By Kim Kavin

In the coming days, the New Jersey Legislature is expected to vote on fast-tracked legislation that very well could destroy the livelihoods of the people who write pretty much everything you read.

Assembly bill 5936/Senate bill 4204, backed by Senate President Steve Sweeney, a Democrat, aims to curb abuses by companies that misclassify people as independent contractors when they should be paying them benefits as full-time employees.

While that’s an admirable goal, similar legislation was recently enacted in California, with a similar sales pitch to the public — and has done serious collateral damage to professionals like me, who have been happily working as freelance writers and editors for years.

If you haven’t noticed since a little thing called the internet came along, the publishing industry has been decimated here in New Jersey, in neighboring New York and all around the nation. Countless newspaper and magazine publishers have shed full-time editorial jobs by the thousands.

Many of us who have survived at the profession of writing and editing have done so by building freelance businesses, where we contribute a variety of things — blog posts, columns, feature articles, editing time, advertorial content and more — to a variety of publications. Today’s freelance writers are kind of like designated hitters, filling in wherever the current gap in any given newspaper or magazine’s lineup of staffers happens to be, while playing for a whole bunch of teams at the same time.

For me, in the face of this volatile publishing marketplace, freelancing has been a godsend. I opened my freelance writing and editing business in 2003, and I have been able to work full-time at it ever since. Today, I have a stable roster of clients, I earn six figures a year, I can afford health insurance, I make my own hours, I work from a home office that I love, I have a retirement nest egg, and I live in a nice town where I can afford the mortgage and an occasional night out at a restaurant with friends. To be frank, given the dismal state of the publishing industry nowadays, I actually earn more money as a freelancer than some of my editors do in their full-time roles.

Independent contractor laws like the one in California and the one that Sweeney is backing here in New Jersey have the unintended consequence of threatening, if not outright destroying, the careers of freelance journalists like me. The law in California won’t go into effect until January, but already, some publishers there have already stopped hiring longtime freelance writers.

Some California-based publishers are forcing freelancers to sign non-compete clauses, which means the writers have to choose to keep just one of the, say, 25 small clients they’ve had for years. And according to the National Law Review, New Jersey’s original version of the legislation was even more restrictive than California’s.

Part of the problem with New Jersey’s version of the legislation is that even the Senate Democrats writing it don’t understand what its impact will be. I spoke on Nov. 18 with a legislative aide for the Senate Democrats, and I asked him if my freelance writing business would be able to survive what they are working to do. His best answer? “Probably.”

This ridiculous attitude of indifference among Senate Democrats only began to change at the end of last week, after some writer friends and I created and led a Facebook group that grew to nearly 600 members in five days. We got organized fast on social media, jammed the lawmakers’ emails and phone lines, and started publishing op-eds in newspapers all across the state.

As of late Friday, the Senate Democrats had put out a press release stating that the legislation would be amended to make sure that the status of freelance journalists in New Jersey does not change. But given that Sweeney and his staff started out lacking either a conscience or a clue about how they were going to destroy our lives with the original version of the bill, we are not letting up.

With this bill, these lawmakers are playing with incredibly dangerous matches that have the potential to turn lifelong careers into dumpster fires. We look forward to reviewing the bill’s changes after Sweeney’s team puts them in writing, and we hope that going forward, we can go back to our everyday business of thriving as lawful, successful independent contractors here in the great state of New Jersey.

Kim Kavin is a journalist and author whose byline can be found in The Washington Post, HuffPost and Salon, as well as many other publications. She lives in Washington Township, Morris County.

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