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alibi_shopThis 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.
Scope and intended effect of PRO
The goal of PRO as described by its sponsors and supporters is to protect the right of employees to engage in union organizing and collective bargaining. You can see the summary of the bill here, and the full text here.
It amends various sections of the National Labor Relations Act, which created the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and gave it authority to act against violations of labor organizing rights. That law has been amended since 1935 and you can find the current version of these policies in Title 29, Chapter 7, Subchapter II of the U.S. Code. PRO describes its changes to the law as increasing the subset of workers whose organizing rights should be protected by NLRB.
Purported bad consequences of PRO for freelancers
An example of the currently popular argument against PRO is this widely circulated essay by Judi Ketteler. (Ketteler works as an advertising copywriter so it's possible that she's writing on behalf of others, but people could certainly come to the same conclusions independently. In any case, in her her Twitter feed she is clearly focusing on repeating the same points from her essay and promoting the hashtag #FightForFreelancers as a rallying cry against PRO, so I think it's fair to treat this as a consistent campaign and not just a random op-ed.)
The argument is this (and I'll say up front that I think this argument is wrong, but here it is):
• The bill, in section 101(b), includes language about distinguishing between an "employee" and an "independent contractor" on the basis of three criteria that are equivalent to what's commonly called the ABC test.
• California's controversial Assembly Bill 5 of 2019 (AB5), using the ABC test criteria (based on an earlier court decision that mandated this), caused many people previously classified as independent contractors to be reclassified as employees in a wide variety of legal contexts, such as the requirement of employers to pay benefits and overtime. It exempted many professions, but did not exempt others such as musicians and journalists. This was seen as causing unintended disruption of those professions, in which full-time employment by a single employer was not the norm.
• If PRO writes the ABC test into labor law, it will have the same effects as AB5 on a national level.
• So the ABC test language should be dropped from PRO.
Rebuttal against the purported bad consequences
There's a general summary of arguments against the points made above on the AFL-CIO's website; one of the more detailed pieces I've seen is this one by the labor lawyer Brandon Magner. Briefly:
• The scope of PRO is clearly limited to labor organizing and collective bargaining rights, so its reference to the ABC test does not cause freelancers to be reclassified as employees in any other sense. It doesn't touch any of the kinds of laws that AB5 touched.
• It also doesn't require freelancers, or anyone else, to engage in labor organizing or collective bargaining; it only protects the right of a subset of them (the ones not covered by the ABC test) to engage in those if they want to.
• The ABC test language can't be dropped from PRO, and isn't a mistake: its effect of increasing the number of people who are classified as employees instead of independent contractors in the context of labor organizing rights is the whole point, as businesses have traditionally resisted labor organizing efforts by arguing that only regular full-time employees have such rights.
Who to believe?
As a resident of California, where a dismaying amount of legislation is conducted by referendum and is therefore "debated" via competing press releases and flyers rather than in a legislative chamber, I'm very familiar with the feeling of seeing two apparently contradictory positions argued back and forth in an "Is not! / Is too!" style. But it's not impossible, even if you're not an expert, to identify logical flaws and to find out what the things being referenced actually mean and compare that to what's being said about them.
I'm going to keep referencing Ketteler's article, and her Twitter feed, here because I think they contain examples of several commonly used bad and illogical arguments—that is, commonly used in general on many subjects, but especially in this case about PRO.
Some very bad arguments
1. "Definitions in a bill apply to every law"
I think this is very easy to refute, and the first point mentioned above under "Rebuttal" is really undeniable if you've ever read any legislation. It's easy to point at a phrase like "An individual ... shall be considered an employee" and assume that that means "employee" is being redefined in every context where such a word is relevant. But the context of every statement in the law matters, and in this case—as in all legislation that isn't totally inept—it's been spelled out clearly.
Each of the legal changes in the bill begins with a phrase like "Section 2(3) of the National Labor Relations Act (29 U.S.C. 152(3)) is amended by adding...". If you look at 29 U.S.C. 152, the first four words are "When used in this subchapter"—that is, Title 29, Chapter 7, Subchapter II. Everything in that subchapter pertains to the National Labor Relations Board and its ability to require employers to allow collective bargaining under certain conditions.
