DearJohn

When the booking agent that freelance stylist Angela Ivana contracted with for work on ad campaigns and TV productions told her that he wouldn't put her headshot on the website because he “didn’t want his clients seeing that I was black” she didn’t have an HR department to turn to.

The NYC Human Rights Law is a powerful tool to fight discrimination and harassment, yet hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers, like Angela, haven’t been able to rely on these protections because they are not classified as employees. Today, I am proud to share that the City Council passed my bill [[link removed]] to extend the robust protections of the NYC Human Rights Law to cover freelancers and independent contractors.

As Angela told the Council’s Civil and Human Rights Committee: “This discrimination meant I was being excluded from larger paying jobs and campaigns. As contractors, we didn’t know who to report his behavior to. Since we were all freelancers and depended on the income of a person who facilitated our work, people were hesitant to speak up.”

Now, because of the passage of Intro. 136 freelancers, independent contractors, and interns have will have recourse to address harassment and discrimination based on their gender, race, religion, sexual orientation, immigration status, or other protected identity under the Human Rights Law.

[[link removed]]

Corporations have shifted to rely more and more on independent contractors and freelancers, creating business models based on evading the obligations to provide the benefits, pay, and legal rights that employees are due. The Freelancers Union found in a study released this week that one in three of NYC workers freelances [[link removed]] , and freelancers make up 61% of the media and entertainment industry.

These workers have been cut out of fundamental protections like the right to be free from harassment and discrimination in their work (as well as minumum wage, health insurance, unemployment insurance, and other basic labor rights). But together with workers, and in partnership with Freelancers Union, we are clawing back the rights and expanding protections that all workers deserve.

Closing the loophole that left independent contractors without sufficient recourse for discrimination or harassment is a huge step for NYC’s 1.3 million independent workers. Many thanks to the Freelancers Union, and the lawyers at the National Employment Lawyers Association, National Employment Law Project, and Anti Discrimination Center who helped identify this gap and partnered with us to fix it.

This legislation builds on our ambitious work to win protections for gig-economy workers. New York City’s new laws -- including our 2018 living wage for for-hire drivers [[link removed]] and the 2017 Freelance Isn’t Free Act [[link removed]] to protect freelancers from being stiffed out of payments they’ve earned -- have already secured hundreds of millions of dollars for hard-working New Yorkers.

Just this week, California advanced a bill classifying many gig workers as regular employees [[link removed]] , granting them basic labor protections like minimum wage, overtime and unemployment insurance. Uber is already working hard to undermine it, using some of the same slimy arguments they’ve used here in NYC to argue their way out of obligations to their workers. Our driver pay minimum wage in NYC and the protections for independent contractors that we won today are important steps forward, but there is more work to do to ensure that gig economy workers get the same rights and protections as employees.

Can you help spread the news so freelancers know about these new protections? [[link removed][0]=68.ARCNdrEJiCKo3Q42PrdnnG4W4LSVqzzxS1iwYKpG8BQFOIKLNkuUnMIAeXnA496oEbywAyfURpljMz1cq5fQeFURL2F3Fx0_8Hx6cVnUqSuZpSHBZvnsZbtfqRCB8k96zCSNnGYex9Syx4jGoidwu_7kupEf8H1yZ0fpunBECjwggjfg30to3mbEQNRX0HXu_IMI5I8dnxwAphgarw&__tn__=-R]

Brad

P.S. If you support this work, will you give $5 today so that I can continue to fight to win rights for gig economy workers citywide? [[link removed]]



Lander for NYC
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New York, NY 10003
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