Here is the letter that Scutari sent to Sherrill:

Scutari’s action is good news for independent contractors like me. He is showing leadership on this policy issue in response to all the independent contractors and the broader business community who continue to stand in fierce opposition to the rulemaking, which attempts to impose the Labor Department’s own interpretation of regulatory language that defines who can legitimately earn income as an independent contractor throughout the state.

What You Can Do

I believe this makes Scutari the 25th sitting legislator—and certainly the most powerful one—to speak out publicly with concerns about the Labor Department’s independent-contractor rule. A list of the other 24 is here.

It would be helpful now for all of us to contact Governor Sherrill as well as our own three district elected officials (we each have one state Senator and two Assembly members).

Please contact them all, and tell them two things:

• You agree with Senate President Scutari and would like Governor Sherrill to delay the independent-contractor rule so that it does not take effect October 1;

• You would like to see the Legislature put meaningful protections in place—with serious input from happy, thriving independent contractors—so that we will not be misclassified as employees in the future.

Share

Notably, according to Gallup, that record-high figure is because of just one group of respondents:

“Democrats account for the entire increase since 2023 in Americans’ desire for unions to have more influence. Currently, 73% of Democrats hold this view, up 12 points from 61% and the highest Gallup has measured for the group. By contrast, this preference is unchanged among independents and Republicans, at 45% and 19%, respectively.”

Also notable in this year’s survey is that an important question is missing. It has actually been missing for several years now. The last time I saw it asked was in 2022, when Gallup found that while about 70% of Americans support labor unions (similar to this year’s 71%), a full 80% of nonunion employees either had no interest in joining a union or were at best neutral on the subject:

The omission of this additional question sure skews the overall narrative of Gallup’s findings, eh?

Without that additional question, we end up with politicians suggesting that because most people approve of labor unions, we need to change our laws so that more people can join labor unions. Even though most people already eligible to join clearly don’t wish to do so.

Alas, this year’s Gallup survey is what it is. And in addition to promoting Gallup’s survey, labor union leaders were all over TV this weekend reporting the AFL-CIO’s research showing that more people trust unions than trust Democrats or Republicans.

Per the AFL-CIO:

• Trust in unions exceeds trust in the Democratic Party by 20 points (52% to 32%), and workers are twice as likely to trust unions than to trust the Republican Party (52% to 26%).

• Young workers ages 18–30 trust labor unions (61%) more than twice as much as they trust the Democratic Party (28%) or the Republican Party (22%). Among young men, the trust gap is 40 points between unions and Democrats (63% to 23%) and 43 points between unions and Republicans (63% to 20%).

• The only group workers trust more than unions is their own neighbors (75%).

I found the AFL-CIO’s talking point to be a bit odd, given that surveys have also found Americans like zombies, hemorrhoids and dog poop more than they like Congress. People like traffic jams, lice and root canals more than they like Congress. Even the federal immigration agency ICE is more popular than Congress.

Which means that if the questions were posed differently, trust in unions might match or fall below most people’s feelings about dog poop, root canals and ICE.

That got me to thinking. Of course, I’d like to see Gallup bring back its question about whether non-union employees actually wish to join unions. And yes, by all means, I’m for Gallup asking how people’s feelings about unions compare to their feelings about zombies and dog poop.

But drilling down deeper, the following five additional questions would also help to shed a lot of light on what people really believe about unions, not just based on what people think unions are doing, but instead in the context of how some unions are actually behaving today.

Question 1

Do you believe the government should change regulatory language to reclassify entrepreneurial people—such as independent contractors who choose to work as financial advisers, real-estate agents and freelance writers—as unionizable employees?

This question is important because the union-led push to reclassify as many independent contractors as possible has been underway for years. Right now, there’s a bill in Congress called the Protecting the Right to Organize Act that would expand a version of California’s failed reclassification experiment nationwide. It has the support of pretty much the entire Democratic Party, while the former chairman of the National Labor Relations Board says it would unravel large segments of the economy.

Question 2

Do you believe that every person involved should get to vote on whether to join a union? Or do you believe the government should give a union control over a whole sector, such as all rideshare drivers in a state, even if only 25 percent of the drivers actually vote to join?

This question matters because that’s the exact percent required under a new Massachusetts sectoral-bargaining scheme that’s already being copied in California, Illinois and Minnesota, and that union leaders say they plan to bring to other states as well.

Question 3

Do you believe it’s OK for city officials to mandate that all people doing a certain kind of work must automatically be unionizable employees, and can no longer earn even a side income as independent contractors?

This question is in play right now in New York City and Chicago, where bills have been introduced with strong backing from the Teamsters union to automatically make certain Amazon workers, in particular, unionizable employees.

Question 4

Do you believe that union organizers should work with the Democratic Socialists of America to weaken or end capitalism? Or do you believe that unions should exist as they always have in the United States, within the system of capitalism?

This question is important because a lot of people don’t realize that for several years now, the AFL-CIO and the Teamsters, in particular, have been working hand-in-glove with the Democratic Socialists of America to try and grow union membership. This past weekend, at the Socialism 2026 conference—#TrySocialism—a DSA member on one of the panels talked about how the group is already working on “radical militant democratic unionism” right now.

Question 5

Do you believe that unions should use members’ dues to pay for political campaigns, such as the New Jersey Education Association spending $40 million in a failed election campaign that attempted to make the union president the state’s governor?

Really, $40 million is a drop in the bucket. Most people would be stunned to learn that, as recently reported in The Hill, labor unions directed more than $1.8 billion into Democratic Party campaigns and political causes during the 2024 election cycle alone.

Share

And I can report, after reading Osterman’s book, that this was indeed an accurate assumption.

But I also learned something important by slogging my way through this latest missive about self-employment from Harvard University Press.

