe themselves. Here’s what the respondents said:

Think about that chart the next time somebody tries to tell you that independent contracting is synonymous with being an Uber driver. Or the next time someone from a construction union says we have to restrict all kinds of independent contracting because there’s employee misclassification happening in the construction industry.

Independent-contractor policy affects us all, including millions of highly skilled professionals who should not have to fight for the freedom to continue earning a living.

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The Flexibility Argument

One other finding in the iHire research caught my eye, because it flies in the face of unionists’ false claims that traditional employees who report to a boss can have as much freedom and flexibility in their lives as people who are independent contractors.

Yet again this week, in fact, this claim turned up. The New Jersey AFL-CIO sent an e-mail to members of my state’s Legislature, claiming that independent contractors who are reclassified as employees “can easily be in compliance with the law and can still enjoy this flexibility as a W-2 earner (employee).”

Compare that (ridiculously laughable) claim to what is actually going on in the lives of freelancers that iHire surveyed. How many W-2 employees do you know who describe their work-life balance like this:

And I can tell you, as someone who has been a professional freelancer for two decades now, one of the benefits of being your own boss is being able to move in and out of those work-hour categories however you please. Work a little less one week, a little more one week—it’s entirely up to you as an independent contractor.

There is no boss in the world who can compare with having no boss at all. And freelancers know it, based on this bit in the iHire report:

“Our survey showed that the motivation behind freelancing isn’t necessarily money—it’s lifestyle. Specifically, flexibility (73.2%), remote work (71.3%), and the ability to strike a healthy work-life balance (60.5%) were the top three reasons respondents were drawn to freelance work, above earning supplemental income (53.1%) and making more money/higher pay (39.9%).”

Yet again, the research shows that most independent contractors are choosing self-employment. We’re doing it for a better life, for a better income. We’re striving to achieve affordability with flexibility.

Any politician who claims to value those things should be doing everything possible to stop the freelance busting we’ve been forced to endure for years now. Stand with us, not against us. Protect and preserve our freedom to choose independent contracting.

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And now, the freelance-busting brigade is hopping on that linguistic bandwagon, repeatedly and purposefully describing employee misclassification as yet another kind of fraud—“misclassification fraud”—that the State of Minnesota needs to address.

On March 5, a hearing was held before the Minnesota House of Representatives Committee on Workforce, Labor, and Economic Development Finance and Policy. The witness list for this hearing was heavily stacked against independent contractors, with the following individuals among those invited to testify:

• Lee Atakpu and Carin Mrotz from Minnesota’s Office of the Attorney General, which ran what experienced business leaders reportedly called a “sham task force” on employee misclassification—a task force whose SEIU member, when challenged by yours truly about the need to protect independent contractors from overly restrictive policymaking, said that union busting is real, but freelance busting is “bullshit”

• Kevin Pranis of LIUNA Minnesota and North Dakota, with LIUNA being among the unions pushing for harsh restrictions on independent contractors nationwide

• Ben Baglio of the Minnesota Nurses Association, who presented research by Katie J. Wells, a Ph.D. in the field of geography who testified before Congress that independent contractors should be reclassified as employees against their will

• Melissa Hysing of the AFL-CIO, a longtime and major driver of freelance busting nationwide

• Aaron Rosenthal of North Star Policy Action, a union-backed think tank whose founders include the Minnesota AFL-CIO, LIUNA Minnesota and IBEW Local 292 (the IBEW is also pushing freelance busting nationwide)

Indeed, this Minnesota hearing was yet another example of what I described in my recent “Extremism vs. Entrepreneurism” report like this:

“Many of these same groups that descended upon New Jersey in 2025 had spent years issuing research reports, filing public comments and testifying against independent contracting not only in the Garden State, but also in other states and in Washington, D.C. They’re like a traveling road show from the days of the Old West, only instead of pushing snake oil as medicine for personal ailments, they often push mischaracterized data, antiquated research and limited anecdotes, urging policymakers to believe there is a problem of rampant employee misclassification, and then making widespread independent-contractor restrictions seem like the cure.”

The gang was all in Minnesota on March 5, where Atakpu kicked off the witness testimony by uttering the word “fraud” no less than a half dozen times in his first two minutes of being at the mic:

Now, to be sure, this isn’t the first time we’ve heard the term “misclassification fraud.” Groups like the Economic Policy Institute (whose chairwoman is the head of the AFL-CIO) have been using this term on occasion for years.

But what Atakpu did at this Minnesota hearing was different. The repetition of the term so many times, in so few minutes, was planned. You can see him reading from prepared notes. Repetition of this nature is a technique that is intended to frame a narrative.

Trust me: As a journalist, I’ve been interviewing people for more than 30 years. Atakpu’s repetitive testiomony is how it sounds when someone is trying to get me to write what they want, exactly the way they want it written.

To a layman—or, say, to a legislator who doesn’t know any better about attempts to impose overly restrictive independent-contractor policy that threatens our fundamental freedom to earn a living—“misclassification fraud” would be a whole lot easier to understand than “employee misclassification.”

And given everything else that’s going on with fraud in the State of Minnesota right now, it just might be the perfect time to try and attack independent contracting by using that particular language.

Notable Construction Detail

Another witness who included the word “fraud” numerous times in his testimony was Pranis, from LIUNA:

Interestingly, though, Pranis also said something that I haven’t heard before with regard to the construction industry.

