There Is No Spoon
New Jersey's public comments reveal a matrix of freelance busting, but little evidence of a widespread misclassification problem.
The Matrix is my favorite movie of all time. I still remember seeing it in the theater back in 1999. The end credits rolled, I walked outside into the daylight, I grasped at the air to see if it was real, and then I walked back inside and bought another ticket to watch the movie again.
This film baked my noodle about the idea that it is possible to simulate a totally convincing reality that doesn’t really exist. The power of this idea struck me so hard that a quarter century later, this artwork hangs in my dining room:
The Matrix is a film about a computer simulation that exists all around us. Humans are plugged into this machine creation that overwhelms our brains and bodies, force-feeding us carefully designed inputs so we will accept the fake construction as our lives. What we believe is the real world is actually a computer-generated dreamworld. It seems real to us, but it’s not. The movie is about our hero’s journey as he realizes the truth: that the computer-created matrix isn’t reality.
I’ve been thinking a lot about that idea as I finished dissecting the public comments filed in support of the proposed independent-contractor rule at New Jersey’s Department of Labor & Workforce Development.
If you’re a regular reader of this Substack, then you know I’ve been able to find only 26 written comments that support this rulemaking, amid an estimated 9,500 comments that are 99% opposed.
You also know that most of those 26 supportive comments came from organizations, not individuals—and that these organizations are trying to convince us that all kinds of things are true. These comments claim, among other things, that lawyers and landscapers are in the same line of business. That we shouldn’t be our own bosses today because of the way the Mafia infiltrated the Teamsters union a half century ago. That there’s no difference between being your own boss and having a half dozen part-time bosses.
Regular readers of this Substack also know that among those 26 supportive comments, only eight came from individuals. Most of them describe concerns about app-based rideshare platforms—when the proposed rulemaking threatens the ability to be our own bosses in hundreds of professions, from financial advisers to translators to attorneys.
We are down the rabbit hole now, my friends. We can see how deep it goes.
I’m not an attorney, but to me, a plain reading of these comments that support New Jersey’s proposed rulemaking do not represent our reality.
They instead represent a constructed matrix. New Jersey’s public-comment process has exposed the matrix of freelance busting.
Here’s the Red Pill
The creation of a matrix begins with a series of carefully designed inputs. In this case, they all appear intended to make us believe that the problem of employee misclassification is widespread—so much so that new laws and regulations are needed to fix it.
Those inputs, from the start in New Jersey, have been based on data that appears to be mischaracterized. In the vernacular of The Matrix, a false version of reality.
The 2019 Report of Gov. Murphy’s Task Force on Employee Misclassification, in its very first paragraph, states that misclassification “has increased by approximately 40% in the last 10 years, and is a growing problem in New Jersey.”
But the cited data doesn’t show that misclassification increased by 40% between 2009 and 2019. The data instead shows that independent contracting rose 40% between 2005 and 2015, mostly after people lost their traditional jobs in the Great Recession. People turned to freelancing and consulting to feed their families when the W-2 job market crashed.
Also at the start of New Jersey’s task force report, union-backed research is misconstrued as federal government research. The task force report states that: “Based on a 2000 U.S. Department of Labor study of misclassification in construction in New Jersey, the failure to properly classify construction employees resulted in state income taxes not being paid for up to $11 million in off-the-books employment and nearly $9 million from employment of misclassified workers.”
Now, there is a 2000 U.S. Department of Labor “Planmatics” study that is 196 pages long, but only two of those pages are about New Jersey’s construction industry—and those two pages do not mention the dollar figures in the New Jersey task force report. Those figures instead come from union-backed research whose own authors wrote that “there is no foolproof method of trying to measure something that by its nature is mostly invisible, and any estimates should not be taken as absolute.”
Also at the beginning of New Jersey’s task force report is a reference to a book by academic David Weil called The Fissured Workplace. This book (and, by extension, the task force report) portrays independent contractors as victims of a workplace structure that is breaking apart, or fissuring, and needs to be fixed.
In reality, 80% of independent contractors say we prefer self-employment today. Why does Weil ignore this fact? The answer appears to lie in his 1994 book, Turning the Tide: Strategic Planning for Labor Unions. In it, Weil details two ways to think about independent contractors: first, as a “fundamental challenge to unionism,” and second, as a reason to “develop methods to organize” us into unions. Weil published the Fissured Workplace about 20 years later, in 2014, the same year he was installed as Wage and Hour Administrator at the U.S. Department of Labor. There, he used his powers of regulatory interpretation to claim that most Americans should be considered employees, not legitimate independent contractors.