The freelance-busting brigade has a central problem in their argument that, surprisingly even after all these years, they still can’t figure out how to solve.

Osterman’s book is rooted in the idea of injecting a term he coined, “disposable workers,” into the policy debate. He isn’t just talking about independent contractors with his definition; he’s also talking about some full-time employees he sees as lacking in what employment should provide, such as in-house training and the opportunity for promotions within the same company. In Osterman’s view, adjunct professors who aren’t eligible for tenure fit his definition of “disposable workers” right alongside rideshare and delivery drivers. Neither, in his opinion, are on a real ladder to success.

Whether or not his thinking is correct isn’t why I read this book. What matters to me is understanding his concept of “disposable workers,” because the terminology is similar to the term Weil coined, the “fissured workplace,” from Weil’s own 2014 book. Both frameworks are intended to give an easy label to a perceived problem that these authors believe needs to be solved in the workforce as a whole.

And as we all learned from Professor Weil, when someone like Osterman—who is professor emeritus of human resources and management at the MIT Sloan School of Management—frames a complex policy debate in two catchy words, those words can have an outsized impact. Lawmakers who believe that people being independent contractors means we have a “fissured,” or broken, workforce are also going to be inclined to believe that even the most successful independent contractor is a “disposable worker,” and then write “protective” legislation and regulations accordingly.

In fact, the power of two well-chosen words is so significant that I coined the term “freelance busting” to help swing the debate back. My two-word frame creates an entirely different understanding of what’s going on in this area of labor and employment policy. From my perspective as an independent contractor, unionists who want fewer people like me in the workforce are trying to shut down an entire pathway to achieving the American Dream.

Now, to be fair, I think both Weil and Osterman would say their books are intended to deepen our understanding of the way Americans work. I would argue with that description, and I could critique more than a few parts of Osterman’s book that made me do a double take, such as when he suggested it was better to be a valued dishwasher at his friend’s restaurant than to be a well-paid staff attorney at a law firm.

For now, I want to focus on one important point. This book, just like others of its ilk, eventually belies its intent to deepen our understanding of independent contractors and the broader workforce.

Disposable Workers ultimately just pushes the same union-backed “solutions” that are in fact radical, and that keep failing amid widespread public outrage in the real world.

‘Being a Freelancer is Desirable’

My biggest beef with Weil’s Fissured Workplace book has always been that in a nation where the vast majority of independent contractors say year after year that we prefer the way we’re working, Weil couldn’t find a single happy independent contractor to so much as mention in any of his 424 pages. Oren Cass, in his book The Once and Future Worker, took a similarly dismissive approach to tens of millions of us all across the country, prompting me to write a piece titled “Hi There. We Exist.”

The thing these tomes have in common is that their authors talk about us, without us. They come from a worldview that being a unionized employee is the ideal, so by definition, self-employed people are a lower form of worker. Happy and successful independent contractors, to them, are as mythical as unicorns. It doesn’t even occur to them to think of us as equals making a choice about how we wish to work, the same as many unionized employees choose a different path because they feel that it suits them better.

To his credit, Osterman doesn’t do what Weil and Cass did in this regard. Osterman writes about us differently in Disposable Workers. He not only acknowledges that happy and thriving freelancers like me exist, but he also writes that we can be happier than traditional employees with similar earnings, and that it would be wrong to take away our pathway to success:

“It is clear that, for many people, being a freelancer is desirable. Therefore, any policy initiative aimed at entirely eliminating this choice or making it harder to obtain this status would be misguided.”

Agreed.

Osterman also does another thing in this book that I rarely see with discourse from the freelance-busting brigade: He acknowledges that rideshare and delivery drivers, traveling nurses and other traditional union-organizing targets might be in situations more complicated than the one-size-fits-all headlines suggest.

He even acknowledges that they, too, may want their status quo as independent contractors to remain, even as some so-called “protected” employees may want their own lives to change:

“… about two-thirds of ride-share drivers are part-time and most have health insurance through another job or spouse. Accordingly, these folks may not be strong advocates for change. One can make the same point about heterogeneity among contractors, where, for example, travel nurses are happy with their situation, but in non-union settings being a contractor for a staffing firm providing building cleaners or security guards is problematic, to say the least.”

So there is at least some nuance in what Osterman writes about all of us in this book, as well as an acknowledgment that simply reclassifying us all as unionizable employees might not go over so well—a refreshing change of attitude that’s more aligned with the reality of the intense pushback we’ve all seen to sweeping and overly restrictive ABC Test legislation and regulations in recent years.

Which is what makes it so frustrating that at the end of the book, Osterman outright calls for the ABC Test to be implemented nationwide anyway.

On the one hand, he’s acknowledging that independent-contractor status is working out just fine for many of us, while on the other hand, he’s advocating for regulatory language that wipes our preferred status away.

Subscribe now

The Insolvable Problem

Osterman’s big policy recommendation is to implement the ABC Test through federal legislation like the Protecting the Right to Organize Act. This recommendation undoes every bit of effort Osterman makes throughout the rest of his book to try and show some respect for those of us who are happily and successfully self-employed, and who wish to remain independent contractors.

His policy recommendation also makes it evident, yet again, that no matter how the freelance-busting brigade tries to frame or reframe the current state of the workforce—and no matter what lip service they may pay us in saying they have no problem with legitimate independent contractors—their ultimate goal is to inject regulatory language that attempts to make most or all of us unionizable employees, whether we like it or not.

It’s deeply disappointing to see the way Osterman describes the ABC Test in his book. His description of this regulatory language as an “ideal solution” aligns him with everyone else in the freelance-busting brigade who turns to intellectual dishonesty in pushing this kind of policymaking.

