The Next Wave
A Minnesota press conference spotlights the freelance-busting brigade's new plan of attack against independent contractors.
There was a press conference last week in Minnesota that didn’t get a whole lot of attention in the news, but that should make clear to everyone nationwide how the next wave of attack against independent contractors is going to come at us all.
As you watch this press conference, imagine that it’s 2019:
The leaders of unions with all-time-low membership numbers have decided that their big idea to get more dues-paying conscripts is to change the law.
Change the law how? By making a lot of noise in the media about how bad Uber and Lyft are, and about how “gig workers” need protection from them.
These union organizers do everything they can to ensure that the media narrative is all about how this effort to unionize is coming not from them, but instead from rideshare drivers, who want protections and new rights.
All the while, these same union organizers actually have a plan to try and reshape the whole workforce by making it illegal for all kinds of legitimately self-employed people to earn a living unless they become unionizable employees.
Union-backed lawmakers in California have gone along with this plan and passed Assembly Bill 5, and union-backed New Jersey lawmakers have just introduced a copycat bill to try and do the same thing in a second state.
Now, watch this press conference that happened last week in Minnesota.
Think about what happened in 2019 in the context of what you’re seeing and hearing.
Here’s what I see and hear when I watch that press conference in Minnesota:
The leaders of unions—whose membership rosters have now hit fresh all-time lows—have decided that their big idea to get more dues-paying conscripts is to change the law.
Change the law how? By making a lot of noise in the media about how bad Uber and Lyft are, and about how “gig workers” need protection from them.
These union organizers do everything they can to ensure that the media narrative is all about how this effort to unionize is coming not from them, but instead from rideshare drivers, who want protections and new rights.
All the while, these same union leaders actually have a plan to try and reshape the whole workforce by instituting sectoral organizing, which could give unions power over all kinds of legitimately self-employed people.
Union-backed changes to the law have just gone through in Massachusetts, and union-backed lawmakers in Minnesota are announcing a plan for legislation to try and do the same thing in a second state.
This is an easy-to-spot playbook being put into motion again.
You don’t have to take my word for it. Listen to Minnesota state Rep. Samakab Hussein, who said this at last week’s press conference:
“Unions are the backbone of America … Big rideshare companies continue to do the bare minimum while making billions. It is time for change. This bill will give drivers the right to form a union and negotiate fair pay and protection … We are following the model that worked in Massachusetts. We will try to implement the same model right here in Minnesota.”
Now, despite what Hussein said, there is not actually any “model that worked” in Massachusetts. What does exist is a brand-new thing that unionists just pushed into law a few months ago, and that, much like California’s AB5, has yet to play out in the real world. All kinds of legislative and legal battles are likely to come next.
What has changed for sure between 2019 and 2025 is the way the freelance-busting brigade is trying to change our laws to get control over independent contractors, who currently are protected from union organizers as we earn a living on our own terms.
Importantly:
There has been no change in the way most independent contractors feel. Some 80 percent of us wish to remain our own bosses.
There also has been no change in the way most rideshare drivers feel. Some 77 percent of them wish to remain independent contractors, too.
What has changed is the avenue the freelance busters are taking to try and change the law, so they can try to unionize as many of us as possible.
In the wave of freelance busting that started with California’s Assembly Bill 5, the method of attack was the reclassification of independent contractors as employees. That method created massive backlash everywhere it was tried, so now, a new method is being tried. That new method is called sectoral organizing.
This strategy of freelance busting in multiple states is usually a setup for a nationwide attack against us all. Independent contractors nationwide just learned this the hard way, with California’s Assembly Bill 5 ultimately leading to the introduction of the federal Protecting the Right to Organize Act. The freelance-busting brigade is, once again, doing a test run of its idea in the states, with bigger ambitions on the horizon.
That’s why it is paramount for us all to understand what’s happening with sectoral organizing, and why it’s so important for this type of freelance busting to fail—right now, in Minnesota, and in the future, everywhere else.
What is Sectoral Organizing?
I started writing about sectoral organizing—sometimes called sectoral bargaining—back in July 2024.
Just two months earlier, the Service Employees International Union had made an announcement that should have gotten a lot more attention than it did. The SEIU is one of the most relentless, remorseless freelance-busting unions in the country. In May 2024, its leadership announced this:
“We will win bold, groundbreaking sectoral organizing victories that raise standards for workers and open the doors of unions to workers who have been written out and written off.”
That was a change from the SEIU’s longstanding talking point of wanting to focus on what it called the misclassification of unionizable employees as independent contractors. In previous years, the SEIU had been among those unionists screaming at the top of their lungs that misclassification had “reached epidemic proportions.” (Government regulators found precious little evidence of this being true when they prioritized looking for misclassification during the Biden-Harris administration.)
