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By the government!
Dave Meltzer said:The California State Legislature passed a law, aimed at cracking down on independent contractors in the state.
But this has affected the journalism field, in that independent contractors in the year 2020 are classified as those who produce less than 35 written submissions over the course of a year. That is a ridiculously low threshold and any written submission, even a blog post, would count against the 35 number.
This will have a major effect on the journalism field. Unfortunately, this looks to end my long association with the MMA Fighting web site. I am very clearly the definition of an independent contractor, I work on topics I like, on my own time, with the general idea of 100 to 150 stories per year.
Obviously with my pro wrestling work and how time consuming it is, there is no way I could work full-time anywhere else, nor would I want to. Vox Media, which owns MMA Fighting, made the decision that if you live in California, you have to be working full-time.
So my long association with MMA Fighting looks to be ending at the end of March.
And it is amazing that a law constructed to keep employers from taking advantage of employees will end up, in the journalism field, due to an ignorant threshold rule, costing so many reporters their positions as part-time reporters all over the state. It’s especially worse for those who financially were in a position to really need it in a field that is difficult to make money in, and even more, for smaller web sites who can’t afford full-time employees and now will have to rely on contributors working for free, which the law evidently doesn’t cover.
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