Joe Biden has adopted another bad idea that failed in California in hopes of forcing it on all of America. The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has issued a 339-page rule that will ban most freelancing or independent contractor professions in the country. The goal is to force people out of the rewarding professions that they love and use to support their families, so they’ll have to take a union job where the dues money can be funneled into the campaign coffers of Democrats running for office. They won’t admit that that is the goal—but it is.
California attempted to ban freelancing in 2019, and it was a disaster. The state’s communist legislature passed AB5, and Governor Hair Gel Hitler signed it into law. The intent at the time was to force Uber and Lyft to unionize. The law was so loosely and poorly written that it applied to virtually all freelancers and independent contractors.
People working in more than 600 professions suddenly found their livelihoods outlawed by AB5. That’s not an exaggeration. Everyone from tennis instructors to independent owner-operator truck drivers was suddenly out of work. It’s amazing that the story didn’t receive more national coverage since more than 7 million people lost their freelancing jobs overnight.
Did you know that stuntmen who work for the movies in Hollywood are freelancers? Neither did the retards who wrote AB5.
The law was so draconian and crazy that it banned bestselling California author Dean Koontz, whose books have sold more than 500 million copies worldwide, from writing any more books while it was in effect. Authors and writers were banned. Theater workers were banned. Yoga instructors, pet sitters, mortgage brokers, bookkeepers, building inspectors, carpenters, illegal alien fruit pickers, and mall Santa Clauses were all banned from their freelancing jobs.
In their eagerness to force Lyft and Uber to unionize, the communists in the California legislature didn’t bother to do an ounce of research to determine how many additional freelancers would be impacted by the law. It turns out that 3.3 million Californians derive all of their income from freelancing. Another 3.8 million combine freelancing with traditional W2 work. The California legislature nearly put one-fifth of the state’s population out of work with this boneheaded law.
When public outcry against the law became too much to ignore, the snotty sponsor of the bill, Assemblywoman Lorena Gomez, doubled down. She claimed that the professions that were banned under AB5 didn’t pay very well anyway. There were 7.1 million Californians who disagreed. Gomez’s point didn’t matter anyway. People freelance either to make the bulk of their income or to supplement their income to make life easier. The cost of living isn’t exactly cheap in California.
People also freelance in many cases because they like the flexibility it offers their lives over working a traditional 9 to 5 job. Thanks to the internet, millions of people can now work from home at freelancing and spend more time with their spouse and children. Many freelancers, present company included, make more money from freelancing than they would in a regular job doing the same thing for a regular employer.
The California legislature was finally forced to provide exemptions for hundreds of professions under the rule. Not that that is slowing Joe Biden and the NLRB down. If this rule goes into effect, it will be the same catastrophe all over again—but this time on a national scale. 38% of all workers in the United States are freelancers. They’re all going to be out of a job if this new rule from the NLRB goes into effect.
