I'm self-employed. I'm an independent contractor. I have been for many many years. And I come from a family that is by and large allergic to wage slavery. I simultaneously fervently believe that the economic fortunes of the American middle class live and die by the strength of American unions. Days before reading this article, I'd called my US Representative Kathy Manning's office asking her to vote for the PRO act. After reading this article, I called her office and explained to a staffer that while I still support the act, I have a problem with the "ABC" test, and it should be replaced with the "IRS" test. I also joined the Facebook group recommended in that article called Fight For Freelancers USA.
Every day since, I've been more and more suspicious that I've been duped. This is supposed to be a nonpartisan (trans-partisan?) Facebook group, but there is a lot of unalloyed anti-union vitriol that comes from that page. Not all of it––you'll find a smattering of posts narrowly opposing the screening criteria––but lots of anti-union anti-Democrat anti-Biden US Chamber style bullshit. Now I'm starting to wonder if maybe even the ABC vs IRS test distinction is something that would weaken unions' hands, and could be a red herring to drive a wedge between different types of American workers.
It's given me a perspective on the phenomenon of "voting against your own interests" which we decry a lot among poor rural conservatives. They vote against the party which wants to give them a hand up, all because the other party offers them white nationalism and hetero-patriarchy. So are they voting against their interests? Or do their interests in white nationalism and hetero-patriarchy simply outweigh their material interests? As for me, I've been struggling with the question of whether this worker classification test is actually an existential threat to my way of earning a living or just a ruse. And much more fundamentally, even if it is not a ruse, if that material interest could or would or should outweigh my interest in a strong labor movement and its resulting strong middle class. And if I conclude that it doesn't, then what can I say about the poor rural conservatives who put their abstract ideological interests over their material interests?
It's also had me pondering questions of epistemology. How do we know what we know? Why do we believe what we believe? I took this at face value because, having read his work for years, I generally trust kos's political judgement. But now that this appears to clash with my wider political beliefs, how do I reassess my judgements on the issues and the individuals?