Osterman writes:

“The ideal solution would begin with legislative clarification of how to define an employee. A straightforward approach would be federal adoption of the so-called ABC rule, already in use by over thirty states to define employee status for state employment rules and for programs related to minimum wages, unemployment insurance, and workers’ compensation. This rule makes the assumption that everyone is an employee unless the employer can prove otherwise, and to succeed, that employer needs affirmative evidence on three criteria: that the work is done without the direction and control of the employer, that the work is outside the usual scope of the employer’s business, and that the person doing the work has their own independent business or trade doing that kind of work.

“Simple and clear as that might seem, getting such a thing through Congress seems impossible…”

Well, yes, Professor Osterman, getting the ABC Test into federal law through the PRO Act has proved impossible—because there is opposition on both sides of the political aisle to what the version of ABC that’s in the bill actually does.

Here in the real world, the ABC Test is not so simple, and the only thing that’s clear is that its impacts are increasingly bad. In multiple states where this so-called “solution” has been tried in recent years, the outcomes have not been nearly as rosy as this book’s description suggests. A former chairman of the National Labor Relations Board went so far as to state that the PRO Act, as written, would “substantially unravel and change large segments of the U.S. economy.”

What Professor Osterman leaves out of his book’s description of the ABC Test, and what is so intellectually dishonest about the description he does give, is the way unionists are trying to edit and finagle and twist the ABC Test’s language so that it will hit a broad swath of legitimate independent contractors.

Is the ABC Test actually being used in dozens of states, as Osterman claims it is? Technically yes, but also, no. There is no uniform ABC Test to begin with, even between some neighboring states that use versions of it.

Just a few examples:

• Pennsylvania has the ABC Test for certain purposes, but it omits the B prong. That makes Pennsylvania’s version of the ABC Test different from, say, California’s version that has all three prongs;

• At the same time, California’s version of the B prong is different from New Jersey’s version of the B prong, so even though both those states have all three prongs, they’re not actually the same;

• California’s version—the one the federal PRO Act emulates—tanked self-employment and overall employment in California, and led to statewide legislation intended to protect working people in more than 100 professions from the ABC Test, either in part or in full;

• In New Jersey, we are all living through a regulatory-rulemaking nightmare where the state Labor Department just tried to interpret the ABC Test prongs in ways that attorneys called unprecedented and said would almost entirely eviscerate anybody’s ability to be an independent contractor at all. Lawyers called this latest variation on the ABC Test an existential threat to flexible, independent work itself. The public rose up and submitted thousands of written comments that were 99% opposed, but the state Labor Department wrote in response that, among other things, economic consequences would not be considered. The state is now proceeding with plans for an amended version of the rule to take effect October 1, notably using the same misleading word as Osterman, “clear,” in the press release: “NJDOL Adopts Clear Rules on Worker Classification...”

Those are just a few of the states involved with the ABC Test, but you get the point about how problematic this regulatory language is.

It is accurate to say that the ABC Test has been around for a long time, and that versions of it are in use in many states.

It is also accurate to say that what’s been happening in more recent years with this regulatory language is new, it is destructive—especially to women—and it is deeply unpopular with the general public. As I testified in summer 2025 before the U.S. Senate HELP Committee, those of us trying to protect our chosen careers as freelancers from this madness now see the ABC Test as regulatory language being weaponized to attack us.

There is quite simply no way to square Osterman’s call for a nationwide ABC Test with his statement that policy initiatives are wrong if they are aimed at eliminating freelancing or making it harder to be a freelancer. These stances have opposite meanings. As I wrote in my recent report about all the public comments the State of New Jersey received, we are experiencing a battle of “Extremism vs. Entrepreneurism.” Osterman is suggesting that he respects the entrepreneurs at the same time that he calls for regulatory language the extremists wield against us.

That disconnect is precisely why books with policy recommendations like Osterman’s should have no central place in the independent-contractor debate.

Yes, he acknowledges our existence in Disposable Workers. That’s unusual among the books that will sit on the same shelf as his, and it’s a welcome change. But it should not be the bar for having one’s ideas become central in this debate.

We need real solutions for the real world that stop true cases of employee misclassification while also respecting and protecting everyone’s freedom to choose self-employment. Branding even the happiest, most financially successful independent contractors as “disposable workers” creates a negative spin that will unfairly disadvantage us in the continuing policy discussion.

This book is worth reading if you want to understand how the language of the independent-contractor debate may evolve in the months and years to come, but overall, Osterman’s policy prescription is just more of the same.

Freelance busting has never been palatable in the history of the United States, and it never should be, no matter what language surrounds it.

Share

This bill specifically targets last-mile drivers at Amazon, a company that the Teamsters have long sought to unionize. The bill also fits beautifully into the socialists’ campaign called Unions for All.

I wrote that this “core services” concept wouldn’t be limited to New York City, and that it would not stop with delivery drivers. The unionists’ goal—just as with years’ worth of worker reclassification attempts and newer sectoral bargaining gambits—is to get a construct into the law that will allow boatloads of independent contractors to be turned into unionizable employees, all at once.

It took only one week for the freelance-busting brigade to reveal their next target city.

A City Council hearing has been scheduled September 15 for what’s being called the Chicago Delivery Protection Act. Just like the New York City bill, this one includes language about “core delivery services” and everyone who provides them needing to be an employee:

And in the Windy City, just as in New York, the Teamsters are pushing hard for the bill’s passage while trying to make sure all the headlines are about Amazon. They put out a press release yesterday in which Randy Korgan, director of the Teamsters Amazon Division, states:

“The movement to end Amazon’s dangerous DSP model is growing because workers are fed up with this company’s lies and mistreatment. Amazon Teamsters are leading the fight to hold Amazon accountable. We are calling on Chicago Alderwomen and Aldermen to defend everyday Chicagoans by passing the Delivery Protection Act.”

