Massachusetts Independent Contractor Law

NWU Statement at Massachusetts State House Briefing

Former NWU-Boston co-chair Elaine Gottlieb spoke on behalf of freelance writers at the July 28 State House "Artists Under the Dome" legislative briefing. Here are her remarks:

The biggest issue facing writers today is making a living when paying venues have diminished with the advent of the Internet. While the Internet has created more opportunities to present your work, such as blogs and web sites, most pay little or nothing.

The Massachusetts Independent Contractor Law addresses misclassification of employees as contractors and is designed for workers in the construction industry, not freelance writers.

The requirements of this bill betray a lack of understanding of freelance writing. Freelance writers, like other consultants, work both at home offices and clients' offices. This flexibility is very important but this law requires that, order to be considered as an independent contractor, you can only work at an established home office. It also stipulates that no one at the client organization perform the same work as the contractor but most organizations that use freelancers have full-time writers but need outside assistance to handle the workload.

There's also the issue of losing rights to your intellectual property; when organizations are forced to classify freelancers as employees, they lose the rights to their work. Traditionally, writers have increased their earnings by selling the same piece of writing to multiple publications but with the Internet, this is no longer an option. However, maintaining rights to your work is still critical, except in situations when doing work for hire makes sense, such as when you write content that can only be used by a particular organization and you are well-compensated.

Fortunately, I haven't yet been affected by this law, but if I did lose clients because of it, it would be very hard for me to earn a living. At a time when full-time jobs are scarce and many writers have no option but to freelance, it's critical that this legislation be changed so that clients that hire freelancers don't “blacklist” Massachusetts writers and make it impossible for them to survive as contractors.