The video above is my opening statement at the July 17 hearing on independent-contractor policy before the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions. This statement summarized events of the past six years into a five-minute speech and these two key sentences:
"This is not targeting employee misclassification. This is weaponizing regulatory language to attack independent contractors."
Over on X, independent contractors are sharing this and other video clips I posted, gaining more than 50,000 total views so far—and that’s just on the X platform, without any major media coverage of the hearing. The reach of this message is broad. I’m even hearing from people I knew in high school 35 years ago. Turns out they grew up to be independent contractors too, and they’re now joining the fight to protect our freedom to earn a living.
Viewers are commenting that my words brought them to tears. They are urging everyone across the country to “watch and learn.” Walter Kirn—the widely read writer, co-host of “America This Week” and occasional “Gutfeld!” guest on Fox—posted: “She is a voice for all of us who wish to secure our independence as creators, truckers, farmers, performers, tradespeople, and on and on.”
I am humbled by this powerful, nationwide response. And I must say that not just based on public feedback, but also based on private feedback that I received from the U.S. Senate committee, Thursday does seem to have been a good day for our side in the freelance-busting war.
If you want to watch the entire hearing, you can do that here. But in my opinion, two of the most important moments are in the clips below.
For the first time in my three appearances on Capitol Hill since 2023, Democrats actually acknowledged that independent contractors were in the room—and that we have a point. Usually, they don’t speak to us independent-contractor witnesses at all. At this hearing, one Democrat even asked me a question in front of the cameras so we could discuss things a bit.
My only regret about Thursday is that I didn’t get a chance to have any meaningful interaction with Senator Bernie Sanders, an independent from Vermont, or Senator Josh Hawley, a Republican from Missouri. I had a few things that I really wanted to tell them, in particular.
But hey, since I have this Substack, I’m giving myself the last word below. Hopefully, this article will make its way to those two senators, and to every other lawmaker who wants to understand why freelance busting must be stopped all across the United States.
U.S. Senators Tim Kaine and Andy Kim
The two Democrats who acknowledged me—and, by extension, all of America’s tens of millions of independent contractors—were Senators Tim Kaine of Virginia and Andy Kim of New Jersey.
There’s a backstory about Senator Kim. I’m from New Jersey, which means I am Senator Kim’s constituent. I had been trying, through multiple channels and contacts, to schedule a meeting with him and his staff anytime in the afternoon following Thursday’s hearing. We kept getting the brush-off, all across the board.
So, I went on NJ101.5 statewide radio Wednesday morning and asked listeners to call Senator Kim’s office on my behalf. (Thank you, drive-time host Eric Scott!) I guess the radio audience did its thing from all across New Jersey, because by dinnertime on Wednesday, meetings were being scheduled for Thursday in Washington, D.C.
I knew, when I arrived at Capitol Hill on Thursday morning, that I’d be meeting with Senator Kim’s staff right after the hearing. What I didn’t expect was for him to be personally waiting to welcome me in the hearing room before the proceedings began:
I also did not expect Senator Kim to acknowledge me during the hearing itself. As I noted above, Democrats do not usually ask us independent contractors questions, or even seem to care that we are there at all.
Senator Kim did. He not only spoke to me during the hearing’s Q&A, but he used almost half his time to engage with me in what I felt was a sincere attempt to find common ground and leave space for future discussions.
Here is that clip:
The other Democrat who looked me straight in the eye while saying independent contractors had a point was Senator Kaine of Virginia. His words were a total surprise to me—and to pretty much everyone I know who watched the hearing.
It was a welcome moment of a Democrat acknowledging the fact that independent contractors deserve to have our wishes respected in policymaking that is, in fact, about independent contractors.
Here is what Senator Kaine said:
Those two interactions, in my opinion, were the most significant of the day. Our side appears to have gained some much-needed bipartisan ground on the idea that every American has a fundamental freedom to be our own bosses—a freedom that has existed since the day this nation was founded, and that should never have become the subject of a partisan policy fight in the first place.
Senator Bernie Sanders
With all of that said, I’m no Pollyanna, and I certainly do not ever expect to gain the support of lawmakers like Senator Bernie Sanders. The Democratic Socialists of America called it their highest national priority to pass the freelance-busting PRO Act, and Senator Sanders routinely pushes a narrative that threatens all kinds of properly classified independent contractors.
I was taking notes while Senator Sanders was giving his opening statement. If you look in the video of my testimony, you can see a spiral-bound notebook to my right. Here’s what I wrote while Sanders was speaking:
The first note is about a line we hear again and again from the freelance-busting brigade: that the latest Gallup survey says 70% of Americans support labor unions, but only 6% of private-sector workers belong to one. The freelance busters then always follow up by saying, as Senator Sanders said on Thursday, that: “All over the country, people want to join unions.”
That’s their argument for why we need widespread reclassification of independent contractors as unionizable employees through legislation like the PRO Act.
And it’s a gigantic, steaming, stanky pile of horse hockey.
Senator Sanders is accurate when he says that according to Gallup, 70% of Americans approve of labor unions. It’s actually 71%, which you can see for yourself in the first paragraph of Gallup’s most recent results.
