Let's Do This
The Trump-Vance administration wants ideas for "real people" as labor policy advisers. I'd appreciate your vote to help stop freelance busting.
I’ve been nominated to serve as a policy adviser to the Trump-Vance Labor Department. Please click here to vote for me.
This is the story of why I became a freelancer, what I’ve done to earn the role of a labor policy adviser, and why I believe independent contractors need a strong voice at the policymaking table—to stop the government from attacking our freedom to be our own bosses.
I became involved in the independent-contractor policy issue in 2019. I was 47 years old, and it was the first time I had ever really gotten involved with a government issue, beyond insisting that my Township Committee fix the potholes in my road. That took me about three years of going to meetings and arguing with them.
Yes, I can be tenacious when something is wrong and needs to be made right.
My whole livelihood is being a freelance writer and editor. I write mostly about boats, franchises and the dog business. This is how I pay my mortgage, my health-insurance premiums, my grocery bills, everything. You can find stories I’ve written everywhere from Yachting to Entrepreneur and The Washington Post. I’ve also published books. Links to my award-winners are at kimkavin.com.
The path I took to freelancing began in 1994 with a diploma from the University of Missouri-Columbia School of Journalism. I spent about a decade in staff jobs at daily newspapers and monthly magazines, including being the executive editor at Yachting from 2000-2003. I realized, while at that magazine, that some of the top freelancers were earning more than I was. They also had better lives, free from the 9-to-5 grind. With zero chance of in-office sexism to hold them back in achieving their potential.
And, I had a personal reason for wanting to be my own boss. Years earlier, I had been the victim of a random violent crime. A man I didn’t know, with a history of mental illness and violence, followed me into my apartment building’s vestibule. He was off his medication, having visions of women drowning in pools of blood, and carrying a serrated kitchen knife. I will spare you the awful details, but I was lucky to regain consciousness in time to fight him off from the ground, before he hurt me even worse.
Working on my own schedule from home—where nobody could come up behind me and tap me on the shoulder, and where I could sleep in some mornings if I had a bad week of nightmares—was a godsend for me, long before remote work became trendy.
For all those reasons, I hung out a shingle in 2003 and went into business for myself. Like so many Americans, for so many of their own reasons, I simply thought I could earn a better living and have a better life as a freelancer.
More than 20 years later, I can tell you unequivocally that it was a good choice. As with most independent contractors, I love earning a living this way. I have built my freelancing business into a low-six-figure career with many repeat clients. I feel great, I have clients who respect me, and I do some pretty darn good award-winning work.
So, when lawmakers here in my home state of New Jersey announced in 2019 that they were going to try and enact a law that copied California’s disastrous Assembly Bill 5, I knew I could not let that happen without a fight. My entire livelihood would have been destroyed, just as we were seeing with freelance writers in California because of that horribly misguided law.
The problem was the regulatory language. It was too strict. The government made a test that people had to pass to remain legal independent contractors—but it was like the Star Trek Kobayashi Maru. The test was designed for people to fail, to try and force as many independent contractors as possible into traditional, unionizable jobs.
Since then, despite the damage to so many Californians’ lives, some policymakers at the state and federal levels have been trying even harder, in various ways, to hurt legitimate independent contractors like me. Their goal remains the same, and their tactics keep evolving, no matter how often we demand that they leave us alone and respect our right to be our own bosses.
What our own government is doing to all of us is just plain wrong.
That’s why I’ve volunteered so much of my time trying to stop them.
Fighting the Freelance Busting
I coined the term “freelance busting” to describe what’s been happening. Lawmakers and bureaucrats keep claiming that they want to help or protect people who are misclassified employees—people we all agree need help and protection—but what policymakers are actually doing is attacking legitimate independent contractors and threatening our entire livelihoods.
We saw this happening anecdotally back in 2019, and it has been documented now by economists that we were correct from the start in crying foul. We now know with the benefit of hindsight that independent contractors in more than 600 professions were being walloped. Some of them continue to fight to this day in the courts, for their freedom to earn a living.
I got together with my fellow freelancers back in 2019 and co-founded the nonpartisan coalition Fight For Freelancers, to try and make sure that kind of damage did not spread beyond California. We ended up being the tip of the spear in the grassroots resistance, after a powerful exchange that I had with a New Jersey state senator during a public hearing ended up playing on a loop on our state’s biggest news channel. As professional writers, we realized that we could use our skills to produce persuasive op-eds and articles that exposed what was going on within the bureaucratic maze. We blanketed the state with coverage, built a Facebook group into a thousand people, and led them all in a campaign to bombard lawmakers with calls.
As it turns out, we were pretty good advocates for the little guys. We stood up to the powerful state Senate President—a Democrat who laughed in my face at the thought of freelancing being a real career, and then tried to discredit us by writing an op-ed that compared us to Russian operatives trying to interfere with democracy.
We helped to stop his freelance-busting bill in 2019-20, and then helped to block the federal version, called the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, in the years that followed. I was the lead author on public comments like this one, at 20 pages long, filed to the U.S. Department of Labor regarding attempts at freelance busting there.
I also learned how to write amicus briefs, including this one that I was the lead author on for the National Labor Relations Board, and this one that I was the lead author on for the U.S. Supreme Court. I also led the effort to organize all the amici—I had to learn that word, which is a fancy way of saying co-sponsors. The Supreme Court brief ended up having amici who represented more than 275,000 independent contractors from all walks of life nationwide.
