This is the text of my speech at the #RepealAB5 Rally on January 24, 2020, in West LA.
I AM A WRITER.
I grab ideas out of the air and pin them down, with words, in space and time.
And writing changes your brain.
I mean that
literally.
One of my
symptoms: I remember my dreams. Every night, at least three or four dreams. In complete
detail.
And I know
why I remember them.
It’s because dreams are the world of ideas, and archetypes, and symbols. It’s the world where time doesn’t exist. The past is now. The dead live. The dead are as vivid and real as you are here, now.
And I’ve worn away the veil between that world and this one. I’ve worn it thin, from a lifetime of moving back and forth between these two worlds, in my mind.
… Or maybe it’s not me, that does the moving.
Maybe I’m hitching a ride on Hermes. You know Hermes, right? He’s the Greek god with the wings on his sandals. His job was to carry messages back and forth between humans and the gods.
He carries
messages to us from the world of ideas, and archetypes, and symbols, and the dead.
No surprise: Hermes is the god of writing …
Something else that is no surprise:
Writers love
freedom.
When you
spend your time flying with winged sandals and talking to the dead, you learn
some interesting things about what it means to be free.
I have my
story about AB5.
I’ve lost work because of AB5.
I have my
story about freelancing.
About how I’ve always freelanced, because that’s what writers do.
About how when I walked away from full time salaried work and started to freelance full time, I tripled my income. I came into my own as a professional, respected working woman.
So yeah, the
idea that words—some else’s words—can mess with that?
It pisses me off. It pisses me off!
But I’ve been listening, very carefully, to the people who support AB5. I’ve been listening as a writer. And I’ve read the bill.
#AB5 a piece of “writing.”
Quite the piece!
5896 words.
(By the way? The Constitution of the United States – which comes to us [thank you, O Hermes!] from the dead – is 4558 words…)
But why do I care about the length of AB5? Why mention that?
One of my favorite quotes about writing is from the historian David McCullough.
“To write is to think. And to write well is to think well.”
Hmmmm…
We all agree
there are ideas out there—ideas related, somehow, to AB5—that are good ideas.
Nobody should be exploited.
That’s a very, very good idea. (“Nobody should be exploited” is four words, by the way.)
Everyone deserves fair compensation.
Also a good idea. (Also four words!)
Here’s a
sentence from AB5.
In circumstances which are in essence the loan of an employee from one employer to another employer wherein direction and control of the manner and means of performing the services changes to the employer to whom the employee is loaned, the loaning employer shall continue to be the employer of the employee if the loaning employer continues to pay remuneration to the employee, whether or not reimbursed by the other employer.
What the fuck. (That’s the writer in me, talking…) What the serious fuck …
I said a
minute ago: writers know something about freedom.
Because
there’s nothing more free than darting around the world of ideas on your winged
sandals.
But writers also know that, in this world, words are used to imprison people.
It’s no coincidence that writers are often on the front lines of wars. Or that they are often among the first to die.
Writers want to be free. Writers want YOU to be free. And when it comes down to it, to push and to shove, we will fight to keep you free.
But maybe you’re thinking, AB5? It’s not about freedom.
Isn’t it?
Let me put
it this way.
Do you wish, sometimes, that life was simpler?
I do.
I think we all do. I think we all know, in our heart of hearts, that things really should be simpler. And technology. Globalization. All those 21st century “isms”?
They don’t change what’s real.
And in our heart
of hearts, we know that. Because in our heart of hearts, we know that our true
home is anchored in the world of ideas.
And that
world resolves to only a few, simple things.
Love. Family. Peace. Joy.
Suffering … Redemption.
Longing … Fulfillment.
So why do we
submit to so many complications?
“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold,” wrote the poet William Butler Yeats. “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.”
Is that … us?
Have we abandoned
the convictions that we, as Americans – as Californians – as humans – once held
so strongly about the things that really matter?
Have we let “the
worst” wear us down? Confuse us?
This is not
about politics.
This is not about the left, or the right.