The SEIU announcement in May 2024 signaled a new tactic being put into motion. The announcement didn’t even include the word “misclassification,” but it did talk about sectoral organizing—and it was soon followed by the SEIU backing the Massachusetts sectoral-organizing measure, as well as heralding last week’s announcement about a sectoral-organizing bill about to be introduced in Minnesota:
What the SEIU has going for it with this new angle attack is that, much like the idea of misclassification, most Americans have never heard of sectoral organizing. The millions upon millions of independent contractors that sectoral organizing could ultimately affect in hundreds of professions are yet again completely clueless about the fact that this policy drive being spun about Uber and Lyft is really, at its core, about changing our laws to try and gain access to us all.
Under U.S. law, it’s illegal to unionize an independent contractor. We all have the right to hang out a shingle and go into business for ourselves, to choose the path of self-employment, to be our own bosses as small-business owners, and to earn a living free from union interference or control.
We also have the right to choose a traditional job as an employee, and then, as employees, to decide whether or not to join a union. As lawyers have explained it to me, the type of organizing we have in the United States requires unions to organize employees at only a single company at a time. Union leaders can’t unionize the whole auto industry at once, for example; they first have to get employees at Ford to unionize, then go to Chevrolet, and so forth.
In other words, the union organizers—by law—have to go from auto plant to auto plant, offering every employee a chance to vote on whether or not to join a union. The same thing is true for union organizing in every industry.
Legal lingo for the system we have means that unions must focus their organizing efforts on a single enterprise. What we have all across the United States today is known as enterprise bargaining.
With sectoral organizing, aka sectoral bargaining, that enterprise limitation is removed.
This sectoral approach would mean that unions could gain control over setting standards for entire industries at once—including industries where independent contractors do business, even without reclassifying us as employees. Union-backed lawmakers could give organizers control over, say, standards for the whole publishing industry. Suddenly, freelance writers would be caught up in the unionists’ gill net, right alongside unionized and non-unionized employees.
As one lawyer explained it to me, sectoral organizing is cartel-level control in the hands of union organizers, backed by the power of the state.
The audacity of it is truly breathtaking in a nation where most Americans continue to say we have no desire to join a union at all.
One Important Difference
The good news, as the unionists roll out this next wave of freelance busting, is that this time around, a lot more of us are onto their game.
Back in 2018, when these same unionists were creating things like misclassification task forces in my home state of New Jersey—as a pretext to issue “official” reports calling for independent-contractor reclassification legislation—freelancers like me had no clue that what they were doing was actually about trying to ensnare us.
Today, quite a few smart, determined independent contractors have learned to understand the nature of the fight we’re up against, all across the country.
In Minnesota in 2023, state Attorney General Keith Ellison formed a task force on worker misclassification, saying he wanted “to gather the best thinking about the problem and make practical, workable recommendations.” Right from the start, freelancer Brittany VanDerBill was smart enough to get a seat on that task force. She then took copious notes at all the task-force meetings, and she ultimately shared her experiences publicly in this Q&A, which itself has now been widely circulated among Minnesota lawmakers.
Britt managed to get it into the public record that the process in Minnesota has been biased against legitimately self-employed people from the start. This is different from what happened in the last wave of freelance busting, when a bunch of us had to do things like sue the federal government after the fact. In Minnesota, there’s an actual record going into this next battle about how unionists are unfairly, and inaccurately, skewing what policymakers are being told about independent contractors in general.
As Britt told me in that Q&A:
“Whenever I brought up the fact that independent contracting offers freedom and flexibility, other task force members or agency members would immediately try to downplay and discredit that argument.
“One task force member tried to explain to me that there was nothing legally preventing an employer from offering an employee the same flexibility as independent contractors. Sure, legally that could happen. There’s also nothing legally stopping an employer from offering every employee their own private Cadillac Escalade and personal chauffeur, either. Will that happen? Hell no, not for those of us who live in the real world.
“The idea that independent contractors choose to be independent contractors was another thing that constantly got shot down whenever it was brought up. They kept telling me that choosing to be an independent contractor, or to work with one, is not a factor in determining status.”
As Britt’s efforts make clear, many of us who value our freedom to choose self-employment are all much better prepared to fight the freelance-busting madness in this next wave of attack. Like her, we all just have to raise our voices and do it.
If you live in Massachusetts, contact your state lawmakers and tell them you do not want sectoral organizing to become legal in your state.
Across the country, if you live in a state with Democratic Party control that is likely to introduce a copycat bill, be on the lookout for it in the news, and watch for announcements about task forces being formed. Get out in front of the media narrative—expose the whole truth of what’s really going on with this push to institute sectoral organizing—before the freelance busters have a chance to gain any traction.
Big picture, our opponents’ goals have not changed. They are on a continuing quest to increase union membership by hook or by crook.
For most Americans, the preference to be our own bosses hasn’t changed, either. Most of us support the existence of unions, but have no interest in joining one ourselves.
Lawmakers need to stand with us, and for our freedom to earn a living in whatever way works best for us, no matter what tactics the freelance busters try next.