At the same time, I also raised my voice publicly, in every way that I could think of, to try and protect everyone’s right to choose self-employment. You will find some of my writing on this topic at publications that span the political spectrum, including The Hill, The Washington Post, The Philadelphia Inquirer, NBC Think, Daily Kos, Reason and the (New Jersey) Star-Ledger and Asbury Park Press. I also reported and wrote the entire Entrepreneur “Campaign for Our Careers,” a series of advocacy articles in opposition to the PRO Act (specifically, the bill’s anti-freelancer ABC Test and joint-employer standard that hurts franchise owners). That series earned the 2022 FOLIO: Eddie award for best series of articles in any consumer news or general interest magazine.
I’ve spoken about anti-freelancer legislation on podcasts like this one and this one. I’ve spoken about anti-freelancer regulatory efforts on this podcast. I have also been quoted everywhere from CNBC to Forbes to USA Today on this issue.
In 2023, I was one of two freelancers who went to Congress—on my own time and my own dime—and testified on behalf of everyone’s right to be self-employed. This was my opening statement:
Note that with my last 30 seconds, I spoke directly to the top-ranking Democrat on the committee. I politely said that I thought she was correct about something she’d just stated—and that I hoped we could have a conversation that day about the concerns of independent contractors like me.
The hearing went on for several hours after that. Not a single Democrat even acknowledged the existence of the independent contractors at the table.
After that, I became a plaintiff in a federal lawsuit against the Biden administration’s Department of Labor, with pro bono help from the Pacific Legal Foundation, once again to try and protect us all.
Today, I regularly support and work with grassroots leaders in other states whenever they need somebody to testify at a hearing (just last month, in Minnesota) or do anything else that might contribute to resolving the bigger-picture situation.
I’m widely regarded as a leading grassroots voice, if not the leading one, on independent-contractor policymaking nationwide.
What I Want to Fix
The biggest problem that I see with this policymaking is that there are no independent contractors at the table. All these bills, all these regulations, are being crafted primarily by people who want to unionize us. They’re making policy about us, without us. That’s why we’re enduring this current wave of freelance busting.
It’s like having a commission on racism that’s all white people, or a commission on sexism that’s all men. The goals of the people who have been pushing these policies fly in the face of what most independent contractors want. They’re able to attack us, plain and simple, because we are not being given a real seat at the table to defend ourselves against government overreach.
The government’s own research, along with countless studies, shows that up to 85% of independent contractors are just like me and wish to remain self-employed. I have been compiling all of that research so that independent contractors everywhere can use it while talking to their lawmakers and writing their own op-eds. Freelancers from all across the country now send me data and studies to add to the list.
In June 2024, I launched this Substack about Freelance Busting that is dedicated to covering the independent-contractor issue with long-form advocacy journalism, because I simply did not see anyone in mainstream media publishing the whole truth. The “news” coverage has been shockingly, awfully skewed against us. I earn no money from this Substack, and I write it in addition to running my regular freelance writing and editing business to pay my bills. I simply believe that the truth needs to be spoken out loud, and I don’t see anyone else speaking it regularly enough to counter our opposition’s false narratives.
Freelance Busting quickly developed a monthly audience with several thousand readers. It’s still growing daily. I’ve done Q&As with U.S. Rep. Kevin Kiley, R-California—the loudest champion for independent contractors in Congress—along with top people from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Mercatus Center and more. Labor experts I’ve interviewed include attorneys from Littler, which is the world’s largest management-side labor employment firm with 1,800 attorneys on four continents; and from Pacific Legal Foundation, a public interest law firm that defends Americans’ liberties when we are threatened by government overreach and abuse.
I’m elevating serious voices, and I’m finding that they, too, are all looking for more ways for the whole truth to be heard on this issue.
The Next Step
All of this grassroots leadership is the reason why the Bi-State Motor Carriers Association (which represents many self-employed truckers at the Port of NY&NJ) nominated me on November 8, 2024, to be a policy adviser to the U.S. Labor Department in the Trump-Vance administration.
I have the support of my Congressman here in New Jersey, as well as the support of other offices, associations and advocacy groups on Capitol Hill that have been trying to solve this policy problem for years.
Everyday people who support my nomination have been voting for me and writing testimonials on my behalf here and commenting on my X handle, which is entirely about this policy issue as well.
I feel that I’d be good in an advisory role at this particular time in our nation’s history because I’m a registered independent voter who believes we need more reasonable voices in policymaking, as opposed to activists pushing one-sided agendas. To that point, I actually grew up in a proud union household. Both of my parents were public schoolteachers in New Jersey, teaching history and music. I believe that employees should have the right to join a union if that’s what they wish to do; I just want those unions and their favored policymakers to stop attacking independent contractors like me through horribly punitive regulations and legislation.
My goal is to do everything in my power to ensure that everyone’s freedom to choose self-employment is protected and preserved. I’m articulate and well-versed in the issue, which should not be partisan in the first place. The freedom to be our own boss is an American value that dates back to the nation’s founding, rooted in liberty and the pursuit of happiness. All lawmakers should be supporting it.
I stand ready to serve in whatever capacity will help most, and I look forward to being given the chance to contribute in a meaningful way.
If you think I would do a good job serving in an advisory role on labor policy, please click here, sign up with your email address, and cast your vote for me.
And if you have extra energy after that, please drop an email to your members of the U.S. Senate and House. Tell them you support me—and ask them to remember your name as their constituent.
We need them to hear a lot more from us all on this issue in the years to come.