In 1981, in his introduction to Unamerican Activities, a compilation by the PEN American Freedom to Write Committee, PEN coordinator Geoffrey Rips wrote about writing and freedom and control. “A government intent on controlling the economic and social realities of a country,” he said, must manipulate the written perception of those realities.
And look at
us, 39 years later.
The worst,
with their passionate intensity, are burying us with crazy words.
They’re
dumping this crazy pile of words on us. And we’re scrambling to try to
understand them. To make sense of them. To react to them.
What an awful thing.
To go from what we once were, to a people governed by awful, mixed-up, crazy words.
To wake up one morning and learn that some rough beast, its hour come round at last, is slouching toward us to be born. That because of some word salad written by lawyers, that living you were earning? That business you built?
Disappeared.
I had no interest in becoming political. I had no interest in becoming an activist.
For years, now, I’ve been toying with an idea for a book. The working title: Abstract Nation.
The idea for the book goes something like this:
We (Americans / Westerners) live increasingly in our heads.
We interact, increasingly, with ideas as if they were things.
We’re doing this because of how we’re schooled. We’re taught to read at earlier and earlier ages. We spend more & more of our childhoods indoors, interacting with abstractions (e.g. “virtual” playthings) instead of physical, three-dimensional objects and materials.
Fewer and fewer of us grow up in rural places, where “nature” is a real thing (versus images flashing on a screen, or a story in a book, or a concept you relate to sporadically by maybe hiking or looking at birds through binoculars).
Fewer and fewer of us do manual labor, i.e. the kind of work that requires our bumbling fingers to manipulate objects, our muscles to lever against the drag and inertia and gravity of the three-dimensional world.
You see the effects of this transition (evolution?) everywhere, if you start to look.
Treadwell had an idea in his head about nature in general and bears in particular. He went out into the wilderness to interact with this idea, and for a while it worked. For a while, the grizzly bears he encountered fit his idea of bears as gentle giants.
And then a different version of the bears’ reality intruded on Treadwell’s story.
He got killed and eaten.
Consider the popular literature about stress, and stress hormones, and how we deal with stress, and the effect of stress on our brains. You’ve heard about this, for sure: our stress reactions evolved, originally, to help us deal with three-dimensional threats. Fight or flight response. We needed “fight or flight” it to assess three-dimensional threats and react to them in ways that would keep us alive.
But today, many of the our threats we face are abstract.
We worry about the future, we fret about the past, we torture ourselves with “what ifs.”
And our brains don’t know the difference! Our brains react to abstract threats as if they were three-dimensional threats. And so we bathe ourselves in a constant stream of stress hormones, wearing ourselves out, aging ourselves unnecessarily, depressing our immune systems. And for what?
Another lens on this same problem is explored in The Gift of Fear by Gavin de Becker [affiliate link, paying the bills, guys, tks]. One of the points de Becker makes is that we put ourselves at a huge disadvantage when we train ourselves to override our bodies’ fear signals. And why do we do that? Because sometimes, those feelings don’t gibe with our abstract concepts about the world around us. We commit to some idea about the world, and when reality hits us in a way that contradicts that idea, we get confused. And sometimes, our confusion exacts a terrible cost. We think, oh, I’m probably overreacting here and in that moment of hesitation, we leave ourselves vulnerable to a (human) predator.
Ideas can form a kind of veil between us and the world.
Ideas can be a kind of enchantment that distorts how we interpret the world.
It can go the other way, too. Watch how people interpret politicians and media personalities. When we “know” that so-and-so from the other political party is a bad person, we interpret that person’s words and body language as threatening and awful. Yet someone on the other side of the political spectrum will watch the same interview or speech and have a completely different reaction.
On the one side: stress hormones spike.
On the other: they don’t.
I’m fascinated by this.
I’m fascinated by how becoming more & more abstract is affecting us.
I’m fascinated by the role of technology. How technology makes abstract ideas seem even more real, pushes them into our faces …
Are we better off for this?