From the start, it seems, we’ve had mischaracterized data and deeply misguided beliefs being used to establish the idea that employee misclassification is a widespread problem.
And ever since the release of New Jersey’s task force report in 2019, this matrix has continued to expand.
Dodge This
As the characters would say in The Matrix, we’ve had the inputs pumped into our brains for years now.
For example, in 2021, New Jersey’s Department of the Treasury issued a press release once again claiming that misclassification “has increased by approximately 40 percent in the last 10 years, and is a growing problem in New Jersey.” That would mean the new claim is that misclassification rose 40% between 2011 and 2021. When, again, the actual data still shows that independent contracting rose 40% between 2005 and 2015, primarily after people lost their traditional jobs in the Great Recession.
Even during this 2025 Labor Department rulemaking process itself, the state’s own press releases have revealed that what we’re being told, and what’s actually real, do not appear to be the same thing.
For instance, the Labor Department—while insisting since 2019 that it is addressing the “widespread and illegal practice of misclassifying workers as independent contractors”—announced in mid-July 2025 that since 2021, a first-of-its-kind misclassification penalty the Legislature approved had assessed nearly $11 million to be paid directly to approximately 13,000 misclassified workers.
That’s an average of just $846 per person, paid to less than 1% of the state’s estimated 1.7 million independent contractors. These real-world results do not suggest a widespread or rampant problem.
Which brings us to the estimated 9,500 written public comments now on file with New Jersey’s Labor Department about its proposed rulemaking. Reading them is akin to the part of The Matrix film where our hero realizes he can bend spoons with his mind. He can’t believe it at first, but he can do it—because the reality is that his mind is what had to bend.
He had to realize the truth: There is no spoon. He’s not bending a physical object with his mind. He’s instead realizing that the inputs are trying to convince him the spoon is real, when there is no spoon at all.
A plain reading of the public comments that support this proposed rulemaking feels like that to me.
Fully half the supportive public comments are filed by or based on the research of multimillion-dollar nonprofits that fit the definition of alt-labor groups, as author Daniel J. Galvin defined them in his 2024 book Alt-Labor and the New Politics of Workers’ Rights. Galvin writes about how labor unions, traditionally, looked to gain power through labor law, which is based on the idea of a democratic workplace vote among employees. By contrast, alt-labor groups are targeting employment law, which affects us all. These alt-labor groups are often organized as nonprofits with big-dollar, anonymous donors. They can behave like dark-money special-interest groups, using top-down political influence to impose changes on everyone.
Think about Galvin’s description in the context of 99% public opposition to this proposed rulemaking in the written public comments. Consider the fact that every witness who testified in favor of this rulemaking at June’s public hearing was either employed by a union, or affiliated with organizations that have strong union ties—and the fact that they were outnumbered for hours at the witness table, with the overall testimony being 3-to-1 against them. The amount of money being thrown at trying to overwhelm this rulemaking process is also eye-popping, with just a single one of the supportive written comments being built on more than $300 million of nonprofit financial backing.
Nearly half the supportive comments, about 45% of them, cite the same handful of antiquated data points: a 2009 Government Accountability Office report that itself is based on data from as long ago as 1984; the 2000 U.S. Department of Labor “Planmatics” report that also is based in part on that 1984 data; and the 2019 New Jersey task force report, which itself cites research based on those same decades-old sources.
I was 12 years old in 1984, dancing around my parents’ living room in a neon orange sweat shirt while watching Cyndi Lauper sing Girls Just Want to Have Fun on MTV.
People my age are grandparents now. It is ridiculous to be making any kind of policy based on data from 1984.
Data that comes from union-backed and alt-labor research is often questionable, such as this ICERES study that’s cited in the public comments. Its authors state outright that their methodology cannot tell the difference between totally off-the-books schemes and employee misclassification. That same methodology underpins this Century Foundation research, which New Jersey’s Labor Department recently cited in a press release about how the state “has vigorously fought to protect workers from various forms of worker misclassification, which continues to be a priority for the Murphy Administration.”
A matrix is all about perpetuating a belief. We are being told, again and again, that a crackdown on independent contracting is necessary to stop widespread employee misclassification. But the state’s own preferred research cannot definitively tell us how much misclassification even exists.
Public comments from unions claim that misclassification is widespread, often with little evidence to support those claims. For instance, New Jersey State Building & Construction Trades Council, a federation of unions that’s affiliated with the AFL-CIO, filed a public comment that calls the misclassification of construction workers a “rampant” problem. But the three main examples this comment cites involve a combined total of only 34 people, in a state where, according to the Labor Department, more than 150,000 people work in construction.
