And the Crowd Goes Wild

Supporting independent contractors isn’t anti-union. It’s having major stage presence in politics—to win a much bigger audience.

Clarence Clemons was 6 feet, 5 inches of pure power, strolling around the Jersey Shore with a saxophone in hand, looking for a gig to play. Right around the time I was born in the early 1970s, Clarence was joining a local singer who people thought had a lot of potential. The first Bruce Springsteen album that Clarence played on was called Greetings from Asbury Park. It was named for a town about 10 minutes from my childhood home.

I didn’t listen to a lot of the E Street Band’s music as a little girl because in our house, the epitome of cool was jazz geniuses like Dave Brubeck and Artie Shaw. My dad played the saxophone, and my mom played the piano. The two of them weren’t singing Blinded by the Light in our family kitchen; they were instead talking about syncopation and 5/4 time, sometimes tapping wooden spoons on the countertop to demonstrate a paradiddle. Later, when I was old enough to play clarinet in the school band, I was one of the only kids who understood when the teacher said he wanted our audience to be so excited about what we were playing, they’d clap on the off-beat too.

Photo by Jens Thekkeveettil on Unsplash

Both my parents had what they described as stable union jobs to pay the bills, as public schoolteachers—but they never talked much about that work at home. What lit their fires was music, and they turned that passion into side hustles. My mom made extra money by teaching piano lessons for the whole neighborhood, and I know for a fact that the sound of a tenor sax carries from a basement to a bedroom two flights up because in the afternoons, my dad would come home and practice in our cellar for the weekend gigs he had lined up with his band.

My dad could play as well as Clarence—better, even—but Clarence had this extra element called stage presence. The Big Man knew not only how to blow the roof off a joint with a horn, but also how to work a crowd into a frenzy.

I was thinking about all of this on Wednesday as a trio of posts about the modern workforce scrolled across my screen. They were posts that my congressman here in New Jersey’s 7th congressional district, Republican Tom Kean, Jr., sent out back-to-back in the span of about three hours:

One, two, three—can you hear it? That right there, my friends, is a classic triplet.

You want to be a union carpenter here in New Jersey? Kean has your back, working to help create apprenticeships.

Interested in being a self-employed independent contractor? Kean is right there standing by your side too.

Thinking about opening a franchise? Absolutely yes, he says. The more opportunities, the merrier.

To everyday people, these posts do not seem complicated at all. They appear to be basic common sense. If you set them to music, most people would hear my representative playing a song that sounds a lot like America the Beautiful, a classic about liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

But this series of posts lands differently on the ears of independent contractors like me. It’s not an everyday occurrence. It’s the stuff of undeniable stage presence.

Independent contractors have been forced to spend years now fighting to save our livelihoods from our own government’s attacks—right alongside our friends in the franchise industry who have been battling regulatory language called joint employer that threatens their careers too.

Far too many lawmakers have been wrongly convinced that supporting Americans like us means taking a stance against unions. They see legislation in Congress like the Modern Worker Empowerment Act—a bill introduced for the specific purpose of protecting independent contractors—as somehow attacking unions.

Nothing could be further from the truth. It is ridiculous to suggest that just because somebody chooses to be a self-employed real-estate agent or an auto-dealer franchisee, they are a threat to a unionized carpenter.

It is even crazier that in Washington, D.C., and in state capitals all across this country, simply speaking this simple truth has become an act of political courage. Seeing a trio of posts like these in our polarized culture is like seeing a performance so rousing that it makes me want to stand up and cheer.

What I see when I look at those posts is a lawmaker who knows it takes all kinds of players to form a top-notch band. I see a musician rising above the political noise that tin-eared lobbyists keep pumping out, trying to convince lawmakers that supporting independent contractors is the equivalent of being anti-union.

You don’t have to understand labor and employment law to realize that us-versus-them thinking is a sour note.

We all know the sound of the good stuff when we hear it. In this case, it’s a little tune that I like to call freedom to achieve the American dream.

Choice, Choice, Choice!

My congressman is not the only one who has been smartly singing this tune in recent days. When I testified before Congress last month in support of the Modern Worker Empowerment Act, quite a few Republicans were taking their turn to jam onstage.

Listen to this one-minute clip of Congressman Ryan Mackenzie’s closing statement from last month’s hearing. He’s a Republican from Pennsylvania, and I was sitting directly across from him as he said this.

Partisanship aside—I continue to say that supporting independent contractors should not be a partisan issue—Mackenzie’s words about protecting our freedom to earn a living left me feeling joyful. I wanted to climb up on top of the witness table, hold a lighter high above my head, and sway along with every word he spoke:

Online, the official feed of the U.S. House Committee on Education & Workforce was also leaning hard into these same sing-along lyrics:

Lawmakers from every part of the country, and from every political party, would be smart to embrace what Mackenzie rightly described as the correct side of this issue, which study after study shows is indeed 80/20.

You can’t have an 80/20 issue unless the majority crosses party lines—and that’s precisely what we’ve experienced in our grassroots movement to stop freelance busting. Independent contractors who voted for everyone from Bernie Sanders to Donald Trump agree on this policy issue. Only deeply misguided partisan zealots believe we should be restricting anybody’s freedom to earn a living. It’s fringe fanatics who think it’s a good idea to give people fewer options to put food on the table.

There’s a reason that everywhere freelance busting has been tried in recent years, people of all genders, ethnicities, ages and professions have stood together shoulder-to-shoulder, singing in harmony that we want lawmakers to protect and preserve every possible pathway to success. There’s a reason that when our leaders talk about policies that favor all kinds of opportunities, it’s music to our ears.

Congress should pass the Modern Worker Empowerment Act. Protecting everyone’s ability to earn a living shouldn’t even be a debate. Working in whatever way works best for us—liberty and the pursuit of happiness—is an idea rooted in the very soul of our nation.

It’s the kind of fundamental freedom that makes the crowd go wild.