I’m not sure. I worry that certain practical skills, practical, concrete ways of interacting with reality, are starting to atrophy. How about like map-reading, for example? Old-fashioned maps are an abstraction, sure, but they are much more concrete than a blue dot slip-sliding around on a phone screen.
Old-fashioned maps have concrete correspondences to concrete directions: north, south, east west. Same with the old-fashioned way of giving directions, for that matter. “Get off exit 12, take a right, drive east for 2.2 miles, then take a left at the 7-11.” The directions are pinned onto the actual world. Clear as compass points.
So what happens if the grid goes down and you need to find your way from point A to point B? If you’ve used a map, if you’ve learned to navigate by old-fashioned directions, aren’t you better off than if you grew up navigating only via a screen on a phone?
And yet, sometimes I have hope. Sometimes things happen which seem to pull us back into a less-abstract way of interacting with the world.
Which brings me to the idea of activism.
There are, I submit, two kinds of activism.
One type of activism is based on abstractions.
There’s an idea out there — an abstraction — that resonates with you. Examples: climate change. The right to choose. 2A rights. Income inequality. Immigration.
There’s a million of ’em.
You read about the idea. You see media reports about it. You read about someone who was physically affected as a result of it, and something about this person is relatable, which makes the idea even more “real” to you.
And — depending on your temperament and bandwidth — you might even begin acting to support or oppose this abstraction. You might vote a certain way because of it, or attend a rally, or write to a politician, or join a group, or donate money. Or,heaven help us, become even more radical, become a terrorist or an assassin.
The other type of activism is based on an actual, concrete, three-dimensional threat.
In the 1980s, I joined a group of activists in Upstate New York. We formed to fight a state proposal to site a “low level radioactive waste” dump in one of two rural upstate communities (one in Steuben county, one in Cortland county).
This was not an abstract threat. It was real.
Yes, the state had a problem it needed to solve. It needed a way to store that crap.
But its solution was a terrible one. Its solution was to barge into some community and dump (hahaha) the problem into the laps of the people who had made their homes there.
And there was a backlash. A strong backlash.
Because the threat wasn’t an abstraction. People knew that accepting a new dump in their communities would cause changes — the huge, noisy trucks rolling in from across the state (and who knows, maybe out of state?), the conversion of pristine state forest into an industrial site, the risks to their well water, other potential risks to their health.
It was an issue that hit people where it really matters. It was a three-dimensional threat, a threat to peoples’ homes, their families, and their quality of life.
And you know what? Party lines didn’t matter. Left v right didn’t matter. It was us against the enemy.
And we won. We stopped the dump. The state backed down. It decided to store low level radioactive waste on site instead of trucking it to some rural community and burying it there.
Which Brings Me to AB5
Forty years later, and suddenly I’m an activist again.
And it’s for the same reasons.
I’m an activist again because once again my (state) government is trying something really stupid, and it’s sledgehammered me in a very real, three-dimensional way.
And I’ve noticed some interesting things about how the reaction to AB5 is lining up.
Some people who argue that AB5 is a great law. And it’s possible some of them are sincere. But it seems to me that their arguments are all based on abstractions. Corporations are bad. Businesses mistreat employees. Labor unions are beneficent. Laws are the best way to fix social problems. Doing something is always better than doing nothing.
OTOH, the people who have been hurt by AB5? They’re not upset because of an idea. They’re upset because they woke up one morning and discovered the California had taken a sledgehammer to their homes, their families, and their quality of life.
And guess what’s happening?
Hint: see this from a Forbes article, California’s AB5 Leaves Women Business Owners Reeling, by Elaine Pofeldt. Pofeldt interviewed several women, including mother-of-three Jessica Tucker. Tucker started doing freelance transcription and closed captioning work from her home three years ago. Now, Pofeldt writes (emphasis mine):
Tucker estimates she will lose a couple of thousand dollars a month. She has never “been political,” she says—but AB5 has galvanized her.
I’m running across that same kind of thing all over. Another example over on Twitter, where @AnoukEZMAC‘s profile reads:
I was living peacefully, doing my thing, posting my meditation posts, working as an interpreter from home. And then BAM. AB5 happened. So, I’m tweeting politics
This is big, folks.