As I wrote last week, attempts to create a construct that will force more independent contractors into unionizable employee status always begin with Amazon or Uber in the headlines. This media narrative lulls the general public into believing this broader policy fight is between the unions and Big Tech.

But remove a single word—“delivery”—from future bills, and anything the government deemed “core services” for any kind of business or industry could only be done by unionizable employees.

Just as we saw in 2019 with California’s Assembly Bill 5 and the more than 600 professions it affected, and just as we saw last year when New Jersey put forward its independent-contractor rule that attorneys said would almost entirely eviscerate anyone’s ability to be an independent contractor, the ultimate goal is to sweep every possible worker in every conceivable profession under the union umbrella.

These “core services” bills are yet another variation on trying to achieve the goals that unionists detailed in 2018, when they called for “admittedly radically different” policies to try and shift entire industries into unionizable employee status.

You don’t have to be a genius to anticipate that more “core services” bills are about to pop up in more cities soon.

We’re also about to see if the pattern holds in Chicago of independent contractors standing shoulder to shoulder and fighting back.

They Topped Us by Three Hours

Back in 2019, when my home state of New Jersey tried to follow California’s ill-fated lead and reclassify all of us as unionizable employees through legislation, independent contractors flooded into a New Jersey Senate Labor Committee hearing to overwhelm the State House process with opposition testimony. Just as independent contractors had amassed by the thousands to fight back in California, those of us in New Jersey dominated four hours of our state’s six-hour hearing, one after the next telling lawmakers to stop what they were doing because it’s wrong.

Professional lobbyists from Trenton to Washington, D.C., still talk about that four-hour New Jersey hearing with amazement.

Well, lo and behold, New York City’s last-mile delivery drivers made their elected officials sit through a seven-hour hearing.

As Reason just reported:

“Ironically, NYC’s last-mile delivery bill is also being opposed by those it purports to help: The City Council hearing stretched to seven hours long as several hundred last-mile delivery workers unexpectedly showed up to testify against it. These workers make around $24 per hour on average and have employer-funded healthcare through the subcontracted companies.”

That same story in Reason also quotes one of my favorite attorneys, Alex MacDonald of the Littler firm, explaining exactly what’s going on here:

“As attorney Alex MacDonald has noted, this is part of a larger strategy being employed by unions in recent years: If they are unable to organize through ‘organic, boots-on-the-ground campaigns,’ they now lobby for laws like this one that ‘read like a shortcut to organizing.’ In other words, what can’t be accomplished by collective bargaining is pursued through direct regulation.”

We are seeing a variation of that unionist strategy right now once again in my home state of New Jersey, where MacDonald and I were both among the witnesses who testified this past May about the Legislature’s need to act in the face of a New Jersey Department of Labor & Workforce Development independent-contractor rule.

Far from being responsive to the will of the people—or even the will of the Legislature, which abandoned similar 2019 legislation amid widespread opposition—this New Jersey rule that’s scheduled to take effect October 1 is entirely of, by and for the union organizers:

• It’s being imposed by an acting labor commissioner who used to work for the New Jersey AFL-CIO.

• The only people who testified in favor of it at the Labor Department’s hearing were either on a union payroll or affiliated with organizations that have strong union ties.

• The adopted rule outright states that it doesn’t matter if the research used to push it was inaccurate. It outright states that there’s not going to be any consideration of economic consequences.

• It largely ignores the 99% public opposition to the rulemaking that the Department received in an estimated 9,500 written public comments.

In location after location, there are very good reasons why independent contractors keep saying “no” to all of this madness.

But union organizers keep insisting that elected officials change our answer against our will to “yes.” Chicago is just the latest hot spot on the map.

Share

If You’re in Illinois…

I’m told that the Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce is leading the opposition in the Windy City. Give them a shout, and ask how you can help by making your voice heard.

At some point, the unionists trying ever harder to capture independent contractors against our will are going to figure out that the only thing they’re doing with these increasingly brazen actions is amassing even broader nationwide opposition—to them.

But that day is not today.

Today, it’s important for everyone to keep raising our voices and standing up for our freedom to work in whatever way works best for us.

Share

Leaders of the Teamsters union—taking a page out of the AFL-CIO’s playbook—just stood side by side with leaders of the Democratic Socialists of America to rally support for this bill. The professionally printed signs, the Teamsters press release and the speeches have all been laser-focused on how this bill would give delivery drivers leverage against what they describe as one big, bad company: Amazon.

Headlines in the media have followed suit, with everyone from The New York Times to The Wall Street Journal telling audiences that this legislation targets Amazon:

But those headlines are only part of the story.

To their credit, farther down in their article, the writers and editors at The Wall Street Journal correctly identified this New York City bill as ultimately being about much more than Amazon. They described the Delivery Protection Act as the latest salvo in the broader freelance-busting war that’s been ongoing nationwide for years.

The Wall Street Journal wrote:

“If the bill passes, New York could become the first city to require last-mile operators to make delivery workers direct employees. It isn’t the first local or state government to try it. The New York City bill is one of several efforts by cities and states to rein in a broader trend toward outsourcing work to contractors, freelancers and gig workers.”

The Wall Street Journal then gave brief background about California’s Assembly Bill 5, a law that passed in 2019. AB5’s unionist backers touted it in the media as protecting drivers from what they described as the big, bad company Uber, just as backers of New York City’s Delivery Protection Act are touting it as protecting drivers from Amazon.

In reality, AB5 tanked all kinds of self-employment and overall employment. That California bill’s language ultimately led lawmakers to exempt more than 100 professions so that everyone from attorneys to graphic designers could try to continue earning a living as independent contractors. As many as 1 million people were affected, according to the nonpartisan California Legislative Analyst’s Office.

