(Note: Today’s article was too long to include everything in the email post. As always, the website has the full version!)
From time to time, I’ve written about my experiences as a freelance writer/editor over the last decade or so. Over the years I’ve met a number of other freelancers, all of whom have their own unique reasons for choosing a life as an independent contractor over one as a regular employee.
Some people I met were physically unable to go to an office for 8 hours a day. (Remember, before 2020, remote work wasn’t really a thing.) Some people were caring for (and focusing on) small children or older parents, and were often called away at a moment’s notice. Some people were workaholics and wanted to put in 70 hours a week, every week. Others — like myself — simply didn’t like the idea of putting all their eggs in an employer’s basket.
One thing all of us agreed on is that we didn’t WANT to be employees of the various sites we freelanced on. (Obviously, workers who believe they ARE employees should have some sort of arbitration available to determine their legal status!) We valued flexibility over stability. If I wanted to work from midnight until 8 am, no problem. If I wanted to take a weekend (or a week) off, nobody could tell me I couldn’t. And to be sure, there are pitfalls to choosing to be an independent contractor. (I had the damnedest time finding an apartment because I had no “reliable income” — as if the lady sitting on the other side the desk would still get paid if she stopped working.)
During my freelancing career, nothing upset the independent contractor applecart more than California’s “Assembly Bill 5” (AB5), which was an attempt to get “gig” workers such as Uber drivers to be classified as employees of the company.
The tiny number us of who were paying attention to this issue as it was unfolding noted that Uber and Lyft both offered to pay drivers $21 an hour. (In 2019!) However, this proposal wasn’t good enough for the California legislature, which plowed ahead with AB5 without realizing (or without caring) what they were actually setting in motion.
Far from only affecting Uber and Lyft drivers, AB5 sent entire industries into a tailspin. We’ll start with freelance writers:
Now, if you’re Matt Taibbi or some other bigtime investigative journalist, you may be able to get by only producing 35 “content submissions” a year, because each story is thoroughly researched and presented all at once. But for the vast majority of creators, a “content submission” might be something like a “Top 10” list for Buzzfeed — which takes maybe an hour and pays around $20. (One frequent task I worked paid roughly $3 for a 100-word product description. These took roughly 5 minutes - meaning that in 3 hours I would have been ‘topped out’!)
Good luck paying your bills when you’re limited to 35 of those articles per year.
And how did the California legislature, in all its wisdom, come up with the ‘proper’ number of submissions in the first place?
Just like ‘the experts’ pulling ‘6 feet of social distancing’ out of…….nowhere (something we’ve known for years), here the California legislature decides that ‘part-time’ writers have weekly columns, so people who do HALF OF THAT should be classified as employees.
And just like the 6-foot ‘rule’ caused chaos in all facets of life, this ‘arbitrary’ number upended the lives of countless freelancers. In fact, many companies decided the easiest way to avoid the hassle of tiptoeing around the new law was simply to stop doing business with California freelancers all together:
But the carnage extended far beyond the newsroom:
Were you aware that most truckers are actually independent contractors? Do you think the California legislature was when they came up with AB5’s ‘ABC’ test?
After realizing they had just shotgunned their economy in the face, California quickly moved to create exemptions for specific industries — a situation nearly as dangerous as the bill itself. Who wants to be dependent on the whim of a bureaucrat (or team of them) continuing to exempt your business from their dumb rules?
(As an added “bonus”, the original targets of the legislation — Uber and Lyft — sponsored, promoted, and eventually got Proposition 22 passed, which exempts rideshare companies from the law. So for all the pain caused, the lawmakers didn’t even accomplish their main objective — getting drivers into unions.)
AB5 is another example of government believing you’re too stupid to run your own life and make your own decisions — and if that means you end up with no job, well…you’re welcome. The bill forced people — many of whom didn’t want to be classified as employees in the first place — to readjust their entire lives based on the whim of an idiot who thinks 35 articles is a reasonable cutoff in an industry she obviously knows nothing about.
In fact, California’s AB5 was so universally reviled, there’s only one thing to do — take it national!
Joe Biden knows that when times are tough and more and more people need a side hustle to keep their heads above water, the best thing to do is add more water to the pool! Do you Doordash a few hours a night a couple days a week? Not anymore! Government knows what’s best for you, citizen!
If you read the full 106-page PDF of the rule, you quickly see these new proposals are completely arbitrary — leaving your fate in hands of people who do nothing but tear down what other people build.
If none of the factors have a predetermined weight, how on earth are you to know if you — or your subcontractors — qualify? As an employer, why would you risk it? Even if the situation is resolved in your favor, you’ll be spending hours and hours NOT doing something productive that pays the bills — instead you’ll be chatting with government workers who get paid no matter how long it takes to resolve the issue. (Of course, it takes government workers to call it an issue in the first place!)
The government received nearly 55,000 comments about the new rule, the vast majority (that I reviewed) from citizens concerned about the proposed rule. Yet all throughout the full text, the Department of Labor ignores the real people who will be affected and plows ahead anyway.
The good news is this rule doesn’t take affect for two months, and lawsuits are already on the horizon — meaning it may never actually become official. The bad news is that millions of Americans will be waiting on the courts to rule upon issues affecting their livelihoods. (Just like Biden’s vaccine mandates.)
And also just like those vaccine mandates, this is yet another example of “The Defender of Democracy” not actually going through the proper steps to pass laws affecting millions of Americans.
Independent contractors, almost by definition, are independent. It’s no wonder our overbearing government wants to eliminate us — it’s much easier to control a few corporations than a million ‘mom and pop’s. But being free quite obviously includes the ability to work outside the ‘normal’ parameters of employment. Instead of government attempting to write one-size-fits-all rules (which must still be judged on a case-by-case basis), perhaps it should instead focus on the actual disputes between companies and contractors who WANT to be employees. The rest of us don’t want — and certainly don’t need — “help” from Uncle Sam.
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Time for a Bonnie update! She now comes inside almost every night (maybe 4/5?) after the sun goes down and she’s done catting around. She hangs out with Gangster or takes a nap for a few hours, then usually takes off around dawn. Last week she had her first ‘real’ day inside and didn’t head out until around 2 PM — she’s slowly becoming part of the family! (She already knows exactly where the kitchen is!)
“Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one.”
― Thomas Paine
Oh God, I forgot about the truckers. They have been pummeled again and again in California. My brother is in the Midwest and knows a few truckers who refused to drive to CA anymore. One guy decided to move his family back to Iran because it was too difficult to make money trucking. That is quite a statement and not a happy one.