This is cutting across party lines. Every day, people preface their comments by saying that they are Democrats, that they support protections for contractors, that they voted Democrat in 2020.
But they’re being hurt by AB5, and suddenly “voting Democrat” as an idea is crumbling against the effects of AB5 as a three-dimensional threat.
This is the stuff of which real revolutions are made …
I’ve been a freelance writer my entire life. It was my career choice. It’s what I love to do. Even when I’ve held full-time salaried jobs I have always freelanced at least a little on the side for the sheer love of it.
Being a freelance writer has enabled me to work from home, set my own hours, and maintain complete control over my working environment. I don’t have to work for anyone I don’t want to work for. I don’t have to do work I don’t want to do.
Freelance writing is a dream job. It is MY dream job.
So imagine my horror when I discover that this STUPID AB5 (Assembly Bill 5 aka “the anti-gig law”) has, in effect, made certain types of freelance writing work illegal.
Illegal? To do freelance work, of your choice, in the volume you choose?
And yes, I have already been hurt. I had a promising new client. Did a little work for them in 2019. Was discussing some new work in 2020.
Not any more.
That opportunity is now GONE.
Why? Because I live in California.
My skills, my (extensive) experience, my professionalism, my talent. It means zip in this situation.
Because I live in California, the work I would have gotten will go to someone else.
Yes, I am pissed.
And I’m going to pitch in to fight this thing. #RepealAB5!!!!!
In the meantime, I’m going to use this post to compile background to help people understand AB5, the history of AB5, and how it is impacting people like me. Creatives, sole proprietors, work-at-home women — we didn’t bother anyone, we were NOT being exploited — WE DIDN’T DESERVE THIS.
Let’s start with …
LA Times in September: Groups with “political juice” got AB5 exemptions
California’s employment law was rewritten. Many independent contractors aren’t thrilled. This is a September 23, 2019 column by George Skelton that appeared in the LA Times and — already! — pointed out how awful AB5 is. “The gig law’s advocates” Skelton wrote, think independent contractors are all being “exploited” by “greedy, heartless corporations.” (No. We are NOT.)
The article captures a bit of history of the bill’s creation and signing. It was written by (former labor organizer) Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez (D-San Diego), and “seemed to be aimed primarily at Uber and Lyft.” There’s also this tidbit …
Newsom signed the bill last week without inviting in reporters, avoiding pesky questions about why some workers gained exemptions and others did not.
… to which Skelton adds:
“A problem with AB 5 is some people got exemptions because they had political juice and other people didn’t,” says labor lawyer Brad Shafer.
Yeah, that’s just what we want from our legislators. Complicated laws that ensnare some of us, while exempting groups that have political influence :(
Skelton interviews several people who anticipated being affects, including a physical therapist, a nurse anesthesiologist, and a clinical counselor / dance movement therapist. Great. Let’s drive those people out of California /sarc off
CBS in September: AB5 is a standard for the rest of the country to follow
In a September 11, 2019 piece that essentially lauds the article for fighting all those bad exploitative corporations, California approves bill that will turn gig workers into employees, CBS/AP quote the California Labor Union as stating the law will set “the standard for the rest of the country to follow.”
New York writers, brace yourselves.
The article also notes that “Uber and other app-based businesses that rely on gig workers” were planning to “spend $90 million on a ballot initiative that would exempt them from AB5.”
Anybody have $90m on hand to exempt freelance writers? Hello? Hello?
The Fallout Begins: Vox Media axes its California-based freelance writers
The issue that cost all those freelancers their gigs was the cap on how many jobs per year you can do as an Independent Contractor, under AB5:
As it pertains to Vox, the law forbids nonemployees from submitting more than 35 pieces per year.
As many, many people have pointed out, 35 pieces a year is NOTHING for a freelance writer. If you get a gig writing blog posts, you could easily deliver 35 per month!