Take one look at the actual language of New York City’s Delivery Protection Act, and even a non-lawyer like me can see that it portends something eerily similar to California’s AB5. The slope is slippery. This bill’s language could be used in the future, with just a bit of alteration, to force union-ready employment status on all kinds of people who are currently earning some or all of our income as our own bosses.

Heck, they might only have to change a couple of words.

Section 20-566.3

This link will take you to the full text of the Delivery Protection Act, whose primary sponsor is New York City Councilmember Tiffany Cabán, a Democratic Socialist.

Again, I’m not a lawyer. But after all these years of fighting to keep my freedom as an independent contractor, I can recognize the kind of language that is being used to threaten self-employed people nationwide.

The lines in the Delivery Protection Act that caught my attention are highlighted below:

Yes, that language is specific to certain types of businesses: delivery and warehouse. But the language about “core delivery services” and “core warehouse services” is notable.

Simply remove a single word—either “delivery” or “warehouse”—from future bills, and think about what you’d get.

Anything the government deemed “core services” for any kind of business or industry could only be done by unionizable employees. The language could be edited to target everyone from cartographers to boat captains to writers to accountants to sheep shearers.

This seems like yet another way of trying to achieve the strategy that unionists detailed in 2018, to shift entire industries into employee status whether the current independent contractors are properly classified or not.

It also feels eerily similar to what the freelance-busting brigade tried to do with California’s Assembly Bill 5 in 2020, and similar to one of the many problems that experts have identified with the independent-contractor rule that’s slated to take effect in my home state of New Jersey on October 1.

Subscribe now

How This Relates to the ABC Test

The language at the heart of California’s Assembly Bill 5 and New Jersey’s independent-contractor rule is called the ABC Test. It’s a three-part test to determine whether someone is an independent contractor or an employee. The three parts of the test are known as Prongs A, B and C.

Prong B of the ABC Test is the part attorneys routinely call the “core business” prong. It’s what unfairly snags so many legitimately self-employed people. Unionists have been finagling the language for years, to the point that in California, the way they enacted the language negatively affected people working in more than 600 professions.

In California, Prong B of the ABC Test reads like this:

“The person performs work that is outside the usual course of the hiring entity’s business.”

In New Jersey, it is worded like this:

“The work is either outside the usual course of the business for which such service is performed, or the work is performed outside of all the places of business of the enterprise for which such service is performed.”

The concepts of “usual course of business” and “core services” are from the same wheelhouse. In that sense, it’s almost as if the New York City bill took the most unfair, lopsided prong of the ABC Test and built a piece of legislation around an even more stringent version of it.

Which is, as the news coverage makes clear, notable on its own. However, what we’ve seen this past year in New Jersey tells me that even this New York City language won’t be enough to satisfy the people pushing this Unions for All campaign.

Indeed, in New Jersey, the socialist-unionist side of the debate is already proposing ways to make the language even more all-encompassing. One written public comment filed about New Jersey’s new independent-contractor rule argued that the state’s interpretation of a business’s core services should include any landscapers and janitors who show up once a week on a regular contract at a professional office such as a law firm.

I’m not kidding. That public comment stated:

“… the work of janitors and landscapers may involve the regular, weekly work of the core interest of the business in being clean and having presentable premises.”

This is a much broader interpretation of “core” services than most everyday people would intuitively understand the words on the page to mean. Most people don’t believe that a landscaper who mows the lawn at an office property for an hour a week is in the same usual course of business, or the same core business, as a lawyer working full-time at that office property.

But again, the people pushing this kind of freelance busting don’t think like the rest of us do.

Whether we’re talking about socialists who want to tear down capitalism altogether, or their comrades-in-organizing who want everyone to be an employee paying union dues, the ultimate goal is to weaponize regulatory language in ways that restrict what are currently legal business models for entrepreneurial people across all kinds of professions, everywhere.

Subscribe now

Some Truths are Self-Evident

This past weekend, I read a book that Walter Isaacson wrote called The Greatest Sentence Ever Written. It’s super short, a mere 80 pages, but it’s really interesting.

The greatest sentence ever written, according to Isaacson, is the following one from the Declaration of Independence. Thomas Jefferson wrote this sentence, and Benjamin Franklin and John Adams edited it:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”

That single sentence lays the foundation for the American Dream. It is about the fundamental belief that we do not get our rights from the government. It is about our understanding that certain rights we possess are unalienable, or undeniable. It’s about the fact that these rights are ours no matter who holds the reins of power in Washington or Sacramento or Trenton or Manhattan or anywhere else.

We have the unalienable right to liberty, which most of us understand as being free to make our own choices.

We have the unalienable right to pursue happiness, which most of us understand to include the kind of work we do, or do not do, on any given day.

The socialist-unionist coalition trying to restrict our freedom to be our own bosses stands in defiance of this sentence, and in defiance of what has long been understood as our freedom to pursue the American Dream. The audacity and scale of this affront to our fundamental freedom really does take one’s breath away.

Of course, if the freelance busters explained their goals this way, nobody would go along with them—certainly not in a nation where most people would prefer to be their own bosses, where most independent contractors wish to remain self-employed, and where most non-union employees want nothing to do with joining unions.

That’s why the freelance busters keep trying to frame this policy battle as targeting only the big, bad companies Uber and Amazon. They keep trying to convince everyone that this policy battle is only about delivery drivers.

I’m not here to defend or criticize those companies’ particular business practices, but I do believe it is paramount that we all understand how what’s happening in New York City could eventually be used in other ways.

