130 to 4

This X handle reveals the biggest problem the incoming Labor Department needs to fix: a focus on promoting unions at the expense of everyone else.

Last week, Gallup reported that 9% of U.S. workers who are employed full- or part-time belong to labor unions. The figure was slightly lower than federal data showing about 10% in recent years.

The big-picture point is this: Unionized jobs are a small segment of today’s workforce, a fact that is vividly clear when you see the figure displayed as a chart:

By contrast, independent contractors far outnumber unionized employees. Data varies (based on research definitions) about whether there are 20 million or 50 million or 70 million Americans now earning some or part of our income as independent contractors, but by all estimates, there’s a heck of a lot more of us than there are union members in the United States.

You would think, given the composition of our workforce, that the person running the U.S. Labor Department would spend at least as much time championing independent contractors as she does championing unions.

In fact, you’d think she would be respecting and amplifying the voices of independent contractors when we make our wants and needs clear.

You would be wrong.

The Biden-Harris administration has used the U.S. Labor Department to try and create policy that was not of, by and for the people. Instead, the administration worked relentlessly and remorselessly to create policy that was of, by and for the union organizers, in a way that directly threatened millions of other Americans’ freedom to earn a living.

In my opinion, this is the biggest problem that the incoming U.S. Labor Department will need to fix as part of the Trump-Vance administration.

We need our government to work for us all, including those of us who wish to hang out a shingle, be our own bosses and earn our living as independent contractors as we pursue the American Dream.

The X Factor

Since August 2019 (edited to correct: August 2023), when America’s current U.S. Labor Department chief began tweeting from an acting secretary handle on X, she has posted about 130 times in support of unions. That’s an average of a little more than twice a week.

I know this because I went through her whole feed and did my best to count the tweets one by one. Admittedly, 130 is a round number that might be off slightly, because I started to lose consciousness from the repetitive boredom.

Even still, the pattern is consistent and clear. Again and again, the message to the whole of the U.S. workforce has been this:

The tens of millions of us who are independent contractors within the “other” 90% category of the workforce—earning a living in hundreds of professions from trucking to writing to translation services and medicine—have never been championed at all.

Not even once.

In fact, a search of the feed shows that Su has tweeted precisely four times about independent contractors since August 2019, when she started using this handle on X. All four times that she mentioned us were in January 2024, when her department finalized a new rule to define us in a way that—according to her own department—most independent contractors said was biased against us:

It’s all right there in black and white. Who liked the policy that underpinned this Biden-Harris rule that Su finalized about independent contractors? Many of the same union organizers the White House promoted as wanting her in the job, even despite the U.S. Senate’s refusal to confirm her for the role. Our biggest advocate for independent contractors in Congress, U.S. Rep. Kevin Kiley, a Republican from California, described the White House keeping Su in this job without Senate confirmation as “blatantly an end run around the Constitution's advice and consent requirement."

When people show you who they are, believe them.

All this time, even when our nation’s top Labor official was writing about us, it was to tell us the Biden-Harris administration was going to let union organizers determine our fate, no matter how loudly we said “no, this is wrong, this hurts us.”

And the few times that our nation’s top Labor official deigned to tweet about us, it was to tell us that she was doing the opposite of what we wanted, and instead championing the goals of union organizers who have been leading the freelance-busting brigade all along.

From a policymaking perspective for the U.S. workforce, that’s not giving unions a reasonable, proportional seat at the table.

It’s letting unions run the table in a way that runs roughshod over all the rest of us.

And it has continued to happen, day after day, week after week, month after month, even though many of us used our own X accounts to point out the horror-show nature of the policymaking imbalance:

When that’s how an increasingly vocal chunk of Americans feel, it means you’re failing to do the job that taxpayers are paying you to do. People who are serving in federal government jobs are supposed to represent us all.

Going forward, as the incoming Trump-Vance administration staffs its Labor Department—and especially the department’s leadership positions—this lopsided, anti-entrepreneurial and deeply misguided approach to policymaking needs to change in meaningful ways.

We need a U.S. Labor Department that respects, protects and champions independent contractors too, every single day of the year.

Congress Must Act As Well

It’s a little-known fact that in the U.S. House of Representatives, the committee that oversees workforce issues like this one has a history of changing its name.

Democrats seem to prefer calling it the Committee on Education and Labor, as a nod to labor unions.

Republicans seem to prefer calling it the Committee on Education and the Workforce, as a nod to all the rest of us.

The latter is how it has been known in recent years as Kiley and other Republicans have been doing their level best to help us stop this incessant freelance busting, They have been trying to make sure that this policy problem is given serious attention, in all kinds of ways.

For starters, they have exposed the “experts” who are brought in to testify as Democratic Party witnesses—and who often have zero experience earning a single thin dime as independent contractors themselves. Republicans like Kiley have gotten testimony into the public record that clearly shows these people want to turn independent contractors into unionizable employees against our will:

They have issued subpoenas to the U.S. Labor Department, including this one led by Congresswoman Virginia Foxx, a Republican from North Carolina, in an attempt to expose what Foxx described as “the Biden-Harris administration’s efforts to eliminate the independent contractor model and classify as many workers as possible as employees.”

