Brittany VanDerBill launched her own business in 2015, providing social media marketing services for clients. She enjoyed the flexibility and freedom of running her own business as an independent contractor without any employees—so much so that she decided to expand what she was doing to include communication and writing services in 2019.
“In 2020 or so, I heard about California and their AB5 law that went into effect. At first, I dismissed it as just like, there’s no way this could be true. Like, how could they outlaw freelancing?” VanDerBill said, referring to a state law that required companies to classify many workers as employees rather than independent contractors.
California’s AB5 law uses a three-prong test, called the ABC test, to determine whether a worker can be hired as an independent contractor. Unsurprisingly, the test is highly restrictive, VanDerBill said.
“It makes it really hard for an individual doing work and getting paid by somebody to be considered an independent contractor. They have to pass all three prongs of the ABC test, and it’s a super, super, super restrictive test. In California, this law negatively impacted over 600 professions,” VanDerBill said.
After California passed this law regarding independent contracting, she knew that Minnesota would likely be next.
“In Minnesota—that seems to be our trend in recent years—we tend to kind of follow after California’s policies. And unfortunately, we tend to pick the worst of the California policies to follow,” VanDerBill said.
“Sure enough, the attorney general here created a task force on worker misclassification,” she added.
VanDerBill said that the term “worker misclassification” is often used to describe rules from government agencies that are very much anti-independent contractors.
“It was sold or described by the attorney general and others as … this task force is looking at how do we protect exploited workers,” she said. “The reality of the term worker misclassification is actually making it dang near impossible to be an independent contractor and run your own business.”
VanDerBill said she knew she had to try to make sure Minnesota’s task force wasn’t completely biased against independent contracting, so she applied to sit on it. To her surprise, she ended up securing a seat.
She said she was shocked she was the only voice on the task force representing business owners or independent contractors who opposed increased regulations on their work.
VanDerBill said that while she doesn’t want to throw labor unions under the bus, she believes they are partly to blame for the attacks on freelancing. Union membership has been falling over the last few decades, and unions requiring workers to be classified as full-time employees rather than freelancers could be one way to reverse that trend.
“No union member has said this to me, but you can piece things together,” VanDerBill said.
“Currently, as U.S. culture and law stands, they cannot unionize independent contractors, so they can’t even have us as members,” she continued.. “If we wanted to join a union, we couldn’t at this point.”
When she started on Minnesota’s worker misclassification task force, which disbanded at the end of 2024, VanDerBill said she tried to go into it with an open mind.
“I’m just volunteering to do this because I want to make sure we have a seat at the table,” she explained. But “it was very evident that we were kind of just going towards some predetermined outcome in a way. For most of the task force, I was the only one with my perspective, really. So I was often disagreeing with a lot of what they were saying,” VanDerBill explained.
She said she also used the opportunity to connect with a lot of local Minnesota organizations, lobbyists, and business leaders who were concerned about the attacks on independent contracting and were thus following the task force very closely.
“In their words, they called it anything from a ‘kangaroo court’ to ‘the task farce’ or ‘sham task force,’” VanDerBill said.
“I’m glad I did it,” VanDerBill said about her experience. “It was a stressful experience, but I’m glad I did it.”
As task forces can’t make any laws themselves, they make recommendations to agencies or the legislature for laws that they believe should be on the books. The task force’s recommendations ended up being far too similar to California’s AB5, VanDerBill said.
“The presumption of employment for every industry in Minnesota was a recommendation from the task force,” she said. “Another recommendation from them described something very similar to the ABC test without calling it the ABC test.”
Largely due to the split legislature in Minnesota, not much has been done about the recommendations from the worker misclassification task force, but she believes that could change with the upcoming midterm election.
“This recommendation document is hanging over our heads with this upcoming election. I’m very much afraid of that thing. We don’t know when it will pop up, but I don’t think they’d put it in the garbage just because it didn’t go through on the first try,” she said.
Correction: A previous version of this article misstated the year of VanDerBill’s business launch.