Because, sadly, it’s also a self-evident truth after all these years that while companies like Amazon and Uber are always in the headlines, the war that this socialist-unionist faction keeps waging is in fact against us all.

Share

The article focuses on a settlement in a case about employee misclassification that the administration of Governor Mikie Sherrill just announced with regard to a trucking company—and makes the point that the state already had the tools it needed to resolve the issue without the looming independent-contractor rule being in place.

NJBIA Policy Analyst Jack Kelly is quoted:

“Misclassification is a serious offense that we don’t condone in any way, shape or form. And the Sherrill administration just showed there are serious methods already in place to address it.”

That is correct.

Also correct are the points that Kelly makes at the end of the article—points that many of us here in New Jersey have been making at public hearings going back the better part of a decade now, and that many of us made in page after page of the estimated 9,500 public comments that demonstrated 99% public opposition to this independent-contractor rule.

Kelly hits the bullseye with this passage:

“You could make the case that the enforcement mechanisms are already in place. You can also contend that this whole debate, at its core, is not really about protecting workers who were truly misclassified.

“If it was, a comprehensive study should have first been conducted examining whether the IRS test used before the ABC test was actually failing to detect and address unlawful misclassification at the scale being alleged.

“Instead, we are moving directly toward one of the strictest independent contractor standards in the nation at our own peril.”

He’s right.

And what most people don’t realize is that when Kelly suggests that an examination should have been done to determine whether the IRS Test is effective in addressing employee misclassification, he’s actually highlighting a trick the freelance-busting brigade has been using for more than 25 years now to hide the truth of that matter.

The Test that Worked

Back in February 2000, a Maryland-based firm called Planmatics, Inc. prepared a nearly 200-page report for the U.S. Department of Labor about independent contractors.

This report, now known colloquially in labor-policy circles as the “Planmatics report” or the “Planmatics study,” tried to determine the prevalence of employee misclassification. The Planmatics report became the source of a figure that the freelance busters still widely quote today: that 10% to 30% of employers misclassify at least one employee. The administration of Governor Phil Murphy cited this figure in New Jersey in 2019 to help justify an unprecedented series of laws and crackdowns that targeted businesses working with independent contractors.

But here’s the thing: The Planmatics report is filled with undocumented, anecdotal claims, especially as they pertain to New Jersey.

And in trying to pass off that information as something it’s not, the Planmatics report intentionally buries a key detail: The State of New Jersey, even back then, was successfully using the IRS Test to address the problem of employee misclassification.

Read it for yourself and make your own judgment.

Below is the section of the Planmatics report that focuses on New Jersey. It’s pretty short, not even filling two whole pages, and it takes as gospel the unsubstantiated claims of unnamed people who are affiliated with unions and union-adjacent groups:

Note the way that the Planmatics report—while fluffing up the union and union-friendly sources—totally omits any information about how the State of New Jersey actually succeeded in targeting the practice of employee misclassification at the Houston Dry Wall company.

To figure that out, you have to read the footnote that relates to this section:

This article isn’t accessible online, so I accessed it using my handy-dandy library card here in Morris County, New Jersey.

And lo and behold, when I read that 1999 article from the Star-Ledger, the reality could not have been any clearer about what the Planmatics report had left out: The state had used IRS Test regulatory language to address this case of misclassification.

That fact is right in the first paragraph of the article. The term “20-question test,” at the time the Star-Ledger article was written, was a synonym for the IRS Test:

The NJBIA’s Jack Kelly is right on the money to suggest that, before powering forward with the ABC Test, a study should have been done to examine whether the IRS Test was actually failing to detect and address unlawful misclassification at the scale being alleged here in my home state of New Jersey.

But we all know why that didn’t happen.

Convening a real, unbiased task force or doing any kind of a deep dive in this policy area would have revealed that there is no persuasive evidence of unlawful misclassification at the scale it’s being alleged—and that there is, in fact, quite a lot of evidence about how the Murphy administration mischaracterized research and data, and buried key information, in ways similar to the Planmatics report.

Subscribe now

Let Us Count the Ways

Regular readers of this Substack have been aware of the disconnect between misclassification claims from the freelance-busting brigade and most other people’s understanding of reality for a long time now:

• There’s the 2019 Report of Gov. Murphy’s Task Force on Employee Misclassification that says the problem has increased by 40% since 2009, but then cites research that says no such thing. This Murphy report also cites a nonexistent “2000 U.S. Department of Labor study of misclassification in construction in New Jersey,” saying it shows millions of dollars in taxes failing to be paid. In reality, the source of that information is a 2016 report that unionists commissioned at Stockton University—a report whose own authors say there’s no reliable way to accurately measure misclassification. (You can see all of that broken down with screen shots and links here.)

• To this day, those of us trying to stop New Jersey’s freelance busting can’t find any list of who actually served on Governor Murphy’s Task Force on Employee Misclassification, and we don’t know who wrote that report. We also have a lot of questions about the public hearings this Murphy report cites—questions that Lisa Yakomin, president of the Association of Bi-State Motor Carriers, raised in the group’s public comment filed in opposition to the independent-contractor rule. I quoted a section from her public comment in my report “Extremism vs. Entrepreneurism”:

  

• We also now know that despite the Murphy administration’s claims about misclassification costing the state hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars, there is no evidence of that being true based on the results of the Murphy-era independent-contractor crackdown after all these years.

• And we know, from recent testimony by the Sherrill administration’s acting Labor Commissioner, Kevin Jarvis, that the state Department of Labor and Workforce Development is receiving only about 700 claims each year from independent contractors. In a state with an estimated 1.7 million independent contractors—and where if 10% of a million or so companies were misclassifying workers, there would be at least 100,000 people misclassified statewide—that testimony is yet more evidence that the problem of misclassification is not widespread at all.