The CNBC piece also speculates on how many people would be hurt by AB5:
The bill has the potential to change the employment status of more than 1 million workers in California.
I bet that number is low … if anyone sees any updated figures, please drop me an email or a link in the comments — thank you!
Next Up: Lawsuits
After the turn of the year, the reality of AB5 started to hit home. People are now organizing to fight back. This article by Billy Binion in Reason magazine, California Freelancers Sue To Stop Law That’s Destroying Their Jobs. Pol Says Those ‘Were Never Good Jobs’ Anyway., describes one lawsuit, filed on December 17, 2019 by the Pacific Legal Foundation on behalf of the American Society of Journalists and Authors and the National Press Photographers Association.
The article quotes Alisha Grauso, an entertainment journalist and the co-leader of California Freelance Writers United as noting that the way companies will “comply” with AB5 is to “simply blacklist California writers and work with writers in other states.” (Yep. Why shouldn’t they? Who wants to invite trouble from California regulators when you can easily avoid it?) Grauso also notes that the bill is particularly harmful to women.
“The reality is it still falls primarily on women to be the caretakers and caregivers of their families, and freelancing allows women to be stay-at-home mothers or to care for an aging parent,” Grauso notes. “Being made employees kills their flexibility and ability to be home when needed. I cannot stress enough how anti-women this bill is.”
This article is the first I saw that starts documenting the (horrible) responses of Lorena Gonzalez to AB5 backlash; e.g. she said the Vox jobs “were never good jobs.”
Uh, yes they were, Lorena. As was the “gig” I lost thanks to your stupid law.
And there’s also this charming gem:
“[Freelancers] shouldn’t fucking have to [work 2-3 jobs],” the assemblywoman, addressing a detractor, said in a Twitter exchange last week. “And until you or anyone else that wants to bitch about AB5 puts out cognizant policy proposals to curb this chaos, you can keep your criticism anonymous.”
What a way to treat your constituents …
The article then goes on to quote freelance writers who saw substantial damage to their income streams thanks to AB5, including one writer who lost a client that paid her $20K with in 2019. Unbelievable.
Click through and read it all. Busch does a great job of explaining what it means to be a freelance writer, how she fought to establish her freelance career (in a male-dominated industry niche) and how AB5 is causing her to lose jobs “left and right.”
Busch is also active in California Freelance Writers United so has additional insight into Lorena Gonzalez’ attitude toward freelance writers who are being hurt by this bill:
Clearly, Gonzalez doesn’t understand our business and didn’t do enough research before including us and others — like musicians, court reporters, translators and independent truckers — this bill.
During meetings with her, writers were told that the soonest anything in the law can be changed — if we can convince her to do so — is September 2020. That means ruin for many of us.
Fuck #AB5. I’m so upset. I’m sitting here crying bc everything I’ve worked for, the career I’ve created and based my entire life on, is crumbling around me and there’s literally nothing I can do about it.
My unemployment benefits are exhausted. I’m surviving with some freelance income and by selling personal items on eBay. I’m desperate for work. If nothing else, I might end up with a minimum wage job at Home Depot or another retailer, if they’ll have me. 8/9
These are the fruits of AB5, a law written with some good intention but appalling ignorance of the impact it would have on so many professions.
Thanks, Lorena Gonzelez.
Speaking of whom … guess what her response is to people like Beth?
Lorena Gonzalez “Simply Doesn’t Believe” You If You Claim You’ve Been Hurt by AB5
Well first off, Gonzalez, we freelance writers already ARE “a business.” We have to be a business to freelance, file taxes, and fufill other requirements ALREADY ON THE BOOKS in California.
What Gonzalez (probably?) means is “become an LLC instead of a sole proprietor.” But guess what?
Becoming an LLC costs money. Per my CPA: start with an $800 franchise fee. Then file Articles of Organization with the California Secretary of State ($70 filing fee). Then file Articles of Organization and Statement of Information ($20 fee) You must also “hire a registered agent in California” which costs $50-500 PER YEAR.