Republicans also invited real independent contractors—including me—to testify at hearings, in an attempt to help the public understand what has been happening with this mind-boggling bureaucratic bonanza of policymaking, and how it threatens everyone’s right to go into business and be our own bosses:

I can tell you from my personal experience testifying that day in 2023, it was incredibly frustrating to go all that way, to explain why we’re all so frustrated, to yet again try to have a meaningful conversation with Democrats about the policy problem—and for the Democrats to completely ignore us in that venue, too.

Not a single Democrat would even speak to us that day, not even after I ended my opening statement by saying this to directly to the top-ranking Democrat who was in the room at the time, sitting directly across from me:

"I hope we can have a conversation today about just how much harm it's going to do our economy if you misclassify tens of millions of Americans like me.”

Nope. Hard pass, yet again.

The Democrats did not want to talk about how the non-employer businesses they keep trying to undermine—many of them women- and minority-owned—contribute $1.3 trillion to the U.S. economy.

By contrast, the Republicans kept trying to help us. Kiley and U.S. Senator Bill Cassidy, a Republican from Louisiana who is now the incoming chairman of the Senate committee that oversees this policy area, introduced a joint resolution to try and protect us. Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, a Republican from New York who was just tapped for a leadership role in the Trump-Vance administration, teamed with U.S. Senator Tim Scott, who is preparing to lead the National Republican Senatorial Committee, to introduce legislation in an attempt to protect us. Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee was an initial co-sponsor, as was Representative Kiley. My own congressman here in New Jersey, Representative Tom Kean Jr., has also continually supported efforts to help us in Congress, just as he did when he was our state Senate minority leader in 2019 and the Democrats launched a freelance-busting attack in our Statehouse.

Many other members of the GOP have stood with us on this policy issue and fought for us. The Republican Party has been our most valued partner and champion in trying to protect and preserve our freedom to be our own bosses all across the United States.

We need them to keep doing so in every branch of government. In the next Congress, we need them to pass a law to stop the freelance busting, once and for all.

I’m Ready to Help

It’s my hope that with the Trump-Vance administration, there will be an opportunity for strong voices representing independent contractors to be in all the rooms where policy decisions are being made about us. From the U.S. Labor Department to the halls of Congress, we deserve—and should be given—meaningful seats at the table to help make sure policy works for us all.

Yes, it was disappointing to many of us last week to learn that the person nominated to lead the Labor Department is the choice of the Teamsters union, whose leader supports freelance busting. That nomination was definitely not what any of us were expecting when we walked into voting booths just a few weeks ago. To a lot of independent contractors, the news felt like a shocking betrayal.

However, it’s my hope that even if this nominee is confirmed for the role, the policy stance of the Trump-Vance administration will not be Julie Su 2.0. It’s my hope that there will be more of a balance that gives unions trying to help struggling employees a seat they deserve, while giving the rest of us seats that we deserve, too.

That would be actual progress for all the people, so we can keep all of our options open in terms of how we earn a living, at any given point in our lives.

Something that incoming Vice President JD Vance told reporters just two months ago gives me real cause for optimism about that ultimate outcome as a possibility. The bold emphasis is mine:

"Speaking to reporters on a press call focused on Trump’s union support this cycle, Vance was asked by Semafor whether he believes more workers should be in unions. The Ohio senator said it was “ultimately up to the workers,” but that he blamed foreign competition for reducing union membership.

“I’m not going to tell any worker exactly what they should be doing with their decisions, but I do think that the fact that union membership has declined shows that, in a lot of ways, we have heavily invested in shipping American jobs to countries that sometimes employ literal slaves,” Vance said. “Because people like Kamala Harris have said we’re never, ever going to fight back against these foreign countries using slave labor to undercut the jobs and wages of American workers, we’ve seen that union membership decline in a very big way.”

Union membership fell to a record low rate of 10% in 2023, according to data from the Labor Department, even as the total number of union members crept higher. Democrats have argued Trump and Vance are making a hollow pitch to labor, citing their opposition to the PRO Act, a top union priority that would clear hurdles to organizing workers, among other stances. Vance has distinguished between “good unions” and “bad unions” in prior interviews, arguing the legislation would empower labor groups that support Democrats.

Vance, asked about right to work laws in individual states by Real Clear Politics, added that a Trump-Vance administration believes that it is up to each state to determine policy.

“I think what we see is our job in national policy is to protect as many workers’ jobs as possible, to promote tax and spending and tariff policies that promote large-scale economic growth and actually give workers more their take on pay and more jobs to begin with,” Vance said.

As of today, the transition team helping to staff the incoming administration has asked for nominations of “real people” who are willing to serve and make a difference. I’ve been nominated for an advisor role on Labor policy, and am currently the top vote-getter who is not a celebrity or a sitting U.S. Senator. Quite a few “real people” have written testimonials on my behalf. Numerous folks in Washington have sent my resume over directly, too.

I hope you’ll consider voting for me here if you agree that we need to fix this policymaking problem, which I believe is paramount to protecting the very essence of liberty, the pursuit of happiness and the American Dream.

Certainly, appointing someone like me into a meaningful role would help to give independent contractors some peace of mind about a balanced approach to policymaking going forward. It would help us all to finally feel respected and protected, too.

If you have any further questions about me or where I stand, you can read this background about me, or this piece that I wrote about how I hope the incoming administration will approach Labor policy.

You can also follow my own feed on X, which is decidedly different from Julie Su’s.

It’s time to Make America Work Again, and to make it work for us all.

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