The Freelance-Busting Caucus
Let's call these members of Congress what they really are. In the wake of lousy new union data, they're promising more attacks on independent contractors.
A fresh wave of despondency flooded the organized-labor community this week after the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics released data showing that all-time-low union membership had dropped yet again, now to 9.9% nationwide.
Popular labor writer Hamilton Nolan—in a piece titled “Confirmed: Unions Squandered the Biden Years”—summed up why that statistic has union organizers chewing their fingernails down to the nubs.
He wrote:
“In 1983, union density was 20.1%, meaning that organized labor is now less than half as powerful as it was during the Reagan presidency. This is the first time in generations that less than ten percent of workers have been union members. In 2020, union density was 10.8%. That means that over the course of the most pro-union presidency in my lifetime, not only did union density not rise—it declined into single digits.”
Nolan places the blame for this drop squarely on the strategy that union leaders have embraced in recent years. They have focused their money and time not on organizing employees who actually want to join unions, but instead on bankrolling politicians and then trying to use government as a cudgel to force more Americans into unions, at a time when most Americans have no desire to join voluntarily.
He decries this strategy of unions playing politics, suggesting that it is proving an actual death knell for the organized-labor movement:
“We [will] either change our strategy or we will accept that organized labor is no longer a powerful force in America.”
That line caught my eye because I wrote something similar back in September. The strategy of unions trying to force themselves on all the rest of us lies at the core of freelance busting. This desperation play is the beating heart of every new bill or regulation the government creates to threaten the income and careers of independent contractors—all of whom are legally protected from union organizers, and 80% of whom are perfectly fine with our choices and wish to be left alone.
As I wrote a few months ago:
“Newsflash: If the future of the labor movement depends on government-imposed reclassification of independent contractors into unionizable employee status, then the labor movement has no future.”
I was correct then, just as Nolan is correct now. The way things stand today:
One of the most widely followed pro-union writers in the country knows the politics-based strategy that led to freelance busting was at best ineffective, and at worst harmful to organized labor.
All of us self-employed Americans who have been unfairly subjected to freelance busting know it has caused nothing but outrage and problems for hardworking people who are just trying to pay their bills.
Economists have proved that the primary effect of freelance busting is not to grow union membership, but instead to destroy all kinds of self-employed and traditionally employed people’s income and careers.
Even lawmakers who previously supported freelance busting have had to go back and exempt all kinds of professions, just so people can continue to earn a living.
And yet, there is one group that, as of two days ago, was still promoting the politics of freelance busting with full-throated enthusiasm:
The Congressional Labor Caucus in Washington, D.C., posted a thread on X about the new Bureau of Labor Statistics data. This thread was rooted in a complete denial of the facts, starting out with a claim that the new data about union membership continuing to tank is actually a show of organized labor strength:
The thread goes on to outline the priorities of the Congressional Labor Caucus going forward. These lawmakers make clear that one of their primary goals is still to pass the Protecting the Right to Organize Act—a bill that is based on the same freelance-busting language that has proved economically disastrous and wildly unpopular everywhere it has been tried.
Another post from that same thread:
These people are, quite simply, detached from reality. For years, the data has made clear that the only momentum the labor movement has is spiraling the toilet bowl. And the anti-independent-contractor regulatory language in the PRO Act isn’t about making organizing easier for people who want unions; it’s about weaponizing government to make it harder for people who don’t want unions to legally earn a dime.
The PRO Act is a freelance-busting bill, plain and simple. It is a continuing effort by desperate union leaders to play politics and attack entrepreneurs instead of actually doing the work of organizing union-curious employees into new members.
It’s long past time that we start calling lawmakers who support this madness what they really are.
The Congressional Labor Caucus should be rightfully known as the Freelance Busting Caucus. That’s what I’m calling them from now on.
Here’s the Good News
It’s encouraging that in recent days, we’ve seen a flurry of news that makes clear this freelance-busting brigade is no longer in a position of power within the federal government.
On January 21, U.S. Senator Bill Cassidy, a Republican from Louisiana who has long been a champion for independent contractors—and who is the new chairman of the Senate committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions—made clear that in his chamber on Capitol Hill, freelance busting will no longer be tolerated.
Cassidy, in so many words, pointed out that there is a difference between supporting union leaders who want to weaponize government and supporting actual American workers. He said:
Across the Capitol in the U.S. House of Representatives, we heard from Congressman Tim Walberg, a Republican from Michigan who is the new chairman of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce. He was responding to President Trump firing the general counsel of the National Labor Relations Board, one of several federal agencies that participated in the Biden-Harris administration’s freelance-busting push against self-employed Americans.
Like Cassidy, Walberg also made clear that there is a difference between government prioritizing the desperation of union leaders and prioritizing the wishes of American workers to earn a living as we see fit:
We also heard increasing talk this week about growing resistance to President Trump’s nominee for U.S. Labor Secretary, Lori Chavez-DeRemer. She’s a Teamsters-backed nominee who supported freelance busting during her time as a member of Congress—a policy position that is now coming back to bite her as she tries to secure enough votes to be confirmed.
As Sahil Kapur and Matt Dixon of NBC News reported:
“A number of Senate Republicans have problems with President Donald Trump’s nominee for labor secretary, former Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer, citing pro-union stances she has taken in the past that clash with the business community.
“‘I’m not going to support her,’ Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., a senior member of the committee that will oversee her nomination, told NBC News on Monday. ‘I’m the national spokesman and lead author of the right-to-work bill. Her support for the PRO Act, which would not only oppose national right to work but would pre-empt state law on right to work — I think it’s not a good thing.
"‘And it’d be sort of hard for me, since it’s a big issue for me, to support her. So I won’t support her. I think she’ll lose 15 Republicans,’ Paul said, predicting she would win some Democrats because ‘she’s very pro-labor.’”
This message that is emerging from Republicans post-election is an absolute pleasure to hear. It needs to be banged home as loudly as possible, until every American understands how different it is from recent years, and how important it is for everyone’s freedom to earn a living.
In a nation where only 9.9% of employees are union members, and where most Americans prefer the idea of being our own bosses, being “pro-labor” is actually being “anti-worker” when union organizers are demanding freelance busting.
We shouldn’t be shy about stating this fact. We should call the lawmakers who claim differently what they really are: members of the Freelance-Busting Caucus.
And continue to vote accordingly.