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The creator workforce is among the fastest-growing in the U.S. — and among the least protected.
As the creator economy actualizes, the way creators, brands, and platforms conduct their business is becoming more standardized. And yet, labor laws are lagging behind. A new bill aims to change that, focusing on seven distinct protections.
— Natalia Pérez-González, Assistant Editor
A decentralized workforce
How do you protect what you cannot define?
Creators, as a category of worker, do not enjoy the same bespoke labor protections as longstanding professions like nurses, police officers, or electricians.
Creator is a label elastic enough to include a comedian in Atlanta posting short-form videos, a former executive running a newsletter, and a journalist who lost their staff job and launched their own media company.
A category that nobody can define is a category nobody has to protect, and platforms benefit from the ambiguity. If lawmakers (and the public) can’t identify creators as a category of worker, protecting them is nearly impossible.
Roughly 1.5 million Americans work full-time as creators, people who’ve built livelihoods on platforms that both are and are not workplaces; each with its own algorithms, terms of service, and opaque appeals processes. When an account is suspended, or a monetization stream disappears, there isn’t a single decision-maker to point to, no clear explanation of what happened, and no reliable process to contest it.
If an algorithm change cuts a creator’s reach by 40%, is it a market adjustment or a labor issue?
The Creator Bill of Rights, a resolution introduced by Congressman Ro Khanna — whose district covers the heart of Silicon Valley — and co-developed with creators Shira Lazar and Lisandra Vasquez, seeks to redefine this relationship: creators are workers, and the systems that profit from their labor should be accountable for their well-being.
The bill presents a pathway to baseline protections for creators, including transparency in monetization, healthcare, and algorithmic accountability. Nearly 5,000 creators have already signed the petition since it launched in January, and they’re actively seeking House and Senate co-sponsors.
“Everyone's interested and obsessed with creators as mouthpieces and megaphones, but no one is actually thinking of us as a workforce. They need to see us as small businesses.”
The seven-point framework
As it stands, this resolution doesn’t mandate compliance or impose regulator penalties. Platforms are under no legal obligation to comply with its provisions, and the current political environment isn’t in a rush to impose new regulatory requirements on tech companies.
The bill's co-founders have no illusions about the timeline. "I don't foresee anything happening with this until after midterms," Lisandra told me. She recognizes that the bill is just the beginning, a stake in the ground, evidence that someone in Washington is, at least, listening.
The bill proposes seven baseline protections for creators:
Monetization transparency. Platforms decide what creators earn and reserve the right to change the formula without notice. A creator can build an entire business around a revenue-sharing arrangement that disappears in a policy update. The bill calls for clear, fair terms — so creators know what they're earning, how it's calculated, and what would change it.
Customer service and appeals. The bill calls for real response times and actual appeals processes — so that when an account gets suspended or a payout gets flagged, there's somewhere to turn that isn't a help center article written in 2019.
Healthcare. The most basic need, and the hardest to access. Creators working as independent contractors have no access to employer-sponsored benefits. Some go uninsured. The bill calls for affordable healthcare access, but it doesn't yet specify how.
AI and intellectual property. If a platform uses your content to train an AI model — they are, have been, and will continue doing so — the bill says you should get a cut. The CLEAR Act in the Senate runs parallel to this effort. This is the provision that will face the most resistance from the platforms, and probably the most legal complexity.
Algorithmic transparency and data privacy. The algorithm is the invisible boss. It decides what gets seen, what gets buried, what gets rewarded, and what gets suppressed — and it does all of this without explanation. The bill calls for transparency around how those decisions are made and for protections for the personal data that platforms collect in the process.
Audience portability. A creator's relationship with their audience currently lives on the platform's servers, under the platform's terms, deletable at any time. Shira points to decentralized platforms like Bluesky as early infrastructure for what real ownership could look like. The bill calls for creators to own their direct audience relationships — so that a deactivation doesn't also mean losing everything you built.
Small business support and legal protections. Creators are running businesses — paying quarterly taxes, negotiating contracts, managing intellectual property — largely without resources or protections built for people in their situation. The bill calls for support structures that acknowledge what the work actually is.
Historically, only about 3–7% of bills introduced in Congress ever become law, and the majority of those that do are ceremonial. Most legislative proposals, even those with serious policy intentions, stall long before they reach a floor vote.
“This is just a jumping-off point to begin the conversation at a higher level,” Shira said. “I hope, ten years from now, we have some solid solutions, and celebrate that we were part of building that.”
@reprokhanna I'm introducing a historic creator bill of rights alongside @Shira Lazar and @Lisandra Vazquez #breakingnews #tiktok
These provisions each map to real, documented pain points. But each item represents a separate negotiation with a separate set of platform interests, legal frameworks, and political constituencies.
A large-audience art creator fighting for AI compensation faces a different battle than a micro-audience lifestyle creator whose account has been deactivated. This is, in part, why a single-union model won’t work for creators:
"A lot of these union associations have been representative of talent doing only one thing, whereas a lot of us do many things, and then we also have small businesses. The approach [for each group] needs to be different."
A global labor movement
The traditional media industry, with its hard-won protections, is contracting at a historic pace. Nobody is safe. Health insurance, legal support, editorial oversight, a predictable paycheck — these have, to the detriment of workers, become luxuries.
In 2025, legacy media companies cut more than 17,000 media jobs, up 18% from the prior year. From 2022 to 2024, employment in LA's motion picture and sound recording industries fell 27%.
During the same stretch, employment in the creator economy grew by 5%, with full-time-equivalent creator jobs growing from 200,000 in 2020 to 1.5 million in 2024. Many creators have become media workers (55% of U.S. adults now get their news from social media), but they didn’t inherit any of the traditional protections.
What they did inherit is the same structural problem that gig workers have been fighting for years: a business model that depends on their labor and accepts no responsibility for it.
On June 13, 2025, the International Labour Organization voted to develop binding global standards for platform workers — specifically, app-based drivers and digital freelancers — for the first time. A majority of member states backed the decision, but employer delegates voted against it, including government delegates from Switzerland, India, and the United States.
This is why Lisandra, a CalArts-trained photographer and comedian, feels passionately about combining the movements. She’s spent most of her career as a 1099 worker — freelancing, gigging, building her own work because the traditional employment pipeline never had a place for her.
@lisandravcomedy I love that I have to do this quarterly now 🥰🥰
The "creator" framing, she argues, obscures the bill's actual scope.
The people it would (and should) cover include digital creators, Uber and Lyft drivers, DoorDash couriers, and Etsy sellers.
"I wanted the Creator Bill of Rights to be called the Digital Workforce Bill of Rights. I still do.”
The fight is shared by everybody relying on digital platforms to make a living, who currently have no structural protection when the platforms they rely on — who take a cut of workers’ on-platform earnings — change the rules.
"[Law makers] think we're all Logan Paul. They think we're all getting PR boxes, but there's a middle class. There are digital workers making a couple hundred extra dollars to feed their families. There are small businesses using Instagram because they can't afford foot traffic. They need to be a part of the conversation.”