Your cost of doing business goes up. You’re spending (even more!) time filling out and filing paperwork (and probably providing copies to your clients) than you could have spent writing.
And worse yet …
Becoming an LLC May Not “Fix” Anything for Freelance Writers???
Yeah, file this under “holy crap.” Per attorney Nina Yblok, who is licensed to practice law in California, has argued independent contractor cases to the California Employment Development Department, and has done “innumerable” independent contractor audits get this little twist o’ the plot (emphasis mine):
AB5 covers corporations, LLCs etc. and people. This is the ONE really big change in the law, since I’ve always believed that in many cases Dynamex and Borello will result in the same determination. But in the past legally formed California corporations and LLCs, even if owned by only one person, were automatically determined to be ICs. Now they are not.
The new law governing independent contracting, AB 5, includes what can be describedas a business-to-business (B2B) exemption. But a close examination of the actual language shows that the B2B exemption is virtually inoperable.
Yep.
Curtis’ extremely thorough piece carefully documents how the bill’s vague and contradictory language makes the B2B exemption a joke. And, what’s more:
[E]ven if a service provider can establish that it meets all of the factors, misclassification liability on the hiring entity is so great that no one wants to take the risk…
THAT, my friends, is why California freelancers are being blacklisted.
First, vague and contradictory lawyer-ese makes it impossible know how to comply.
Then your clients get spooked.
Is anyone with a whit of common sense suprised by this?
UPDATE 1/18/20. OMG: AB5, the Federal Version?
So you thought you were immune, if you lived far far away from beautiful California?
Good luck with that. As predicted by media outlets like CBS (see above), politicians around the country are looking at AB5 as a model for state legislation.
H.R.2474 – benignly titled ‘The PRO Act’ was originally drafted in May of 2019 as a union-strengthening bill. In its infancy it had nothing to do with independent contractors … But this is government and with government there is never enough. Somewhere between September of 2019 and December of 2019 someone added an amendment to the behemoth employer-rights killer that was a simple copy and paste of California’s AB5.
My stomach has literally gone nauseous about this. Please, if you care about peoples’ freedom to work for themselves, call your Congressional representative and tell him/her to fight this bill!
People who don’t need protecting—professional freelancers, are seeing their livelihoods upended and destroyed.
Kos urges lawmakers in other states to hold off copying this mess.
It would behoove Democrats in other states to step back and let California figure out a way out of this mess, and let the courts weigh in, before it decides to join in, destroying the livelihoods of creative class people that, it so happens, also happen to be a strong Democratic constituency.
New Jersey lawmakers, Singer explains, tried last year to pass an AB5-like bill. And like AB5,
it was so overreaching in its scope that it targeted far more than misclassified employees. It would destroy the ability for everyone from attorneys to data analysts to work, because it made no meaningful distinction between an exploited worker and a career professional who chooses to work for herself.
The citizens of the state fought the bill last year and “managed to shut it down before the final vote.”
But guess what?
Then, on the first day of the 219th Legislative Session last week, the Senate introduced S863: new session, same old bill.
This is crazy. Seriously. What is wrong with our politicians that they think this is a good idea???
“A driver is not an independent contractor simply because she drives her own car on the job,” Cuomo said, echoing the years-old rhetoric of worker advocates. “A newspaper carrier is not an independent contractor because they ride their own bicycle. A domestic worker is not an independent contractor because she brings her own broom and mop to the job. It is exploitive, abusive, it’s a scam, it’s a fraud, it must stop and it has to stop here and now.”
To be clear, the Authors Guild fully supports employment protections for freelance journalists and authors, and will be lobbying for collective bargaining rights in 2020. Like Uber drivers, writers have no benefits and are often paid less than minimum wage. But forcing writers to work as employees, especially on a state-by-state basis, is not the way to go about it.
The Author’s Guild also warns that AB5 could affect some book-writing agreements:
There are, however, some book-writing agreements that could be considered service agreements and arguably would fall under AB-5, such as work-made-for-hire agreements and contracts where the author has ongoing obligations and the publisher has greater editing ability or control over the content.
