“Freelance journalists in California will either be out of work or face limitations on how much content they can produce,” CNN warned. Independent truckers shut down the Los Angeles-Long Beach port to protest the same disastrous law and are leaving California.
The bill known as AB5 which restricts freelance employment so severely that it’s practically a ban on freelance workers has been blamed for contributing to the mass exodus with California unprecedentedly losing population every year that the law has been in effect.
But California’s bad ideas rarely stay inside its borders.
In 2021, House Democrats under San Francisco’s Pelosi passed the PRO Act which would crush freelance workers nationwide. In his state of the union, Biden urged passing, “the PRO Act because workers have a right to form a union.” Workers already have a right to form a union. The PRO Act eliminates the right of workers to be able to work independently of employers and unions.
To many Democrats who depend heavily on union cash and seek to control the economy by herding workers into serving the large businesses they regulate and receive donations from, freelance workers are a problem. And regulating them out of existence by reclassifying them as employees through the ‘ABC Test’, which is at the heart of AB5 and the PRO Act, is the answer.
Now, Biden has nominated Julie Su, an architect of AB5’s war on freelance workers, as Secretary of Labor. When Biden pushed Su, California’s Labor Secretary, as Deputy Labor Secretary, Republicans challenged her on the $31 billion in pandemic fraud, the worst in the nation, and her ruthless war on freelance workers that devastated workers and businesses.
“If you apply that test nationally, as President Biden said he is committed to doing, you would forcefully reclassify as many as half of all independent contractors, if not more, and jeopardize more than 85 percent of our nation’s GDP,” Senator Tim Scott had challenged Su.
Rep. Kevin Kiley, R-Calif., accused Su of overseeing “one of the largest cases of unemployment insurance fraud” during the pandemic and of implementing some of the “most destructive labor policies in decades” during her time as California’s labor secretary.
California congressional representatives warned that Su’s AB5 has “cost tens of thousands of freelance workers and independent contractors their economic livelihoods.”
As the Labor Secretary, Su will be in a position to help Biden kill millions of jobs. Eliminating freelance workers was one of Biden’s campaign promises to unions. And he’s delivering.
“States like California have already paved the way by adopting a clearer, simpler, and stronger three-prong ‘ABC test’ to distinguish employees from independent contractors,” his campaign had promised. “As president, Biden will work with Congress to establish a federal standard modeled on the ABC test for all labor, employment, and tax laws.”
What does that ‘ABC Test’ mean in practice?
As the Morgan Lewis law firm described, “the PRO Act’s three-part test would eliminate ‘independent contractor’ status for everyone who provides services deemed part of a company’s ‘usual’ business, or is subject to the employer’s ‘control and direction,’ or is not associated with an independent ‘trade, occupation, profession, or business.’”
“Meeting those standards is virtually impossible. Once reclassified, most independent contractors would either be forced into traditional employment under terms likely less favorable than freelancing or be out of that work altogether,” an op-ed at the Iowa Gazette predicted.
“Such reclassification means that overnight, it would become illegal for many of us independent contractors to continue earning a living the way we do today — upending the entire idea of what has been a legal way to earn income since the very founding of the United States,” Fight for Freelancers argued.
“If this legislation passes as-is, it will instead destroy my livelihood by making all my work contracts illegal,” Bonnie Kristian, a national journalist, wrote.
While the PRO Act would face congressional challenges, the Biden administration has been trying to use the Labor Department to create a backdoor assault on freelance workers by reclassifying the status of independent contractors under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA).
That’s where Julie Su will come in.
In California, Julie Su abused her power to terrorize small businesses and drive freelancers out of work, warning that she would be “doing investigations and audits. That will be on both wages and tax because AB 5 expands the ABC test that way. So we will be doing investigations and audits so that those who want to comply with the need to reclassify can do so and those who don’t will understand that’s not the kind of economy we want in California. So we can issue citations and demand both wages and taxes and other kinds of penalties.”
Su also made the ultimate agenda of mandatory unionization behind the freelance worker ban clear by claiming that “there are some workers who have been excluded from federal protections and California has a really unique opportunity to bring them into the fold and think about ensuring that they have true union protection working side by side with labor and businesses who are interested in doing that.”
Su’s message was the familiar one of mobsters arriving on the doorsteps of small businesses and warning them that unless they hire their approved workers, bad things will happen.
“When we talk about creating a voice for workers, that it’s really a voice premised on union — like a genuine right to a union on the job. If we can accomplish something, it will set a model for the country,” she emphasized. That’s why she’s been chosen to head the Labor Department.
Under Su, the Labor Department will move forward with forcibly reclassifying freelance workers while auditing and fining anyone who resists. This campaign of terror that began in California will go nationwide. Independent truckers will go out of business leading to further grocery shortages and a collapsing supply chain. Countless other professions will also fall apart.
Julie Su has used California’s Labor Department to oversee both unprecedented corruption and abuses, with billions in pandemic payments made to criminals and scammers while people starved, and she has destroyed the economic security and livelihoods of the state’s workers.
In 2021, the Senate voted to confirm Julie Su by a narrow 50-47 margin. Sens Manchin and Sinema both voted in favor. This time around will be the acid test. The economic survival of freelance workers and small businesses will hinge on the votes of Manchin and Sinema.
Manchin and Sinema have claimed that they reject the radical socialism enacted by the Biden administration. Sinema now claims to be an independent while Manchin has been backing away from his Democrat party status. The vote to confirm a leader in the war on freelance workers and small businesses will show whether they stand with American workers or their oppressors.
This is ugly. Will it pass with a Republican house?
The House has no say in nominations.
The PRO Act could be blocked by Congress, but the nomination is likely to get past a Democrat Senate unless Manchin and Sinema stand up for freelance workers
Eliminating freelance work WILL necessarily destroy the economy…and that doesn’t concern the totalitarian government. It furthers their agenda and thats what they care about.
Next step – everyone who gets a paycheck gets to have money removed from each paycheck and given to the unions. There may be some exceptions for the leadership ot the totalitarian elites. That would be those rules apply to thee but not to me..
That’s what used to happen here in the UK, until Margaret Thatcher changed the law and made “closed shops” illegal.
But since then the government has introduced our version of PR5 it’s called IR35.
State Dems have in the past forcibly unionized parents receiving money to care for their disabled kids.
their depravity and greed knows no bottom
It’s all about the TAX
We have IR35 here in the UK similar thing and it is all about the TAX
Yes the unions love it because it grows their power, but it’s all about the TAX.
Almost every government program or initiative is about the TAX
Basically in California there is mass public disobedience by finding ways to get around the government regulations.
As is usually the case in socialist systems
Which gives the government a lot of leverage if they ever want to squeeze someone who has practiced disobedience. Since the government only has power over criminals, they want to make sure each of us is a criminal.
Give up, you worms. History is on our side. Resistance is futile. Your chances are the same offered the Romanoff grandchildren.
Power unused is power wasted. We aren’t wasting anything. Ask the Romanoff grandchildren.
Corporations are not one bit more your friend than goverments…That is vital to remember… The people are served by keeping both corporations and government fully in check and subservient to the will and best interests of the people…
It is not about merely earning a living, but about the greatest number of people in American society earning a good living–which is inexorably relative… The corporatist-elitist pencil pushers are consumed with a desire to shrink the portion of the productive economic pie, no matter how large it grows, that goes to middle class workers….
Corporations are often hell-bent on cheapening labor costs–reducing the value of labor, and the standard of living of middle class workers–even to the basic extent of not having to plan and manage well enough to keep workers busy on a regular schedule, dump all health benefits, dump all retirement benefits, etc…
Without addressing these real issues actually motivating the ‘gig work’ revolution, you are playing right into the hands of the corporatists who would rather hire Nigerians for pennies a day than Americans if they could…
You’re correct in that there needs to be a balance of power against any system or institution that becomes too powerful. And some gig workers are the result of companies trying to avoid hiring employees. But a whole lot of it is a decentralized way for people to earn money through part time work or being their own bosses by being freelance. There’s no easy answer, but mandatory unionization or banning freelance work definitely isn’t it.
In any ‘freelance’ setting there is a middleman above you who effectively controls access to the work–otherwise you are not ‘freelance’, but a professional to whom clients come directly…
It is the middleman who is the issue, not the work per se…
It is the comparative quality of the conduct of and reward for the work–to the worker–that is the issue
The level of continual organizational effort required to directly employ oil and gas industry translators for example is significantly higher than for a web portal posting discrete, often tiny, ‘jobs’… By the latter system, the reward for effort to the worker is maximally reduced, while the reward for lower effort to the middleman is greatly increased–production is devalued, and low input ‘management’ is overvalued…
The former system supports middle-class workers, the latter does not… Society is very different under the latter than under the former… It is not about being able to work, it is about sustaining a solidly middle-class quality of life…
Fascism at work. The thieves and criminals in charge want more of hard working people’s money.
SO… this will be required of PAID FREELANCH PROTESTERS like Antifa, The Party for Socialism and Liberation, The Revolutionary Communist Party, and the Communist Party USA, too? Many are hired by Mobs ‘R Us and Rent ‘A Mob at Soros & Obama Inc..
Just wondering…. since they are paid, does the employer require the employees fill out W-9 forms and then they send them 1099’s to be filled out on their Federal W-2 income tax forms? Those Self-employed can also deduct expenses like pepper spray, bricks, clubs, balloons to be filled with urine and feces, shields, costumes, masks, and helmets. Printed flyers as advertisement. Travel, food, and lodging.
Just wondering… do the Peaceful Protesters report their income to welfare agencies, EBT, Housing, Unemployment?
Just wondering…. or are the employers and their employees… TAX EVADERS and they could be arrested for TAX EVASION? (A legal way to get all of them! Ferguson protesters were paid, but then they didn’t get paid and protested in front of the office that hired them! PROOF OF PAYMENT YEARS AGO!)
They tend to work at leftist nonprofits while doing their ‘activism’. We saw this recently with the busted SPLC lawyer.
This Antifa SPLC lawyer brought to mind the two NYC young lawyers that threw an incendiary device (molotoff cocktail maybe?) in a police car for the “profound” reason that black lives matter.
Perhaps there’s some courses they’ have taken in leftwing law schools. Bombing the oppressor 101 or something.
Theres a rumor that when brought in front of a judge, the judge said “ my hats off to you” to the NYC bomber/lawyers.
If true, then judges too want to bomb police cars.
Hitler+Stalin+Castro+Mao+Biden=Tyranny
Biden’s Labor Secretary Nominee Wants to Ban Freelance Workers
“Overnight, it would become illegal… to continue earning a living.”………….. but you can bet the farm that she will get more illegals into American jobs!
laws don’t apply to them
that’s the point
Mixing Dems with unions will create a stink worse than mixing iron sulfide with hydrochloric acid.
Yet another proof that the government does not give a rat’s rectum about small businesses (and that includes freelance workers). Freelancers are an integral part of running a business efficiently. Why hire a full-time employee when you only need a resource for a time-limited project or for a one-shot task? And if a company does not have the expertise internally and need it now, are they just supposed to ignore the need and put their company in peril?
Dems certainly don’t care about small businesses. They want to see them go under and pave the way for mega-corps they can control, unionize and who donate cash to them.
Every. Single. Thing. that this administration has done is anti-American. Every. Single. Thing.
What happens in a state with “Right to Work” laws? Also, what would prevent any state from passing such laws to prevent this sort of takeover?
A lot of states have right to work laws which will limit the reach of unions and allow non-union employees, but they have a plan for neutering right-to-work too. The Supreme Court is still a problem for them though.
But people continue to vote these people in
What dose that rag Time Magazine think of their Person of the Year now? providing they named Hitler as their 1938 Person/Man of the Year