Louder! Louder!
From the State of New Jersey to the halls of Congress, our side is cranking up the volume in the nationwide fight to stop freelance busting.
I’m almost afraid to write it.
Seriously. I wrote it, deleted it, and then wrote it again. I don’t want to do anything that might tempt the wrath of the gods with the thing where you have to go outside, spin around three times and spit.
But it is starting to feel—it really, truly is starting to feel—like we may be entering the long-overdue “find out” phase of this freelance-busting FAFO nightmare.
This week has brought an avalanche of attention to the policy problem that so many of us independent contractors have been fighting for years now to try and fix. On Capitol Hill, U.S. Senators Bill Cassidy, Tim Scott and Rand Paul introduced a package of bills intended to help protect our self-employed status as well as give us access to better health-insurance plans and other benefits.
The legislative package includes the U.S. Senate version of—hallelujah!—the Modern Worker Empowerment Act that our hero, Congressman Kevin Kiley of California, introduced in the House of Representatives back in February, and that I testified in favor of in May before the House Subcommittee on Workforce Protections.
A full-court media press then ensued. I came in from walking my dog on Tuesday morning and was flipping through the news channels while eating my bagel, egg and avocado sandwich, and there was Senator Cassidy, chairman of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, standing up for independent contractors on Fox News.
Senator Cassidy was also on Bloomberg TV, spreading the message about the need to protect independent contractors all throughout the land:
Odds are good that my screaming with excitement scared the heck out of poor old Ginger, and I had barely put her leash away and calmed myself back down when then the next thing I knew, Senator Scott was on CNBC singing the praises of independent contractors:
Wow does this feel awesome, having our policy issue front-and-center on the news with some of the top-ranking lawmakers in the majority on Capitol Hill talking about how they intend to protect us.
All I could think was: More of this, please!
And lo and behold, the gods responded. Just when I thought this week couldn’t get any better, our side in this battle to save self-employment kicked into overdrive here in my home state of New Jersey, too.
Jacked Up in Jersey
At 8:07 a.m yesterday, I did as I’d been instructed and called the producer’s line at New Jersey 101.5, which is the biggest talk-radio station in my state. Right on time, at 8:10, drive-time host Eric Scott started talking about the New Jersey Department of Labor’s proposed independent-contractor rule.
I got about five minutes to explain how awful this proposed rule is—worse, even, than California’s Assembly Bill 5, according to the attorneys—and to talk about the widespread opposition we saw at the standing-room-only public hearing in Trenton a couple weeks ago.
The first caller after my hit was my friend Lisa Yakomin of the Bi-State Motor Carriers, talking about how this proposed rule would cripple trucking operations at the Port of NY&NJ. And with that, the show was off to the races. They had so many callers and people in the station’s online chat that independent-contractor policy ended up being the only topic discussed until the show ended at 10 a.m.
It was 100% opposition to the State of New Jersey’s current attempt at freelance busting. There was even a state senator, Jon Bramnick, who called in to join the pile-on against what the New Jersey Department of Labor is trying to do.
The host even played this ad in full for the New Jersey 101.5 audience to hear. Yes, that is yours truly at the end, serving up a much-deserved dose of What The Hell DOL attitude:
Again, I thought: More of this, please!
And again, the gods responded. So many people were still waiting in line to have their say after the show ended yesterday that the host started in on the topic again this morning at 7 a.m., giving out phone numbers for people to call down in Trenton to raise absolute hell. He took calls for a whole hour this morning, too—once again, every single one for our side.
From what I hear, a bunch of people who heard the radio show went to the Save Independent Work website to submit a public comment opposing the New Jersey rule. (You should do that now, too. Bombard these bureaucrats! They have it coming!)
We also had people asking to get into the Fight For Freelancers group that I co-founded over on Facebook, where there’s a surge of excitement among all of us who are so thrilled to see our years of hard work on this issue finally looking like it might turn the tide.
There’s a lot more work to do if we’re going to stop this New Jersey rule-making, and to get the Modern Worker Empowerment Act through both chambers of Congress and over to the White House so it can be signed into law. But we are off and running now—and I’m all in for the pedal-to-the-metal ride that’s about to come next.
Can you feel the excitement? Oh yeah—let’s get louder!