If 152(3) were amended to say instead that "The term 'employee' means a cat," then every reference in Subchapter II to "employee", unless otherwise specified, would mean a cat, and only cats would have collective bargaining rights. But every reference to "employee" anywhere else in U.S. law would have the same meaning it had before. That is a pretty standard aspect of how legal language works: definitions are given to words and phrases within a specific text, so that then the text can just refer to a short word or phrase instead of spelling out the definition every single time. If a definition is meant to have a broader application, then the law needs to say so.
A clear example of this mistake is in the fifth and sixth paragraphs of Ketteler's essay. Paragraph 5 points out that PRO's "way of determining who's considered an employee" is the ABC test, which is correct. Then paragraph 6 goes on to say that the ABC test means "businesses need to treat someone like me as an employee—with all the rights and benefits that entails—even if I'm writing only a single story for them" [italics mine], and goes on to explain how that would hurt her profession and others. But that's only true if the ABC test is applied to the laws governing "all the rights and benefits", as it was in AB5, rather than to the laws governing labor organizing rights, as it is in PRO. Both statements in themselves are factual (although the second one is only true if you completely remove the context), but one doesn't follow from the other; Ketteler hasn't actually said otherwise, she's been pretty careful here not to literally make the claim that the ABC test in PRO does this, but it's clear that that's what she wants you to think.
I think it's fair to say that any opinion piece like Ketteler's (or this similar one) that doesn't even try to acknowledge this issue should be considered uninformed and basically useless. It's the very first thing they should have thought of, if they made any effort to look into this; if they have a rationale for why it doesn't matter, they should say so, otherwise they're counting on their audience not looking into it. And it's not as if people who are self-employed are unfamiliar with the basic concept of "you can legally be in category A with regard to one thing (like, taxes), but in category B with regard to a different thing (like, unemployment insurance)".
2. "OK, it doesn't literally do what I said it does, but it'll be a slippery slope"
This isn't really an argument made in Ketteler's essay, but I've seen it quite a bit on social media and it's all over her Twitter feed. Here the idea is that it doesn't matter whether PRO actually changes the law in any non-union-related ways, such as requiring people to file a W-2 instead of a 1099, because simply mentioning the ABC test increases the overall amount of ABC-ness in U.S. law, which will eventually lead to legislators and courts applying the ABC test to everything.
In my opinion, this is sort of the "where there's smoke there must be fire—I'm just saying!" approach to debate. There doesn't seem to be any attempt to point to examples of legislation working that way; it's being used as a way to sidestep the argument, by claiming that factual concerns matter less than a general feeling of distrust, and that when in doubt we should assume the distrust is correct. People can feel this way for honest reasons but it's so commonly associated with deliberately deceptive fear-mongering campaigns that I think it should be considered a red flag; if that's all that your opinion rests on, it means you need to think it through in more detail, not less.
It's also an odd argument to make while repeatedly pointing to AB5, because AB5 was arguably the exact opposite of a slippery slope. Instead of subtly encouraging a later court decision, it was the clear result of an earlier court decision that directed the state to do exactly this. It immediately and explicitly made all of the changes that it made. And, rather than convincing people that this kind of thing was a great idea, it provoked an immediate backlash (in particular, it's been a huge setback to the goal of discouraging companies like Uber from exploitative practices). I think it's not unlikely that the language in PRO is as specific as it is partly because no one wanted it to be mistaken for AB5.
3. "Democrats haven't considered this—why aren't they speaking to my concern? Or: Democrats have actually admitted that I'm right"
I'll quote this paragraph from Ketteler's essay in its entirety: "When I reached out to my own Democratic senator here in Ohio, Sherrod Brown, his office pointed me toward another bill he introduced that he claims would fix the ABC test issue for freelancers like me. To me, this means he knows that my livelihood is at risk but would rather take California's approach by cleaning it up after the fact—when lives have already been damaged."
This is another kind of rhetoric that I think should always be seen as a red flag, because it's so easily used to mislead: it's like "if you admit I could ever have a point about anything, then you must be agreeing with this point". Did Sherrod Brown introduce a bill addressing some concerns related to freelancers? He did. By doing so, did he acknowledge that Ketteler's interpretation of "the ABC test issue" in PRO was correct? He did not. The bill, from 2015 (a time when, if Ketteler's livelihood was at risk, the reason couldn't have been PRO or "California's approach" years later), dealt entirely with employment tax and with requiring employers to inform contractors of their existing rights.
