Raising All The Voices
Translators and interpreters are speaking out—in hundreds of languages—against New Jersey’s proposed independent-contractor rule.
I’ve known Bill Rivers for quite a few years now. In the ongoing effort to protect everyone’s freedom to be self-employed, translators and interpreters have been among the most vocal fighters—in all kinds of languages. Rivers is a longtime expert in the field, with more than 25 years of experience.
He consults for the Association of Language Companies, which just filed a public comment in opposition to New Jersey’s proposed independent-contractor rule. That’s why I wanted to talk with him.
Rivers is a serious guy in his field. For eight years, he led the Joint National Committee for Languages-National Council for Languages and International Studies as executive director. Prior to that, he served as chief scientist at Integrated Training Solutions, Inc., a business in Arlington, Virginia, where he focused on strategic planning, management and advanced technologies for language and culture programs in the public sector.
In 2003, he co-founded the Center for Advanced Study of Language at the University of Maryland. He has also taught Russian, graduate courses in language policy, qualitative and quantitative methods, Russian linguistics, and second language acquisition at the University of Maryland and at several universities in Kazakhstan.
I really love that Rivers speaks Russian, because that language has special meaning to the New Jersey battlefield in the nationwide war on independent contracting.
Back in 2019, a bunch of us independent contractors in New Jersey opposed a bill that threatened to copy California’s disastrous Assembly Bill 5. Some of us also wrote op-eds in the press. Our state Senate president at the time, Steve Sweeney, didn’t like us slamming his legislation all over the media. He wrote an op-ed in the Asbury Park Press that compared us to “Russian operatives trying to interfere in our elections; one even ran in the Washington Post.”
It was my Washington Post op-ed that got Sweeney all riled up. And that ultimately helped to kill his horrible freelance-busting bill.
I tweeted at Sweeney in Russian at the time: Борьба за фрилансеров.
While I don’t actually speak Russian, Rivers and I do speak the same language on independent-contractor policy. He’s one of us: He has worked as a freelance interpreter and translator himself, and he runs his lobbying and consulting practice as a freelancer.
Here is our conversation, based on the public comment that the Association of Language Companies just filed in opposition to New Jersey’s proposed independent contractor rule.
Q&A with Bill Rivers
The public comment just filed by the Association of Language Companies explains how people working in the language industry provide essential access to health-care providers, schools, municipalities and the legal system, 24/7/365 and in more than 350 spoken and signed languages.
I don’t know if people realize just how integral such services are to countless people all across the country. Would you please explain a bit about how translators and interpreters help non-English speakers navigate hospital policies, help hearing-impaired people succeed at school, help people deal with government agencies and the courts, and more?
Well, we start with the fact that more than 65 million people in the U.S. speak a language other than English at home, and more than 26 million do not speak English well enough to access health care, participate in the legal system, or communicate with state and municipal governments. In New Jersey alone, there are more than 450,000 such “limited English proficient” residents. And we have to add a significant number of deaf New Jerseyans to that total.
Then, federal civil rights and disability rights laws and regulations, as well as New Jersey law, mandate access for people who need language assistance with health care, to participate in the legal system, to communicate with their children’s schools, and so much more. It’s a civil right in the U.S., as well as a practical matter of making services available and more efficient.
I didn’t realize something that the public comment states: New Jersey is one of the most linguistically diverse states in the country, with more than 125 languages spoken. I also didn’t know that at least 850,000 residents have some degree of hearing loss.
As the comment states, language and communications access is required under multiple laws, including the Voting Rights Act, the Patient Protection Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act. Is it even possible to fulfill all those legally required needs solely with employees, and with no independent contractors?
Nope. Even in Spanish, where some hospitals, court systems, 9-1-1 call centers and so on will have staff interpreters or qualified bilingual staff, there simply aren’t enough interpreters and translators available in any one place to meet the demand.
Every one of the services I just listed almost always has a language services company helping them, and those companies have a mix of employees—usually in languages like Spanish, which is spoken by more than 40 million people in the U.S.—as well as independent contractors.
Take a language like Belarusian. The community in New Jersey is small, and there isn’t enough demand from any one service provider to sustain an employee interpreter. But when that demand is aggregated across all of the service providers, and then all of the Belarusian or Uzbek or Guarani communities in the U.S., there’s a good bit of work. No one company will supply all of those needs. As a result, the interpreter has to contract with multiple companies to generate enough income.
That explains why the public comment states that roughly 80% of the language industry workforce nationally is independent contractors who work remotely.
Exactly. And even where a hospital might be able to meet most of its demand for Spanish interpreting with staff employees, there will still be times when they need a surge capacity. And that brings us right back to the language services companies and their contractors.
The public comment states that the New Jersey Labor Department’s proposal poses “significant challenges for compliance.” The comment talks in this regard about a language I’ve never even heard of—Karakalpak—a minority language of Uzbekistan that’s spoken in Monmouth County, where I grew up.
The public comment then describes a hypothetical scenario, in order to satisfy the proposed rule: Company A contracts with Interpreter B for a specific language. Interpreter B, in turn, contracts with another 10 companies. If the New Jersey Department of Labor and Workforce Development audits Company A, then the company bears the burden of proving that Interpreter B is not economically dependent on Company A. However, Company A has only the data relative to its relationship with Interpreter B, and moreover, has no way to compel Interpreter B to reveal her full earnings (thus allowing establishment of a percentage based on Company A’s engagements with her) nor of compelling Interpreter B to reveal which other companies she contracts with, and for how much.
The comment then states that this part of the proposal “might well be impossible to implement, as in effect, companies are asked to prove a negative based on decidedly incomplete information.”
Personally, I find this entire concept to be ridiculous. It shouldn’t matter whether an independent contractor who speaks Karakalpak has one client or a dozen clients—and if having only one client is no longer allowed, then how would anybody even start being an independent contractor based on that rare language skill in the first place?
Our hard-won experience in California shows that they may well find other work, or even move out of state to stay in the language professions, rather than deal with all of the extra burden as putative employees in New Jersey.
What else should people know about translators and interpreters, and why there is a need for so many of them to remain independent contractors?
Interpreters and translators are highly skilled professionals. It’s not enough to be bilingual; interpreting and translating involve complex cognitive processes and require intensive recurrent training to stay qualified.
And linguists are paid well. This is not the gig economy. Annual compensation for linguists rounds out to more than $80,000 per year on average, for those working full time.
The challenges of providing nationwide 24/7/365 access to interpreters in more than 450 languages make flexibility and remote work absolutely essential.
To file a public comment in opposition to New Jersey’s proposed independent-contractor rule, email david.fish@dol.nj.gov or visit SaveIndependentWork.org/NJ. The deadline for comments is August 6.