And that public comment, surprisingly, provides more evidence than several other unions’ public comments that appear to offer little or none at all.
Alt-labor group accusations about what’s happening in New Jersey are often unsubstantiated, such as in this public comment that’s about five individuals in Maryland, and this comment that’s about an illegal immigration problem near the Mexico border in Texas.
In these types of public comments, New Jerseyans who are the supposed victims of misclassification are just … nonexistent.
The practice of employee misclassification is wrong. It always has been, and it always will be. It absolutely should be addressed, and bad-actor companies should be held accountable.
But what we have all seen—starting with the 2019 task force report and continuing straight through to this 2025 proposed rulemaking—is a matrix that is trying to convince us this problem of misclassification is widespread and rampant, when the evidence keeps suggesting it’s not.
As Morpheus tells our hero in The Matrix: You have to let it all go. Fear, doubt and disbelief. Free your mind.
That’s the only way to understand the truth: This is not targeting employee misclassification. This is weaponizing regulatory language to attack independent contractors.
The Plague and the Cure
That 2024 book I mentioned above, Alt-Labor and the New Politics of Workers’ Rights by Daniel J. Galvin, came to my attention because it’s cited in a footnote in the public comments filed by the Workplace Justice Lab at Rutgers University.
I bought a copy of Galvin’s book and started reading—and seriously felt winded, as if I’d been punched in the gut, when I got to the page with the chart.
This chart lists the different types of problems that alt-labor groups have identified and are currently attempting to solve by influencing employment law. The list of problems goes right down a line, one after the next, like this:
discrimination
human trafficking
child labor
workplace violence
independent contractors
That’s right—this 2024 book that’s cited as a source in one of New Jersey’s public comments equates the desire to be our own bosses with abusing children and assaulting people.
The freelance busters have come a long way since David Weil’s 1994 book that said unionists needed to develop methods to organize independent contractors. They now appear to be demonizing the companies that work with independent contractors, portraying all of us smallest of small-business owners as victims, and then attempting to severely restrict our way of earning a living.
That’s the reality of what’s happening. It’s clear in the thousands upon thousands of public comments filed in opposition to New Jersey’s proposal. They describe how this rulemaking could cripple the Port of NY&NJ, decimate the AAA roadside assistance network, be potentially catastrophic for the Early Intervention System that helps infants and toddlers with developmental disabilities, and cause chaos across the economy. Attorneys and economists wrote that this proposal is fundamentally flawed, is an existential threat to independent work, suggests an overkill effect that systematically disrupts legitimate business relationships, and is a way to almost entirely eviscerate any chance of establishing independent-contractor status.
And, yes, all of this is also straight out of The Matrix movie, too.
Toward the end of the film, the bad guy, Agent Smith, delivers the following monologue. It tells us what the machines that built the matrix believe about how the human beings trapped inside of it should be classified:
“I’d like to share a revelation that I’ve had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species, and I realized that you’re not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment, but you humans do not. You move to an area, and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area.
“There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You’re a plague, and we are the cure.”
You’re a plague, and we are the cure.
The freelance busters see independent contractors multiplying and multiplying—the latest MBO Partners research says there are now 72.9 million people earning income this way. This reality is far different from the one that union organizers enjoyed nearly a century ago, when far more people worked in factories as employees.
Today, the number of independent contractors continues to climb with a tech assist from smartphones and laptop computers that let us work anywhere and anytime we wish. Conversely, union membership is at an all-time low.
You’re a plague, and we are the cure.
That’s the thinking behind this matrix that has led us—in a half dozen short years—from what was supposedly a task force on employee misclassification in 2019 to the 2025 proposed Labor Department rule that attorneys say almost entirely eviscerates the ability to be an independent contractor at all.
Such policymaking isn’t even conceivable unless we believe it’s necessary to wipe out something like a disease, a cancer.
This idea, which we’re constantly being fed, isn’t the reality that most of us are experiencing. Hardworking, entrepreneurial independent contractors are not a disease that requires a cure.
The overwhelming opposition to New Jersey’s proposed rulemaking is what’s real.
We need the Labor Department to rescind this proposed rule. We also need our Legislature to protect us all, so this kind of matrix can never take root in our state again. Bills being put forward right now to protect just a handful of professions are not the solution. They don’t treat this matrix as the serious threat that it is to our workforce, business community and statewide economy.
Do not try and bend the spoon. That’s impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth.
There is no spoon.