This was a clear case of a legislator's staff trying to reassure a worried constituent that the Senator cares about people like them. Of course the response would focus on Brown's pet bill that he sponsored. If she expected them to instead try to refute her misunderstandings about PRO (if she even spelled those out) point by point, first, that's a lot to expect for a random constituent phone call; and second—based on her various Twitter posts telling people not to believe any of the kinds of points I've made above—she clearly wouldn't have been open to any such thing. Instead of writing (as she was still doing as recently as yesterday) that Brown "mentioned supporting exemptions in the past" and therefore was really admitting that PRO needed to be fixed (even though those were exemptions to totally different laws), she would've presumably just written that Brown is another Democrat who's in thrall to lobbyists and unions. If Democrats speak in favor of PRO, then they're on the side of evil; if they speak against it, then they're showing she's right; and if they don't speak specifically about it in the way she wants, then either they're weaseling around or they're admitting she's right. I'm having a hard time seeing what kind of message would be acceptable.
OK, but still, why won't they reassure me and my friends in the way that we want?
I realize that if you already think Ketteler is right about PRO, then a question like "Why aren't they campaigning in a way that specifically addresses my concern?" will seem more reasonable. But if her points are absurd misunderstandings that can be seen as such by an open-minded person, then there's no particular reason any particular legislator ought to be spending time on them; in fact it's likely that their staff has advised against it, on the principle of "repeating the lie, even if you're rebutting it, helps to spread it."
If I started a rumor that Joe Biden's nomination of Merrick Garland was a signal that he wants people from Chicago to take over the entire U.S., it'd be foolish for Biden to respond with an official statement about how there definitely isn't any kind of Chicago coup plot, especially if I've also been going around telling people things like "Don't believe any politician who denies the Chicago coup plot, that means they're either in denial or they're in on it." That's a contrived example but this kind of thing is always a judgment call—and since the anti-PRO rhetoric has leaned so heavily on the "where there's smoke there's fire, the facts about what's really in the bill don't matter as much as our fears, the only acceptable thing is to strike out the ABC test" type of stuff, which is specifically designed to immunize against counter-arguments, I think it's reasonable to assume that the kind of explanations I've just spent almost 3000 words on are not the best use of a politician's time. (Why I'm bothering to do this is a fair question, but as I said, I personally know people who are quite concerned about this—the majority of my friends are performers, writers, or illustrators—and if I was going to have an opinion about it I felt it was my duty to be as clear and correct as possible.)
So instead, messaging has been focused on what the bill actually does, and aimed at the people who are actually affected by it: people in unions, and people who would like to be in unions. Which of course can also be spun as "look, the unions are behind this, they're a special interest!" but I for one am very happy to see Democrats aligning themselves unapologetically with unions, and if your point of view relies on thinking unions are evil and are out to take away your freedom, then we don't have much to talk about.
I think it's also worth noting that Republican legislators who oppose this bill (i.e. all of them) have not, as far as I know, been making arguments on the floor of Congress about protecting freelancers. I'm sure they're aware of these arguments, but they've been content to let groups like Freelancers Against AB5 take the lead in that department; instead, the official Republican line is simply that it'd be bad for business. Now, maybe that's just because that's what they say about everything so why bother changing it up, but I can't help thinking that it's also because tying this lie directly to them would make it easier for Democrats to address. If I say "Some people want you to believe X, and here's why it's BS", that has a side effect of making you think "hmm, people are saying X." Whereas if I can point to Rand Paul or Ted Cruz and say "This guy is telling you X, and here's why it's BS", then it's clearer that X is a partisan strategy. And I really think that's what this is. I've seen enough ballot measure campaigns in California to recognize that when all the noise is coming from recently created groups called things like "Mom and Apple Pie Against Fatal Taxes", and the politicians who oppose those taxes for entirely different reasons are carefully not discussing the matter in any detail except maybe to say "well, Mom and Apple Pie are important and we hope voters will respect their concerns," you're probably being had. I've done my best up to this last bit to talk about facts, not about my suspicions, because it's always possible that someone making a point for dishonest reasons could still be right. But suspicions can be helpful if they encourage you to think more carefully about the facts.