But Gallup asked other questions in that same survey—and the freelance busters like Senator Sanders always conveniently ignore them. For instance, Gallup also asked employees currently eligible to join unions if they actually wish to do so.
A full 80% either said “not interested at all” or were at best neutral on the subject:
When you pair the totality of Gallup’s data with the data we see about independent contractors from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics—most recently this past November—that fewer than 1 in 10 of us would prefer a traditional job, it’s obvious that Senator Sanders’ insinuation about people all across the country clamoring to join unions is far from the whole truth.
The data actually shows that most Americans support unions as an option for employees who wish to join them—and support the pathway of independent contracting for those of us who prefer to be self-employed.
We’re all about liberty and the pursuit of happiness here in the U S of A.
The Uber And Lyft Bogeymen
My second handwritten scrawl about Senator Sanders’ statement was “Uber + Lyft (no other kinds).”
Oh, how hard the freelance-busting brigade keeps trying to convince the American people that all this policymaking is only about Uber and Lyft, when in fact, it targets independent contractors in more than 600 professions. Republican Congressman Kevin Kiley of California even read all those professions in a speech on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives to make this point clear:
In fact, the totality of app-based workers—I’m talking Uber, Lyft, Doordash, Instacart, all of them—comprise less than 10% of independent contractors in this country. Freelance-busting legislation and regulations hit everyone from translators and interpreters to owner-operator truckers and financial advisers alike.
But that’s never what the freelance busters like Senator Sanders say. They only ever talk about Uber, Lyft and, occasionally, Amazon or Walmart. Those are the big, bad bogeymen, not the reality of the smallest of small-business owners that this kind of policymaking is really targeting.
As I wrote last year, everyone needs to understand that whether it’s in the halls of power or in the press, “Uber and Lyft means all of us.”
Not to mention the fact that even most Uber and Lyft drivers don’t want to be employees. It doesn’t matter whether you look at industry-sponsored research or research from places like Pew Research Center that have no dog in this fight: A solid majority of app-based workers see themselves as independent contractors and wish to remain classified that way.
The Right To Join A Union
The third thing I noted during Senator Sanders’ speech was that he said independent contractors are being denied the right to form a union.
No, Senator Sanders, we are not.
Every single one of us has the ability, right now, at this moment, to choose a traditional job and then vote to join a union. That right is enshrined in the National Labor Relations Act of 1935.
Nobody is denying us our freedom to exercise this right. What’s happening is that independent contractors are instead choosing to exercise another freedom that has existed since the moment the United States was created: the freedom to hang out a shingle and go into business for ourselves.
Fully 80% of independent contractors say we prefer our way of working. Study after study shows that many of us are happier, healthier and feel more secure as independent contractors with multiple sources of income.
The vast majority of independent contractors are not victims. We are entrepreneurs. We are go-getters. We are among the non-employer firms that comprise a huge percentage of small-business owners in this country—a fact that has been true for years, according to the U.S. Small Business Administration Office of Advocacy:
Most independent contractors are pursuing the American dream in the way that works best for us—and neither Senator Sanders nor anyone else should be able to shut down the pathway we have chosen.
Senator Josh Hawley
I also had an entire section in my notes prepared in the hope of interacting with Senator Josh Hawley. He’s a Republican from Missouri who, the day before this hearing, stood up strongly in defense of writers and authors like me, in a hearing that alleged companies such as Meta are stealing copyrighted works to train AI models.
As Fox Business reported, Hawley said:
“If this isn’t infringement, Congress needs to do something. I mean, if the answer is that the biggest corporation in the world worth trillions of dollars can come take an individual author’s work … lie about it, hide it, profit off of it and there’s nothing our law does about that, we need to change the law."
Senator Hawley also wrote about this on X, in a post that I read on the Acela train en route to Washington for our hearing Thursday morning:
Three cheers for Senator Hawley, having the backs of American writers and authors like me!
I was eagerly anticipating the chance to connect what he said Wednesday about AI with what we were discussing Thursday about freelance busting. I wanted to make sure Senator Hawley understands that protecting our independent-contractor status also protects our copyrights, too.
Under U.S. copyright law—which dates all the way back to the Copyright Act of 1790—the minute we put pen to paper as writers and authors in this great nation, we own the copyright to whatever we create. That means we also have the right to sell it, to slice it and dice it, and to sell it again and again. It means we get the financial upside if we write something the public loves.
By comparison, if we are forced into employee status, then the employer owns the copyright. The corporations get all the financial upside, and we are forced to accept whatever crumbs they give us.
Some 66% of writers and authors in America are self-employed, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Any lawmaker who wants to protect us needs to stand up for our freedom to be independent contractors, too.
That’s what the Modern Worker Empowerment Act is intended to do, and a big personal reason why I went to Washington on Thursday and urged Congress to pass it.
Please contact your two U.S. Senators (find them here) and ask them to co-sponsor the Modern Worker Empowerment Act.
Then call your member of the U.S. House of Representatives (find them here) and ask them to co-sponsor the bill, too.
Feel free to share this article and add your voice to mine: Congress needs to stop this freelance-busting madness, once and for all.
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