And that’s all from New Jersey alone. Californians fighting a similar ABC Test push, via that state’s Assembly Bill 5 law, have documented similar shenanigans, particularly with regard to a lawmaker who later went on to lead the California Federation of Labor Unions, AFL-CIO:

Like I wrote at the top, the NJBIA’s Jack Kelly hit the bullseye when he said this:

“You could make the case that the enforcement mechanisms are already in place. You can also contend that this whole debate, at its core, is not really about protecting workers who were truly misclassified.”

The evidence is overwhelming that this is true. Especially when you factor in a report the unionists themselves put out in 2018, a report that specifically names many of the people involved in this New Jersey ABC Test push, laying out their plan to reclassify entire all workers across entire industries as unionizable employees—whether the independent contractors were misclassified or not.

At last summer’s public hearing about the New Jersey rulemaking, the only people who testified in support were on union payrolls or with groups that have strong associations to unions.

Out of the estimated 9,500 written public comments the state received, only 26 were in support—and 16 of the 26 came from unions or groups with strong affiliations to unions.

Freelance busting isn’t about protecting workers who are misclassified. It’s Big Labor attacking the smallest of small-business owners. It’s about precisely what lawyers described in their initial evaluation of New Jersey’s rule proposal: nearly eviscerating the ability to be an independent contractor at all.

Subscribe now

New Jersey Lawmakers Must Act

New Jersey’s independent-contractor rule is scheduled to take effect October 1. Legislators should pass the concurrent resolution that would invalidate the rule and protect us all from this freelance-busting madness that is rooted in false claims, mischaracterized data and research, and obfuscated facts.

Members of the New Jersey Legislature can stop this rule on their own. The concurrent resolution does not require the governor’s signature to take effect. Legislators simply have to pass the resolutions in the Assembly and Senate.

The Murphy administration took legislators for a ride on this policy issue. Passing the concurrent resolution would acknowledge the seriousness of what has already happened that is so clearly wrong, and would stop what’s about to happen next before matters become even worse.

Share

Here’s that interview in full:

The backlash began almost immediately after that interview aired, with prominent people on both sides of the political aisle labeling Romer’s ideas insane, asinine and dangerous.

What I say to all of you who just realized Romer exists is this: Welcome to the fun house.

Independent contractors like me have been familiar with Romer and her tribe’s thinking for about a half dozen years now, ever since the Democratic Socialists of America joined forces with major unions for the first time on a national campaign. Their goal was to try and pass legislation that would have restricted all kinds of independent contractors nationwide.

That’s right. If you’re wondering how somebody with ideas like Romer’s rose to a position that she’s being interviewed on a popular Sunday political news show, look no further than the unionists who helped to build her profile, in particular the AFL-CIO.

It was the AFL-CIO’s president, in 2021, who personally helped to elevate Romer and lend her credibility, injecting her and her ideas into the mainstream of American politics in a way that directly targeted independent contractors like me.

Good Morning, Comrade

To understand why the AFL-CIO and the Democratic Socialists of America joined forces to target us freelancers in 2021, you have to realize where things stood at that time on the independent-contractor policy battle.

• California, in 2019, had passed Assembly Bill 5. By early 2020, it was well into the process of decimating all kinds of independent contractors’ incomes and careers in that state. This widespread chaos and suffering was a feature, not a bug, for socialists and unionists, who had been brainstorming all kinds of radical ideas to limit the number of independent contractors in the workforce so they could try to add more unionized employees.

• The freelance busters thought passage of California’s law would be the start of a blue-state wave of similar legislation. A New York legislator introduced a copycat bill, as did New Jersey’s Senate president. Since I live in New Jersey and earn my living as an independent contractor, this was a big problem for me. I helped organize and lead a grassroots army of independent contractors who stopped that bill from advancing in late 2019 and early 2020. New York legislators saw all the public outrage in New Jersey, and the New York bill then languished, as did a similar bill that had been promised in Illinois.

• With the state-level rollout of these freelance-busting bills at a halt, news reports began to appear in 2020 about pressure in Congress to pass the Protecting the Right to Organize Act. It’s a bill that would have pushed California-style, freelance-busting ABC Test regulatory language into federal labor law.

• By early 2021, our grassroots movement had grown so big nationwide that it was causing headaches about passing the PRO Act in Washington, D.C., too.

This is when the Democratic Socialists of America, and Megan Romer specifically, became a big part of my day.

In spring 2021, a website appeared. It was called Freelancers for the PRO Act. The people associated with it, calling themselves freelance writers, were unknown to any of us long-timers in the national freelance-writing community. And if you clicked around a bit, you eventually came to a page that showed who had built the site: the Democratic Socialists of America, who called passing the PRO Act their highest national priority.

They had simultaneously created a handle on Twitter, since that was a platform where our grassroots opposition was strong. (Yes, it was still called Twitter back then.) The Democratic Socialists tried to co-opt our grassroots campaign on social media much the same way Romer, in the recent Fox News interview, described trying to co-opt the Democratic Party’s ballot lines. Back in 2021, the socialists put our grassroots hashtag, #FightForFreelancers, right into their Twitter bio:

Note the date when that Twitter handle was created: March 2021.

At that same time, a flurry of articles started showing up almost daily in The New Republic and other media outlets. This burst of coverage elevated the Democratic Socialist voices and planted a media narrative that there was disagreement within the freelance community about the PRO Act.

There was no actual clash of beliefs within the freelancing community. We all wanted freelancing to remain fully legal and unimpeded. The American Society of Journalists and Authors, which is the biggest organization of nonfiction freelance writers in America, had outright sued the State of California over Assembly Bill 5.