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.
Scope and intended effect of PRO
The goal of PRO as described by its sponsors and supporters is to protect the right of employees to engage in union organizing and collective bargaining. You can see the summary of the bill here, and the full text here.
It amends various sections of the National Labor Relations Act, which created the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and gave it authority to act against violations of labor organizing rights. That law has been amended since 1935 and you can find the current version of these policies in Title 29, Chapter 7, Subchapter II of the U.S. Code. PRO describes its changes to the law as increasing the subset of workers whose organizing rights should be protected by NLRB.
Purported bad consequences of PRO for freelancers
An example of the currently popular argument against PRO is this widely circulated essay by Judi Ketteler. (Ketteler works as an advertising copywriter so it's possible that she's writing on behalf of others, but people could certainly come to the same conclusions independently. In any case, in her her Twitter feed she is clearly focusing on repeating the same points from her essay and promoting the hashtag #FightForFreelancers as a rallying cry against PRO, so I think it's fair to treat this as a consistent campaign and not just a random op-ed.)
The argument is this (and I'll say up front that I think this argument is wrong, but here it is):
• The bill, in section 101(b), includes language about distinguishing between an "employee" and an "independent contractor" on the basis of three criteria that are equivalent to what's commonly called the ABC test.
• California's controversial Assembly Bill 5 of 2019 (AB5), using the ABC test criteria (based on an earlier court decision that mandated this), caused many people previously classified as independent contractors to be reclassified as employees in a wide variety of legal contexts, such as the requirement of employers to pay benefits and overtime. It exempted many professions, but did not exempt others such as musicians and journalists. This was seen as causing unintended disruption of those professions, in which full-time employment by a single employer was not the norm.
• If PRO writes the ABC test into labor law, it will have the same effects as AB5 on a national level.
• So the ABC test language should be dropped from PRO.
Rebuttal against the purported bad consequences
There's a general summary of arguments against the points made above on the AFL-CIO's website; one of the more detailed pieces I've seen is this one by the labor lawyer Brandon Magner. Briefly:
• The scope of PRO is clearly limited to labor organizing and collective bargaining rights, so its reference to the ABC test does not cause freelancers to be reclassified as employees in any other sense. It doesn't touch any of the kinds of laws that AB5 touched.
• It also doesn't require freelancers, or anyone else, to engage in labor organizing or collective bargaining; it only protects the right of a subset of them (the ones not covered by the ABC test) to engage in those if they want to.
• The ABC test language can't be dropped from PRO, and isn't a mistake: its effect of increasing the number of people who are classified as employees instead of independent contractors in the context of labor organizing rights is the whole point, as businesses have traditionally resisted labor organizing efforts by arguing that only regular full-time employees have such rights.
Who to believe?
As a resident of California, where a dismaying amount of legislation is conducted by referendum and is therefore "debated" via competing press releases and flyers rather than in a legislative chamber, I'm very familiar with the feeling of seeing two apparently contradictory positions argued back and forth in an "Is not! / Is too!" style. But it's not impossible, even if you're not an expert, to identify logical flaws and to find out what the things being referenced actually mean and compare that to what's being said about them.
I'm going to keep referencing Ketteler's article, and her Twitter feed, here because I think they contain examples of several commonly used bad and illogical arguments—that is, commonly used in general on many subjects, but especially in this case about PRO.
Some very bad arguments
1. "Definitions in a bill apply to every law"
I think this is very easy to refute, and the first point mentioned above under "Rebuttal" is really undeniable if you've ever read any legislation. It's easy to point at a phrase like "An individual ... shall be considered an employee" and assume that that means "employee" is being redefined in every context where such a word is relevant. But the context of every statement in the law matters, and in this case—as in all legislation that isn't totally inept—it's been spelled out clearly.
Each of the legal changes in the bill begins with a phrase like "Section 2(3) of the National Labor Relations Act (29 U.S.C. 152(3)) is amended by adding...". If you look at 29 U.S.C. 152, the first four words are "When used in this subchapter"—that is, Title 29, Chapter 7, Subchapter II. Everything in that subchapter pertains to the National Labor Relations Board and its ability to require employers to allow collective bargaining under certain conditions.
