'Lost Jobs, Higher Costs'
New Jersey state Senator Jon Bramnick adds his voice to the bipartisan chorus urging NJDOL to rethink its proposed independent-contractor rule.
Yesterday, New Jersey state Senator Jon Bramnick formally announced his opposition to the independent-contractor rule proposed by the New Jersey Department of Labor & Workforce Development.
In a news release, he stated:
“This rule change will drive small businesses owners out of New Jersey, plain and simple. By misclassifying thousands of independent contractors as employees, the Labor Department would strip away the flexibility and freedom that make these professions possible. The result will be lost jobs, higher costs, and fewer opportunities for residents.”
Bramnick publicly expressed similar concerns in early July, when he called the morning drive-time show on NJ101.5 radio and added his voice to hours’ worth of callers who opposed the Labor Department’s proposal.
Yesterday’s announcement from Bramnick was formal, and was distributed on the website of New Jersey Senate Republicans:
What’s most notable to me about Bramnick’s statement is that it lists all kinds of independent contractors who would be harmed:
“The proposed rule change seeks to reinterpret the long-standing ‘ABC Test,’ threatening to reclassify thousands of independent contractors—including financial advisors, rideshare drivers, truckers, freelancers, and others—as employees. This would trigger increased payroll tax obligations for companies, in addition to upheaving independent business models.”
It’s great that Bramnick is talking about the need to protect all kinds of independent contractors (including freelancers like me) from bad policy that threatens the incomes and careers of an estimated 1.7 million of us here in New Jersey.
This stance of protecting us all is an evolution from 2021, when Bramnick supported a bill in Trenton that would have protected the independent-contractor status of golf caddies while leaving all kinds of other self-employed people unprotected. At the time, Bramnick told News12 “that because we have the No. 1 golf course in the world and many of the top, that this is important to keep our caddy programs going.”
That may be true, but golf caddies are no more important than the traveling nurses who keep our medical centers going as independent contractors, or the truck drivers who keep the Port of NY&NJ going as independent contractors, or the translators and interpreters who keep our courts and 9-1-1 call centers going as independent contractors, or the AAA responders who keep roadside towing services going as independent contractors …
Playing favorites with carveouts is not the solution to this policy problem. It’s patently unfair, and it only makes things worse. That’s why I was among the people who testified against that golf-caddie bill in 2021. As reported by the New Jersey Monitor, I called it an “egregious example of playing favorites that has absolutely no business being part of our legislative process.”
Freelance busting involves more than 600 affected professions that have been identified so far in California, where this national wave of freelance busting began a half dozen years ago. There are now more than 100 full or partial exemptions in the law there, and they continue to be a mess.
At one point, there was a lawsuit against the State of California that included this passage about the exemptions:
“There is no rhyme or reason to these nonsensical exemptions, and some are so ill-defined or entirely undefined that it is impossible to discern what they include or exclude. For example, some types of workers are excluded (e.g., a delivery truck driver delivering milk) while others performing substantively identical work are not excluded (e.g., a delivery truck driver delivering juice).”
Yeah. Really.
Just in the past year alone with regard to exemptions from California’s freelance-busting law, we have seen:
a state assemblyman calling on the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate;
yet another lawsuit filed against the state in federal court, this one claiming gender and ethnicity bias;
this report from members of the California Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, specifically citing problems with the exemption process, such as: “the politically powerful and those in industries not historical targets of organized labor were more readily able to obtain an exemption.”
Exemptions have not been a reasonable solution in California, and they are not a path that New Jersey should go down, either.
New Jersey’s Labor Department needs to rescind its deeply misguided rule proposal altogether.
We’re Almost at Two Dozen
To the best of my knowledge, Bramnick is the 21st New Jersey lawmaker to raise concerns publicly about the Labor Department’s proposed independent-contractor rule.
Here’s a list of every state Senate and Assembly member that I’m aware of, with links:
Senate Labor Committee Chairman Gordon Johnson, Democrat
Senate Legislative Oversight Committee Chairman Andrew Zwicker, Democrat
Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Joe Lagana, Democrat
Senate Education Committee Chairman Joe Cryan, Democrat
Senate Majority Whip Vin Gopal, Democrat
Assemblywoman Margie Donlon, Democrat
Assemblywoman Luanne Peterpaul, Democrat
Senator Carmen Amato, Jr., Republican
Assemblyman Brian Rumpf, Republican
Assemblyman Gregory Myhre, Republican
Senator Parker Space, Republican
Assemblyman Mike Inganamort, Republican
Assemblywoman Dawn Fantasia, Republican
Senator Declan O’Scanlon, Republican
Assemblyman Gerry Scharfenberger, Republican
Assemblywoman Vicky Flynn, Republican
Senate Transportation Committee Chairman Patrick Diegnan, Democrat
Assemblyman Robert Karabinchak, Democrat
Assemblyman Sterley Stanley, Democrat
Senator Angela McKnight, Democrat
Senator Jon Bramnick, Republican
Also notable is that O’Scanlon, Scharfenberger and Flynn just announced a plan to take action in the state Legislature that could overturn the Labor Department rule.
That would only need to happen if New Jersey’s Labor Department carries on and finalizes the rule. The rule-making process, as of August 6, has ended its public-comment phase. The Labor Department—having already witnessed 3-to-1 opposition at a standing-room-only public hearing that went on for more than three hours in June—is now supposed to read and consider all the written public comments that people and organizations filed. New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy has said he intends to let that process play out.
The next thing I’d like to see happen is the public being given full access to all the public comments that are now on file. It can be a costly, pain-in-the-neck process to access public comments in New Jersey, but the Labor Department has stated in emails that it plans to make them all publicly available for free online.
There is currently no announced timeline for that to happen. Hopefully, it will be soon, so we can understand exactly who said what, and track who the Labor Department actually listens to if it finalizes this freelance-busting rule.
For now, you can see public comments that have been voluntarily been made public, like this one and this one and this one for our side, and this one and this one against us.