They Know This Too
As fallout swirls from the presidential debate, lawmakers who still support freelance busting should note the lessons of betrayal.
The fallout following President Biden’s shaky debate performance shares a notable quality with what many independent contractors began to experience about five years ago in the freelance-busting fight.
It’s a quality that angers people to their core, that erodes and destroys the trust that voters may have felt for decades toward certain politicians or an entire party.
This quality is a feeling of betrayal.
Betrayal is not about having a disagreement. It’s not about making an honest mistake. It’s not about seeing things differently, and it’s not about good intentions gone wrong.
Betrayal is about realizing you are the pawn of intentional deception.
Those of us who have been leading the nationwide fight to stop freelance busting commonly witness a feeling of betrayal in independent contractors, after they realize that lawmakers are knowingly advancing policies to destroy our income and careers.
I explained how this plays out during a one-minute exchange that I had last year with Congressman Eric Burlison, a Republican from Missouri, when I testified at a hearing before the U.S. House Subcommittee on Workforce Protections.
Note my use of the word betrayal:
Lawmakers who continue to support freelance busting—while knowing full well that it will hurt Americans who voted for them—would be wise to watch what’s happening as President Biden’s supporters try to come to terms with their feelings of betrayal.
What we’re witnessing on the national stage is a direct parallel to what many independent contractors have experienced for the past five years on a smaller scale, every single time freelance-busting policies have popped up.
The result is always the same for lawmakers: destruction of trust and respect.
‘Untruthful,’ ‘Fraud,’ ‘Gaslighted’
Anyone with an eye on the news the past few days has been bombarded with people attempting to put their feelings of betrayal into words. The belief is widespread that President Biden and his advisers lied to, gaslit and committed a fraud against even their most loyal supporters by hiding the true nature of the president’s health.
Here’s just a smattering of the deluge from the past couple of days:
The editorial board of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution pulled no punches:
President Biden’s surrogates attempted to brush off the debate performance. Aides claimed he had a cold. Vice President Kamala Harris argued the leader of the free world should be evaluated on the totality of his presidency, not one night. Former President Barack Obama took to social media and said, “Bad debate nights happen.”
These responses are insulting to the American people.
That word, insulting, repeated as people got angrier and angrier about the belief that they not only had been, but were still being, betrayed:
Maureen Dowd, writing in The New York Times, excoriated Biden and his inner circle of handlers and advisers alike:
He’s being selfish. He’s putting himself ahead of the country. He’s surrounded by opportunistic enablers. He has created a reality distortion field where we’re told not to believe what we’ve plainly seen.
David Dayen, writing in The American Prospect, said this:
Biden’s press handlers have pretty much bottled him up since he took the oath of office. He’s done few interviews. Impromptu settings were strictly avoided. How did they think he was going to manage a one-week cram session after having the burden of messaging lifted from him for years? This was an unforgivable mistake for a political shop that has been blind to and insulated from their own failures.
All of this is people using different words to express the same thing.
They feel a sense of betrayal.
Freelance Busting Creates the Same Feeling
In 2021, Markos Moulitsas, founder and editor of Daily Kos—a deeply progressive website—invited me to write about what both of us had been witnessing among independent contractors since 2019. That’s when lawmakers began trying to spread freelance-busting policy language from California’s disastrous Assembly Bill 5 to New Jersey’s Senate Bill 4204 and to the PRO Act in Congress.
Moulitsas personally wrote an introduction to my piece, first explaining to readers why freelance busting is just plain bad policy:
[T]he harm is real. I’ve written before (here and here) about how the same type of legislation in California decimated the state’s freelancers, artists, theater troupes, musicians, video producers, and many other industries that rely on gig workers—the traditional kind.
I then followed up with what those of us leading the grassroots fight against freelance busting were seeing among the liberals and progressives pouring into our ranks:
What’s happening right now all across America, with the House passage of the PRO Act and the ABC Test still in the bill, is independent contractors going through the same psychological exercise that those of us in California and New Jersey endured a little more than a year ago. This vote taught a lot of independent contractors — especially those who are Democratic women — that what’s happening is intentional. They are realizing, after calling their lawmakers to explain the problem with the PRO Act as it’s currently written, that the people they elected into power aren’t listening to them.
I attempted, in that 2021 piece, to be crystal clear about what freelance-busting lawmakers needed to do:
There is still time to make amends for this betrayal.
I also noted the powerful weapon that freelance-busting lawmakers were handing to their political opponents:
The ABC Test that underpins all of that freelance-busting legislation—that has caused so much pain and suffering—is still in the PRO Act today.
And, the Democratic Party platform heading into November’s election pledges that “Democrats will prioritize passing the PRO Act.”
Lawmakers are still out there claiming the PRO Act will help independent contractors and rebuild unions. It’s the same script they were reading from in California five years ago—yes, including potential Biden replacement Gavin Newsom.
It’s still a flat-out lie that freelance-busting policy language helps to improve the lives of self-employed people by creating all kinds of new jobs:
It’s also still a flat-out lie that freelance-busting policy language helps to grow union membership:
If you want a preview of how Republicans can weaponize this continuing betrayal of independent contractors—who now number more than 70 million, enough to swing any election—then watch the political ads that are about to start dropping like an avalanche, accusing Democratic lawmakers of having lied about Biden’s condition.
This ad came out yesterday from Republican Dave McCormick, who is running for U.S. Senate against Democrat Bob Casey in Pennsylvania. Its title is “Bob Casey Knew”:
It’s easy to imagine an endless number of political ads like that one, only made from all the video footage of lawmakers who have been pushing, and who continue to push, the same old freelance-busting falsehoods.
Here is just one example featuring quite a few of today’s top lawmakers:
All their opponents need is some basic video-editing software.
The political attack ads write themselves.
Learn from This Moment
Betrayal is a devastating violation. That’s why it can be turned into such a powerful political weapon.
We are all about to watch as political adversaries brandish that weapon with a startling level of ferocity.
No matter what happens next in the presidential campaign, there is still time for freelance-busting lawmakers to change their ways. We have not yet experienced such a bright, national light being shined on the betrayal that is freelance busting. Lawmakers have an opportunity—right now—to abandon their pattern of gaslighting and lies about policymaking whose primary result is, in fact, the destruction of legitimate independent contractors’ income and careers.
Self-employed Americans from the left, right and center have been trying to teach lawmakers this lesson for several years.
Maybe now, what we’ve been saying all along will finally get through.