If 152(3) were amended to say instead that "The term 'employee' means a cat," then every reference in Subchapter II to "employee", unless otherwise specified, would mean a cat, and only cats would have collective bargaining rights. But every reference to "employee" anywhere else in U.S. law would have the same meaning it had before. That is a pretty standard aspect of how legal language works: definitions are given to words and phrases within a specific text, so that then the text can just refer to a short word or phrase instead of spelling out the definition every single time. If a definition is meant to have a broader application, then the law needs to say so.
A clear example of this mistake is in the fifth and sixth paragraphs of Ketteler's essay. Paragraph 5 points out that PRO's "way of determining who's considered an employee" is the ABC test, which is correct. Then paragraph 6 goes on to say that the ABC test means "businesses need to treat someone like me as an employee—with all the rights and benefits that entails—even if I'm writing only a single story for them" [italics mine], and goes on to explain how that would hurt her profession and others. But that's only true if the ABC test is applied to the laws governing "all the rights and benefits", as it was in AB5, rather than to the laws governing labor organizing rights, as it is in PRO. Both statements in themselves are factual (although the second one is only true if you completely remove the context), but one doesn't follow from the other; Ketteler hasn't actually said otherwise, she's been pretty careful here not to literally make the claim that the ABC test in PRO does this, but it's clear that that's what she wants you to think.
I think it's fair to say that any opinion piece like Ketteler's (or this similar one) that doesn't even try to acknowledge this issue should be considered uninformed and basically useless. It's the very first thing they should have thought of, if they made any effort to look into this; if they have a rationale for why it doesn't matter, they should say so, otherwise they're counting on their audience not looking into it. And it's not as if people who are self-employed are unfamiliar with the basic concept of "you can legally be in category A with regard to one thing (like, taxes), but in category B with regard to a different thing (like, unemployment insurance)".
2. "OK, it doesn't literally do what I said it does, but it'll be a slippery slope"
This isn't really an argument made in Ketteler's essay, but I've seen it quite a bit on social media and it's all over her Twitter feed. Here the idea is that it doesn't matter whether PRO actually changes the law in any non-union-related ways, such as requiring people to file a W-2 instead of a 1099, because simply mentioning the ABC test increases the overall amount of ABC-ness in U.S. law, which will eventually lead to legislators and courts applying the ABC test to everything.
In my opinion, this is sort of the "where there's smoke there must be fire—I'm just saying!" approach to debate. There doesn't seem to be any attempt to point to examples of legislation working that way; it's being used as a way to sidestep the argument, by claiming that factual concerns matter less than a general feeling of distrust, and that when in doubt we should assume the distrust is correct. People can feel this way for honest reasons but it's so commonly associated with deliberately deceptive fear-mongering campaigns that I think it should be considered a red flag; if that's all that your opinion rests on, it means you need to think it through in more detail, not less.
It's also an odd argument to make while repeatedly pointing to AB5, because AB5 was arguably the exact opposite of a slippery slope. Instead of subtly encouraging a later court decision, it was the clear result of an earlier court decision that directed the state to do exactly this. It immediately and explicitly made all of the changes that it made. And, rather than convincing people that this kind of thing was a great idea, it provoked an immediate backlash (in particular, it's been a huge setback to the goal of discouraging companies like Uber from exploitative practices). I think it's not unlikely that the language in PRO is as specific as it is partly because no one wanted it to be mistaken for AB5.
3. "Democrats haven't considered this—why aren't they speaking to my concern? Or: Democrats have actually admitted that I'm right"
I'll quote this paragraph from Ketteler's essay in its entirety: "When I reached out to my own Democratic senator here in Ohio, Sherrod Brown, his office pointed me toward another bill he introduced that he claims would fix the ABC test issue for freelancers like me. To me, this means he knows that my livelihood is at risk but would rather take California's approach by cleaning it up after the fact—when lives have already been damaged."
This is another kind of rhetoric that I think should always be seen as a red flag, because it's so easily used to mislead: it's like "if you admit I could ever have a point about anything, then you must be agreeing with this point". Did Sherrod Brown introduce a bill addressing some concerns related to freelancers? He did. By doing so, did he acknowledge that Ketteler's interpretation of "the ABC test issue" in PRO was correct? He did not. The bill, from 2015 (a time when, if Ketteler's livelihood was at risk, the reason couldn't have been PRO or "California's approach" years later), dealt entirely with employment tax and with requiring employers to inform contractors of their existing rights.