He testified that employee misclassification is only a significant problem in specific segments of the construction industry, not across the industry as a whole:

That’s notable testimony coming out of Minnesota, especially when it’s paired with what we can see in the public comments that are now on file with New Jersey’s Department of Labor & Workforce Development. Those public comments, and their source material, reveal what I describe in my “Extremism vs. Entrepreneurism” report like this:

“It is possible, based on underlying research from several public comments filed in support of the proposed rulemaking, that undocumented immigration is a key reason for this disconnect between a perceived misclassification problem and a more widespread, different problem that requires targeted focus in the construction industry. Per the aforementioned ICERES study, researchers commissioned by the carpenters and joiners union found that they could not distinguish between misclassified employees and off-the-books cash schemes. Significantly, those researchers strongly indicated that off-the-books schemes appeared to be the larger problem in construction. That finding matches underlying research from the supportive public comment filed by the nonprofit Dēmos, which documented a connection between undocumented immigrants, off-the-books cash schemes and construction.

“Indeed, even going back a quarter century to the federal ‘Planmatics’ report that numerous supportive public comments cited as underlying research, findings have noted a correlation between undocumented immigrants and construction-industry problems in New Jersey. That federal report specifically describes immigrants from Poland, Russia and other Eastern Bloc nations, as well as Hispanic immigrants, and their involvement in the Garden State’s construction-industry problems.”

If you combine Pranis’ testimony in Minnesota with information from New Jersey’s public comments, you can see a clear, possible path to targeted enforcement that regulators might want to consider in certain segments of the construction industry, specifically with an eye toward off-the-books cash schemes that involve undocumented immigrants.

That would seem to make a whole lot more sense than continuing down the path of trying to impose regulatory language so strict that attorneys say it now poses an existential threat to independent work of all kinds. Especially when everyone on all sides of this policy debate agrees that the vast majority of independent contractors across hundreds of professions aren’t misclassified at all.

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‘Over $8 Billion Each Year’

Yet another witness who incorporated the term “fraud” into his testimony was Rosenthal, from the union-backed think tank North Star Policy Action. And he packed a whole lot of the freelance-busting brigade’s other greatest hits into just a few short sentences, too.

His testimony made clear not only that the unionists are going to keep targeting independent contractors across all industries—including high-earning industries like finance—but also that the unionists are going to continue to claim that their estimates show misclassification is a problem that costs “billions” of dollars:

That’s a big claim, $8 billion each year. Especially since for years now, we’ve seen similar claims at the state and federal levels that didn’t pan out.

In California, as reported by Karen Anderson for The Coast News Group, Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez said repeatedly while pushing anti-independent contractor policy that the State of California loses $7 billion a year in payroll tax revenues because of independent contractors. The Coast News Group reported:

“As it turns out, her claim is without evidence and has no basis in fact, according to William Hamm, managing director of Berkeley Research Group’s San Francisco Bay Area office. His team helped lead a study beginning in 2019 about the fiscal impact of independent contracting in California.

“‘Her claim is utter nonsense,’ said Hamm, former head of the non-partisan Legislative Analyst’s Office in California. ‘Anyone who cites this $7 billion number is doing so knowing full well that it is completely bogus.’”

Similarly, in New Jersey, as I documented in my “Extremism vs. Entrepreneurism” report, the former administration’s labor commissioner, Robert Asaro-Angelo, testified that “misclassification costs New Jersey billions of dollars in critical income tax and benefits contributions.”

There is strong evidence from Asaro-Angelo’s own Labor Department press releases, after years of focus on this policy area, that the figure is much smaller.

At the federal level, too, we have seen sitting lawmakers such as U.S. Representative Bobby Scott, D-Virginia, claim that misclassification is a problem that costs workers billions of dollars a year. But the Biden administration, after years of focusing on this purported wide-scale problem, didn’t find nearly that much. Instead, the amount the federal Department of Labor recovered was only about $41 million.

And notably, Congressman Scott’s claim was “nearly $4 billion” each year being lost to misclassification nationwide.

That’s only half of the $8 billion that Rosenthal just claimed is being lost in Minnesota alone.

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41% of Their Time

The last clip from the hearing that I’ll share here is one where Minnesota Rep. Isaac Schultz, a Republican, asked how many misclassification cases the Attorney General’s Office has actually handled, given the allegations about how widespread the nature of the problem is.

As you can see for yourself here, Atakpu didn’t answer the question. Instead, he testified that the Attorney General’s Office had spent 41% of its time on the issue of employee misclassification:

What did we learn in that exchange? That instead of focusing more resources on what has turned out to be widespread fraud in programs intended to feed schoolkids, as well as programs involving autism therapy, home health assistance and more, the Office of Minnesota’s Attorney General has been spending 41% of its time on targeting independent contracting.

One could argue that’s evidence of government priorities being misaligned with reality. We’re also seeing something like that here in my home state of New Jersey, where 99% of the public is opposed to what our state government is trying to do with independent-contractor policy.

Here in New Jersey, too, a lawmaker at a hearing questioned our then-Labor Commissioner about why so few cases of employee misclassification were actually being addressed after all the allegations that had been made about the widespread nature of the problem.

It’s enough to make a person wonder if some kind of fraud might be taking place.

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