But the Democratic Socialists of America—in a sudden campaign where Megan Romer was prominent—were showing up in the media and trying to make it seem as if there was a clash of beliefs in the freelance community.

At the same time, Richard Trumka, then head of the AFL-CIO, hosted a YouTube town hall to try and push this Democratic Socialist campaign further into the mainstream.

The top-billed town hall guest who ostensibly spoke for freelancers alongside the AFL-CIO’s Trumka was, you guessed it, Megan Romer. She appeared on a panel with people such as Rafael Espinal (who has since gone on to work for Democratic Socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani of New York City) and David Bacon (also affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America).

It took us real freelancers a hot minute back in 2021 to figure out what the heck all of this was. None of us had ever been on the receiving end of a campaign like this one, let alone a campaign that one of America’s biggest Big Labor forces was amplifying.

We ultimately did the reporting that the media should have done on its own, and we showed editors that these so-called freelance writers did not seem to have any bylines, anywhere—which made it awfully hard for them to claim that they were freelancers at all.

I also personally got into some exchanges with Megan Romer on Twitter at that time. It appears that she has since deleted all of her posts and replies, but you can still see my replies to her and the socialists’ handle from March 2021:

And then, as if by magic, all the media coverage and the socialists’ campaign stopped. It just vanished in the press, stopped functioning on social media, and went dark everywhere.

The federal PRO Act, like the New Jersey bill that would have copied California’s freelance-busting Assembly Bill 5, ultimately did not become law. Instead, we all found ourselves on the receiving end of President Biden’s independent-contractor rule, which led us to sue in federal court.

President Biden’s acting labor secretary at the time, Julie Su, also now works for Mayor Mamdani in New York City.

Subscribe now

Welcome to the Fun House, Prof G

I was thinking about all of this over the weekend, when I listened to Friday’s episode of the Pivot podcast with Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway. Prof G was particularly upset about Mayor Mamdani having doxxed him, and quite a lot of other New York City property owners, by releasing a list of names who might be subject to the city’s pied-à-terre tax on second homes.

Galloway described what Mayor Mamdani did, in essence, as creating a hit list of people who have a net worth that is above average. And specifically about publishing this list, Galloway asked, incredulously:

“He’s implying we’ve done something wrong because we’re successful?”

That’s not quite right, Professor Galloway. These socialists don’t despise you only because you’re successful. Rich people are not their only target.

Their goal is to take down all of us who are hardworking and entrepreneurial in the way we think. Their platform promises followers: “You work as much as you are able and no more than needed.” One of their clearly stated goals from political candidates in the current campaign cycle is to have every single working person in a union. They want no independent contractors to remain at all.

Their quest is to destroy capitalism from top to bottom, along with tearing down our government. They plan to rebuild it in ways that Romer just detailed for the world to see.

It’s a vision of a nation where none of us—not you, not me, not anyone—will ever be able to succeed by working on our own terms again.

And these socialists are still getting big help from Big Labor. The AFL-CIO is continuing to advance and escalate the attack on independent contractors right now in my home state of New Jersey, where a California-style ABC Test rule for independent contractors is looming to take effect October 1.

Nobody has yet doxxed us here in New Jersey, but we know how it feels to be unfairly characterized, since public comments supporting this rule did cite source material that equates independent contractors with the crimes of workplace violence and human trafficking. And yes, New Jersey is the same state where the Democrat serving as Senate President in 2019 compared us to Russian disinformation agents for having the audacity to speak what the government itself now admits was the truth about this madness.

Nobody should be surprised by the words and actions of Megan Romer, Zohran Mamdani, the AFL-CIO or any of the rest of this tribe. These extremists have shown us all who they really are for many, many years now.

Believe them. And do what we’ve been doing: everything you can think of to stop them.

Share

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

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

Here’s part of that segment:

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

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

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

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

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

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

New Jersey’s Legislature Must Act

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Share

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where ‘Normal People’ Stand

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Subscribe now

The Union Power Imbalance

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Subscribe now

The 1% in Control

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Share

And About Defeating Communism…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Share

2026 Aflcio Federal Questionnaire

653KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

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

For instance, the AFL-CIO asks this:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Magical Misclassification Thinking

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

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

Yeah. That would be bad.

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

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

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

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

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

Subscribe now

And Last, There’s This Gem

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Share

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

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

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

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

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

Here are his remarks in full:

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

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

I suggest a two-step process to start.

Step One: Pass ACR73 and SCR62

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This vote shouldn’t even be close.

Subscribe now

Step Two: IRS, Not ABC

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

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

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

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

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

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

Share

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

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

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

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

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

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

There’s just one problem.

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

The Signatories

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Adam Gray, California

• Tom Suozzi, New York

• Laura Gillen, New York

• Don Davis, North Carolina

• Kristen McDonald Rivet, Michigan

• Josh Gottheimer, New Jersey

• Maggie Goodlander, New Hampshire

• Janelle Bynum, Oregon

• Susie Lee, Nevada

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

He did vote for it, though.

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

Subscribe now

Governor Sherrill Fits this Description, Too

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

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

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

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

Yes, really.

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

Watch what they do. Not what they say.

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

Share

As PBS reported:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Freelance Busting is a Socialist Priority

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Withdraw support for the federal PRO Act

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

• Repeal California’s Assembly Bill 5

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

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

Share

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

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

As the California Globe reported:

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

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

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

No New Exemptions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zippo. Zero. None.

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

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

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

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

Subscribe now

Who’s Responsible Here, Indeed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Share

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.

Subscribe now

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.

Share

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.

Subscribe now

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.

Share

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.

Share

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.

Share

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:

Subscribe now

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.

Share

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?

Subscribe now

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.

Subscribe now

‘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.

Subscribe now

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.

Subscribe now

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?

Subscribe now

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.

Share