This was a clear case of a legislator's staff trying to reassure a worried constituent that the Senator cares about people like them. Of course the response would focus on Brown's pet bill that he sponsored. If she expected them to instead try to refute her misunderstandings about PRO (if she even spelled those out) point by point, first, that's a lot to expect for a random constituent phone call; and second—based on her various Twitter posts telling people not to believe any of the kinds of points I've made above—she clearly wouldn't have been open to any such thing. Instead of writing (as she was still doing as recently as yesterday) that Brown "mentioned supporting exemptions in the past" and therefore was really admitting that PRO needed to be fixed (even though those were exemptions to totally different laws), she would've presumably just written that Brown is another Democrat who's in thrall to lobbyists and unions. If Democrats speak in favor of PRO, then they're on the side of evil; if they speak against it, then they're showing she's right; and if they don't speak specifically about it in the way she wants, then either they're weaseling around or they're admitting she's right. I'm having a hard time seeing what kind of message would be acceptable.
OK, but still, why won't they reassure me and my friends in the way that we want?
I realize that if you already think Ketteler is right about PRO, then a question like "Why aren't they campaigning in a way that specifically addresses my concern?" will seem more reasonable. But if her points are absurd misunderstandings that can be seen as such by an open-minded person, then there's no particular reason any particular legislator ought to be spending time on them; in fact it's likely that their staff has advised against it, on the principle of "repeating the lie, even if you're rebutting it, helps to spread it."
If I started a rumor that Joe Biden's nomination of Merrick Garland was a signal that he wants people from Chicago to take over the entire U.S., it'd be foolish for Biden to respond with an official statement about how there definitely isn't any kind of Chicago coup plot, especially if I've also been going around telling people things like "Don't believe any politician who denies the Chicago coup plot, that means they're either in denial or they're in on it." That's a contrived example but this kind of thing is always a judgment call—and since the anti-PRO rhetoric has leaned so heavily on the "where there's smoke there's fire, the facts about what's really in the bill don't matter as much as our fears, the only acceptable thing is to strike out the ABC test" type of stuff, which is specifically designed to immunize against counter-arguments, I think it's reasonable to assume that the kind of explanations I've just spent almost 3000 words on are not the best use of a politician's time. (Why I'm bothering to do this is a fair question, but as I said, I personally know people who are quite concerned about this—the majority of my friends are performers, writers, or illustrators—and if I was going to have an opinion about it I felt it was my duty to be as clear and correct as possible.)
So instead, messaging has been focused on what the bill actually does, and aimed at the people who are actually affected by it: people in unions, and people who would like to be in unions. Which of course can also be spun as "look, the unions are behind this, they're a special interest!" but I for one am very happy to see Democrats aligning themselves unapologetically with unions, and if your point of view relies on thinking unions are evil and are out to take away your freedom, then we don't have much to talk about.
I think it's also worth noting that Republican legislators who oppose this bill (i.e. all of them) have not, as far as I know, been making arguments on the floor of Congress about protecting freelancers. I'm sure they're aware of these arguments, but they've been content to let groups like Freelancers Against AB5 take the lead in that department; instead, the official Republican line is simply that it'd be bad for business. Now, maybe that's just because that's what they say about everything so why bother changing it up, but I can't help thinking that it's also because tying this lie directly to them would make it easier for Democrats to address. If I say "Some people want you to believe X, and here's why it's BS", that has a side effect of making you think "hmm, people are saying X." Whereas if I can point to Rand Paul or Ted Cruz and say "This guy is telling you X, and here's why it's BS", then it's clearer that X is a partisan strategy. And I really think that's what this is. I've seen enough ballot measure campaigns in California to recognize that when all the noise is coming from recently created groups called things like "Mom and Apple Pie Against Fatal Taxes", and the politicians who oppose those taxes for entirely different reasons are carefully not discussing the matter in any detail except maybe to say "well, Mom and Apple Pie are important and we hope voters will respect their concerns," you're probably being had. I've done my best up to this last bit to talk about facts, not about my suspicions, because it's always possible that someone making a point for dishonest reasons could still be right. But suspicions can be helpful if they encourage you to think more carefully about the facts.
