The Telltale Lingo

Freelance busting comes with catchphrases. New Jersey gubernatorial candidate Mikie Sherrill and her supporters are using them.

California’s Assembly Bill 5 was a union-backed law that passed in 2019, weaponizing regulatory language to attack independent contractors and drive them out of business.

AB5 was so harmful to independent contractors that the California Legislature passed another bill less than a year later, ultimately exempting more than 100 professions from it. California voters added more exemptions by passing a ballot measure right after that. Governor Gavin Newsom’s own former deputy chief of staff wrote that “parts of California’s AB 5 make it one of the most destructive pieces of legislation in the past 20 years. It’s truly horrific how many people are negatively impacted by it.”

Reasonable people understand that AB5 was based on the deeply misguided ideas of unionists who want to organize independent contractors. Rational people know that the whole concept of freelance busting at the heart of AB5 should have burned to ash in a California wildfire.

Instead, AB5 set off an entire nationwide wave of freelance busting that we’ve all been forced to fight ever since. That wave included an AB5 copycat bill that we beat into submission in my home state of New Jersey in 2019-20, and it includes the proposed independent-contractor rule we’re fighting to stop right now at New Jersey’s Department of Labor & Workforce Development.

But destroying the livelihoods of independent contractors hasn’t ever been how this kind of policymaking has been sold to the public.

AB5 came with marketing language. A sales pitch, if you will.

This destructive freelance busting—this attempt at the widespread reclassification of independent contractors into the status of employees—was promoted as a way to protect independent contractors by creating pathways to unionization.

And right now, in my home state of New Jersey, that same insidious language of freelance busting is all over the gubernatorial campaign of Congresswoman Mikie Sherrill.

Freelance-Busting Phrases

AB5’s lingo was readily apparent not only in the media campaign that the AFL-CIO and SEIU created to gin up support for California’s AB5, but also in the statement that Newsom issued when he signed the bill into law. Instead of noting what all the data shows—that most independent contractors are correctly classified as independent contractors, and wish to remain independent contractors—the language instead focused on the idea that there is widespread misclassification of people who really should be unionizable employees:

This language—about misclassified independent contractors who need to become employees so they can join a union—then made its way from California to Washington, D.C.

On Capitol Hill, this language has been used for years now to push the Protecting the Right to Organize Act. It’s a bill whose regulatory language about independent contractors would inflict California-style freelance busting on the whole country.

But here’s how the AFL-CIO describes it:

And just as we saw with Newsom out in California, certain lawmakers in Washington, D.C., started mimicking this freelance-busting language, too. They even figured out how to broaden the marketing language during the 2024 presidential campaign, describing the California-style attack on independent contracting as the freedom to join a union.

Here in my home state of New Jersey, the freelance-busting marketing language is now back in full force. It’s not only being used to push the Labor Department’s proposed independent-contractor rule, but it’s also showing up in the gubernatorial campaign ahead of this November’s election.

Look at this August 25 social-media post by the SEIU, promoting Democratic Party gubernatorial candidate Mikie Sherrill:

The language is a mirror of what’s on Sherrill’s own campaign website:

“I will also protect and expand workers’ collective bargaining rights to ensure that they can bargain on wages, benefits, and contracts.”

Expanding pathways to good-paying union jobs.

Expand workers’ collective bargaining rights.

That is the unmistakable language of freelance busting, being positioned amid social-media posts about how Sherrill will always support unions:

A keyword search of Sherrill’s X feed shows she has posted in support of unions more than two dozen times.

She has never once mentioned independent contractors.

Sherrill vs. Ciattarelli

Congresswoman Sherrill also has a voting record on independent-contractor policy. She not only has supported freelance busting during her time on Capitol Hill, but she has done so enthusiastically, calling the PRO Act “landmark legislation to protect workers’ right to organize.”

Sherrill’s press release touting her 2021 vote for the PRO Act describes the bill as a “monumental effort to protect and expand” union-organizing rights. It quotes organizers from multiple unions. They include Ken Simone of the Bricklayers and Allied Craftworkers Union, an affiliate of the AFL-CIO. He describes Sherrill as having been instrumental in pushing the PRO Act through the U.S. House of Representatives:

“This couldn’t have happened without Rep. Sherrill’s steadfast leadership in the fight to protect collective bargaining and organizing rights, and we thank her for being a strong voice for the workers of New Jersey.”

You’ll never guess who else supports Sherrill for governor, citing her 100% voting record to support their interests: the New Jersey AFL-CIO, which, since 2019, has been pushing for the widespread reclassification of independent contractors as unionizable employees all across the state.

So far, Sherrill has been silent on the New Jersey Labor Department’s proposed independent-contractor rule, even despite the fact that it has faced widespread pushback—just like California’s Assembly Bill 5, New Jersey’s 2019 copycat bill, and the federal PRO Act after that.

By contrast, Sherrill’s opponent in the gubernatorial race, Republican Jack Ciattarelli, has made clear that he stands for everyone’s freedom to work in whatever way works best for us.

Ciattarelli has union backing too—but it comes with different language than the unions that are politically aligned with the progressive left. A recent union endorsement for Ciattarelli in New Jersey said that we have a “crisis of common sense” and that our state leaders should not cave to “fringe political voices.”

That endorsement was talking about energy policy, but it may as well also have been talking about independent-contractor policy. The difference in language could not be clearer. And the AFL-CIO issued a harsh rebuke of Ciattarelli that included calling New Jersey’s self-employed people “low-road contractors.”

During all the years that Sherrill has stood with freelance busters like the AFL-CIO’s leadership, Ciattarelli has instead stood firmly on the side of protecting independent contractors from this income-destroying madness. Here he is, having our backs in 2021:

What’s more, Ciattarelli is promising out on the campaign trail right now that he will stop the freelance busting that’s currently in progress at New Jersey’s Labor Department:

We’ve all watched for years as the freelance-busting brigade has tried, with all its political and promotional might, to shove this deeply unpopular policymaking down Americans’ throats.

We’ve been force-fed the ever-evolving catchphrases from coast to coast. Huge numbers of people have come together in the fight to stop freelance busting everywhere it’s been tried, time and time again.

At the end of the day, our nation is built on the promise of liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The whole point of living in these great United States is that our choices—including our choice of how to earn a living—have always been, and always should be, ours to make.

We need leaders who are fluent in the language of freedom.

Not people who spew the telltale lingo of freelance busting.