Where's The Beef?
State and federal regulators—even when they look for years—can't seem to find nearly as much misclassification as the freelance busters claim exists.
Members of the freelance-busting brigade have been telling us all for years now that we have to place unprecedented restrictions on independent contracting to address the growing problem of employee misclassification.
They insist that an increasing number of unscrupulous businesses are denying people the benefits they should have as employees, at the federal and state levels alike. Therefore, their logic goes, we need to restrict independent contracting severely and force lots more people into employee status by government decree.
But then, after they get the power to focus on stopping all of this misclassification, and after they spend years working from inside the government to hold all the bad actors accountable, the reports of their results come out.
I read these results, and I find myself channeling that old woman in the Wendy’s commercial from when I was a kid: “Where’s the beef?”
We’re not talking about small efforts in recent years to find and address actual cases of employee misclassification. We’re talking about major efforts that have been undertaken at the federal and state levels alike, all of it at taxpayer expense.
At the federal level, Congressman Bobby Scott of Virginia, a lead sponsor of the freelance-busting PRO Act, claimed that misclassification was a nearly $4 billion per year problem. But on December 17, 2024, the U.S. Department of Labor announced that since January 2021—after nearly four full years of prioritizing the issue of employee misclassification—it had recovered only about $41 million in back wages for some 28,000 workers.
That’s a little over $10 million per year, just a wee bit off from Congressman Scott’s claim of misclassification being a $4 billion per year problem.
Similarly anemic results are being seen after years of this same narrative and regulatory focus in New Jersey. In 2019, the Report of Governor Murphy’s Task Force on Misclassification was issued. Among the statistics it cited was the ol’ chestnut that 10% to 30% of employers misclassify employees. That Task Force Report has since been used to justify the enactment of 10 new laws, the creation of a state government office, and the granting of unprecedented power for the state’s labor commissioner.
You’d think all those new laws and power would have helped the state find the widespread misclassification that the freelance busters alleged was happening.
But again, I see the results and I ask: Where’s the beef?
At a state Senate Labor Committee hearing on March 10, 2022, Chairman Fred Madden, a Democrat, noted that when it comes to enforcing misclassification policy in New Jersey, Labor Commissioner Robert Asaro-Angelo had only taken action in 44 cases after the new laws had gone into effect.
And according to the New Jersey Department of Labor’s own April 2025 press release, the first-of-its-kind misclassification penalty had assessed money to be paid to only about 12,500 workers.
Then, just days before this month’s U.S. Senate hearing where I testified about how what’s really going on here is freelance busting, the New Jersey Department of Labor released new figures that bumped up its number of misclassified employees who were paid from about 12,500 to about 13,000.
Stop and think about that. The state paid money to just 13,000 misclassified employees. After prioritizing a crackdown on misclassification for years. In a state with a workforce that numbers 4.4 million. After claiming up to 30% of employers were engaging in misclassification.
These paltry results strongly suggest that the information being presented about independent contractors is wildly inaccurate; that these federal and state departments are incompetent in addressing employee misclassification; or both.
N.J. Public Comment Deadline Soon
Right now in New Jersey, that same Task Force Report is being cited in the state Labor Department’s attempt to impose a new independent-contractor rule that is a threat to self-employed people all across the Garden State, according to numerous attorneys and yet one more attorney and Republican lawmakers and Democratic lawmakers.
There is still time to register your opposition to this proposed rule-making, which is yet another attempt at freelance busting. The deadline to send public comments is August 6.
You can email david.fish@dol.nj.gov or fill out the form at Save Independent Work.
Add your voice alongside all of us who testified at last month’s public hearing in Trenton about how awful this kind of freelance busting would be in New Jersey, and why the New Jersey Department of Labor needs to rescind its proposed independent-contractor rule altogether: