Angels and Angles

We won't stop freelance busting by appealing to the better nature of policymakers. We need more leverage so they'll do the right thing.

A friend recently suggested that I read the book Rules for Radicals by Saul Alinsky.

It’s a book that was first published in 1971 as a type of instructional guide for the "have-nots." It’s about how people can organize to achieve real political power, even if they don’t have a dime to work with. It’s based on Alinsky’s experience in Chicago helping poor communities organize to fight landlords, politicians and other “haves.”

Alinsky died in 1972, but his ideas continue to be used in political battles today. His work has been cited as an inspiration for everything from the conservative Tea Party movement to the liberal Occupy movement and campaigns for climate action.

A number of things Alinsky wrote stand out to me as being helpful in creating a formidable nationwide movement to stop freelance busting, perhaps none more than this passage, which has really stuck with me:

“Political realists see the world as it is: an arena of power politics moved primarily by perceived immediate self-interests, where morality is rhetorical rationale for expedient action and self-interest. …

“It is a world not of angels but of angles, where men speak of moral principles but act on power principles...”

This is a foundational message of successful grassroots organizing that independent contractors need to understand.

Those of us who have tangled with the freelance-busting brigade know how real their threat is to our livelihoods. We also know how deeply at odds their beliefs are compared to what most people want.

We know that by all reason, polling, voting, survey data and other research, policymakers should be protecting us from them. We know that there are about 14 million union members in the country, and that by every estimate, there are millions upon millions more independent contractors, with one estimate as high as 72 million. We know that the majority of Americans would rather be their own boss than be anybody’s employee, unionized or not.

By the numbers, lawmakers should reflexively protect everyone’s right to choose self-employment. The fundamental protection of that right is what would constitute victory against the freelance-busting brigade.

But we are asking these policymakers to protect our freedom as if they are angels. We are asking them to do the right thing because it is the right thing to do.

By contrast, our opponents are playing the angles. The freelance busters have taught policymakers that it’s in their own self-interest to restrict our freedom.

We have logic on our side, while the freelance busters have leverage.

That is a core problem independent contractors need to solve if we are ultimately going to win. We need to come at this policymaking problem from a better angle.

An Actionable Angle

While reading Alinsky’s book, I was thinking about why independent contractors lost the fight against a freelance-busting bill in California, while those of us who fought a copycat bill in my home state of New Jersey won.

There are a number of reasons, including the fact that California got hit first. That state was the canary in the coal mine—the place where the freelance-busting brigade launched its first-wave attack in what has since become a nationwide war. Independent contractors in California were caught off-guard, while those of us in New Jersey at least had a warning that we needed to prepare for battle, after our colleagues on the West Coast started losing income and clients.

The first people through the wall in any war always get bloodied, but the second wave has a better chance at success, simply by going second. We live, we learn.

At the same time, though, what Alinsky describes is also true. Unlike independent contractors in California, those of us in New Jersey showed that we had a way to exercise leverage, even though we had no real power or funding.

We didn’t win by asking our lawmakers to be angels.

We won by playing an angle that affected their own self-interest.

Behind closed doors at the Statehouse in Trenton, we were told point-blank that restricting our right to choose self-employment was the No. 1 request that the AFL-CIO was making to lawmakers all across the country. That’s why these freelance-busting bills like California’s Assembly Bill 5 and New Jersey’s Senate Bill 4204 were put in play, and why similar bills and regulations are still being put in play today: Union organizers want to reclassify us out of self-employment status, in their quest to try and create more unionizable employees.

Lawmakers listen to these unionists because without union support, many of the lawmakers can’t win re-election in their own political campaigns—the very type of self-interest that Alinsky describes in his book. The AFL-CIO itself says it is undertaking a “mass mobilization of union workers” to get its favored candidates elected next month. The SEIU alone is spending $200 million this election cycle. In the 2020 election cycle, by one estimate, unions spent at least $1.8 billion—with a “B”—to try and swing votes toward union-friendly politicians.

This is just a snapshot of what’s happening right now with the SEIU in swing states:

Against that kind of incredibly well-oiled, well-funded and well-connected machine that appeals to politicians’ self-interest, independent contractors walked into lawmakers’ offices and said, “You should ignore those unionists who want to hurt us because it’s the right thing to do.”

When you think about it that way, many politicians would find our request for protection laughable.

And in fact, some of the freelance busters literally did laugh at us. The sponsor of the New Jersey bill, Steve Sweeney—who at the time also happened to be the highest-ranking graduate of the New Jersey AFL-CIO Labor Candidates School—actually laughed in my face at the notion that my freelance career was something the law should protect.

I was asking him to be an angel, and I failed.

What ultimately got him to stop was us playing an angle.

My friends and I are freelance writers, so we wrote. We flooded the statewide media with op-eds, letters to the editor, and interviews about the fact that this bill was a direct attack against us. We sent press releases to every lawmaker in state government. No matter where lawmakers looked in the press or online, our message was there.

The light that we managed to shine on that freelance-busting bill was blinding to the people trying to push it. They were used to operating in the shadows of the bureaucratic maze, where nobody could see them behaving at their worst.

Alinsky writes:

“To the status quo concerned about its public image, revolution is the only force which has no image, but instead casts a dark, ominous shadow of things to come.”

We cast that shadow by putting the freelance busters’ behavior under an incredibly bright public light. Put another way, we scared them into backing off.

That’s what happens when you play an angle.

One way to know your angle is working is that the “haves” try to re-establish their own position of power. In this case, Sweeney responded to our media effort by trying to discredit us. As the sitting president of the New Jersey Senate, he wrote an op-ed in a prominent newspaper that included this line:

“Unfortunately, I have seen opinion pieces written and published with misinformation that I thought was reserved for social media posts funded by Russian operatives trying to interfere in our elections; one even ran in the Washington Post.” 

I wrote that op-ed that ran in The Washington Post five years ago. I wrote it as a person who was born in New Jersey, as a person who is a taxpayer and voter in New Jersey, and as a person who has never even been to Russia. I was a citizen trying to protect my right to remain self-employed, as men like him were trying to take that right away.

Every word of that op-ed remains true to this day, including this:

“The independent contractor laws now being written in a handful of states are setting precedents for how the language is going to be written across the country. If we screw this up in New Jersey now, then millions of Americans stand to be screwed over later.”

Even though we managed to stop the New Jersey bill, I had accurately predicted where we find ourselves today. Federal legislation like the Protecting the Right to Organize Act still includes freelance-busting language, and other efforts are underway at the federal and state levels to spread California-style freelance busting nationwide.

The lesson here is that playing the media angle worked because, as Alinsky writes, to the “haves” like Sweeney, those of us trying to stop them, to change the balance of power they enjoy, are a dangerous revolutionary force. That’s why Sweeney ridiculously implied that we were trying to bring down democracy itself.

Alinsky writes:

“Religious, economic, social, political, and legal tracts endlessly attack all revolutionary ideas and action for change as immoral, fallacious and against God, country, and mother. These literary sedations by the status quo include the threat that, since all such movements are unpatriotic, subversive, spawned in hell and reptilian in their creeping insidiousness, dire punishments will be meted out to their supporters.”

I would argue that the freelance-busting brigade continuing to threaten our livelihoods, now with federal legislation like the PRO Act and more, fits that description quite precisely.

And the idea of meting out punishment to people you disagree with or simply don’t like? That’s a hallmark of authoritarianism, not democracy.

Our Ultimate Angle

What happened in New Jersey holds a valuable lesson for how we can ultimately defeat the freelance-busting brigade nationwide.

It’s really quite simple, if you think about it:

We must raise our millions of voices in unison, in a way that targets policymakers’ self-interest.

Think about the AARP. Its stated mission is to enhance the quality of life for everyone as we age. Most people would agree with that mission, because we’re all going to get old—but the reason lawmakers listen to the AARP is not because the message is right. Instead, it’s because the AARP can get its 38 million members to vote. The AARP has state and federal government advocates, as well as litigators poised to pounce on anything the organization deems a threat to older people’s quality of life. They educate AARP members about where candidates stand on issues that affect older people.

The National Rifle Association is smaller, but has been equally potent as a single-issue group. The NRA doesn’t even have 5 million members, but even amid its declining membership, it raised $213 million just a couple years ago. Like the AARP, the NRA can get its members to vote in unison on the issue that matters to them, which is gun ownership rights.

These organizations are demonstrating ways to play an angle.

What we need, as independent contractors, is to follow that lead. We must come together in one organization that fights for everyone’s freedom to choose self-employment.

That’s it. That’s the mission statement—fighting for everyone’s right to be independent contractors, representing every profession, every gender, every age and every race. If even 20 million of us independent contractors came together and showed lawmakers our power as a unified voting bloc, the freelance busting would stop.

It wouldn’t stop because it’s the right thing to do. It would stop because doing it would no longer be in policymakers’ self-interest.

The grassroots, all-volunteer coalition that I co-founded, Fight For Freelancers, brings together independent contractors from all professions in precisely this way. What we need next in this freelance-busting war is to put that concept on steroids with a well-funded, professionally run variation that can exercise real leverage at the state and federal levels.

Creating that kind of an organization requires everyone—realtors, truckers, writers, translators and people in hundreds of other professions—to realize that we’re in this war together. We are all independent contractors first. That is the shared identity we need to understand, because it’s the thing that will give us all a real angle of power.

A main point of what I’m writing these days is to help independent contractors understand that single, basic truth about the nature of the fight we are all in.

We are correct on this issue, but we all need to be political realists, and we must act on power principles.

That’s how we’re going to beat the freelance-busting brigade once and for all.