President Joe Biden suspended his bid for re-election as President and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris to take his place at the top of the Democrat ticket. Two days later, Harris launched her 2024 campaign apparatus, raised $81 million in funds, and secured the majority of pledged delegates needed to secure the Democrat nomination.
Harris’ campaign website has yet to lay out policy points, and independent professionals are anxious to know whether the Biden administration’s pro-union advocacy of and attacks through regulatory means like the United States Department of Labor final Independent Contractor rule will be furthered through a potential Harris administration.
If the past is prologue, then Kamala Harris’ past statements and positions in her roles as California’s attorney general, California’s senator, and vice president need to be closely examined. On July 22, campaign surrogate Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) told Fox News that one of Harris’ biggest accomplishments is stabilizing the middle class.
“Something that I think hasn’t gotten much coverage is her passion for entrepreneurship, for wealth creation, for securing and stabilizing the middle class. She’s traveled around the country to meet with small businesses, and to talk with them about what it takes to get back to work, to grow a small business, to sustain the wealth and opportunity for the family.”
As a former Californian, my experience and research shows that Harris’ past positions have excluded the now-64 million Americans who prefer to work independently and freely, even though at least 34 million of that number are women who are single mothers, caregivers, and senior citizens who often require this type of freedom and flexibility afforded by independent work in their lives. While Harris has supported and been supported by Silicon Valley, small business and entrepreneurship has been given short shrift, both in California and now in the nation.
This is a huge tell on what a future Harris administration might portend for people who wish to work as they choose and the small businesses that use independent professionals to thrive, innovate, and help people grow their own opportunities.
In 2019, during her first bid for the presidency, Senator Kamala Harris gave full-throated support to Assembly Bill 5 (AB5), which reclassified most California independent contractors as employees. The bill was approved and signed into law by California Governor Gavin Newsom, and immediately resulted in the loss of income and livelihoods for 4.5 million independent contractors, gig workers, entrepreneurs, and solopreneurs. Many of us (myself included), fled the state in order to continue our careers and escape the draconian restrictions and penalties of the law.
In weighing in about the law, the 2020 Harris campaign told Vice News:
“She supports AB5 and what the California Supreme Court held in Dynamex, and she believes we need to go even further to bolster worker protections and benefits and elevate the voice of workers. In our evolving economy, she believes it’s critical we ensure a robust social safety net for all workers and support their right to join a union.”
In a 2019 discussion at the National Forum on Wages and Working People (co-sponsored by the Service Employees International Union and the Center for American Progress), Harris admitted to being on board with getting rid of right-to-work laws, which give workers the choice of whether or not to join a labor union in the workplace, in order to eliminate barriers to union organizing. She would reportedly use the “bully pulpit and executive authority as president to promote “banning right-to-work laws.”
As vice president, Harris was appointed by President Biden to chair the White House Task Force on Worker Organizing and Empowerment with the “aim to facilitate worker organizing across the country, increase worker power in underserved communities and increase union membership.”
Additionally, in a January 2022 exclusive interview with The Nation, VP Kamala Harris deepened her pro-labor advocacy, declaring this age to be “a new era of the Labor movement—the modern labor movement.”
If VP Kamala Harris has been this much of an ally and a champion for organized labor, and if the endorsements she is lining up are further indication, then independent professionals need to be very afraid of a Kamala Harris presidency. With the opposition to the U.S. Department of Labor final Rule on Independent Contractors still being fought in the courts, and rumblings that the Senate will revive the PRO Act, it is fairly clear that a Harris administration would not be kind in its treatment of those who want the economic and freedom and mobility to pursue their work without government interference and overreach.