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This post is my attempt to make sense of arguments about the Protecting the Right to Organize Act of 2021 (PRO), specifically regarding its effect on freelancers and the self-employed.
I'm not a lawyer—and I'm not an expert on the ins and outs of freelance work, something I have done before but rarely and probably not very well—so I may make mistakes here, and if someone points those out to me in a convincing way, I'll make corrections. The reasons I'm bothering to write about this are 1. PRO is extremely important in my opinion (even if the chances of passing it in the current Congress are slim) for pushing back against decades of anti-labor policies, and 2. I have self-employed friends who are really concerned about this, specifically because they are in California and have been seeing a lot of arguments that PRO will hurt their livelihood due to what they think are similarities to recent California legislation.
If those concerns are valid, then it's correct to call for rethinking of PRO; if they're not, then that is at best a misguided distraction. And at worst, it's a victory for conservative propaganda, since it's pretty obvious that Republican efforts against PRO are counting on arguments like this to defeat the bill if anti-union sentiment isn't enough.
( click here for a lot more words on this subject )
I'm not a lawyer—and I'm not an expert on the ins and outs of freelance work, something I have done before but rarely and probably not very well—so I may make mistakes here, and if someone points those out to me in a convincing way, I'll make corrections. The reasons I'm bothering to write about this are 1. PRO is extremely important in my opinion (even if the chances of passing it in the current Congress are slim) for pushing back against decades of anti-labor policies, and 2. I have self-employed friends who are really concerned about this, specifically because they are in California and have been seeing a lot of arguments that PRO will hurt their livelihood due to what they think are similarities to recent California legislation.
If those concerns are valid, then it's correct to call for rethinking of PRO; if they're not, then that is at best a misguided distraction. And at worst, it's a victory for conservative propaganda, since it's pretty obvious that Republican efforts against PRO are counting on arguments like this to defeat the bill if anti-union sentiment isn't enough.
( click here for a lot more words on this subject )
