![]() ![]() The success of Prop 22 makes working life harder, more precarious, and less remunerative for drivers and delivery people. Customers had to click on a banner ad for Prop 22 before booking a ride, and drivers had to click through one to open the app. Uber and Lyft, true to form, automated the process through their apps. They send employees to mandatory meetings at which anti-labor consultants present “the facts” to workers. Union busters throughout the economy have been employing such tactics for years. Is that even legal?” I hesitated to tell her that a San Francisco Superior Court Judge found that it was. ![]() “Uber asked drivers to aver fealty to 22, and if/when you took a ride with a driver who did, then you got a text that said your driver wanted 22 to pass, and encouraged you to talk to them about it. “I voted Hell No on 22,” Pamela Waxman, a young mother from Oakland, told me via email. I voted no, brother, because fuck those guys,” he said. “They’re pretty much an exploited class,” he said, “It’s terrible how they’re abused.” Hindman added that on the teams of skilled software engineers he managed, contractors couldn’t even join the rest of the team for post-work beers lest a real employee spill any Apple secrets after a couple of drinks. He had also seen how poorly Apple treated its independent contractors. They have their own agenda they’re pushing, so if I don’t know enough about it, I default to no.” The entire referendum system is broken, he concludes. “Most of the ballot measures that we vote on in California are funded by these high-rolling campaigns. Instead, he applied some basic principles. “I really don’t know what’s in the law or its ramifications,” Hindman told me by phone, and “no amount of research in the two months before the election was going to solve that problem.” Monty Hindman, a retired Apple software engineer with a PhD in economic history and time on his hands, didn’t really try. With a dozen measures on the ballot this year, ranging from voting rights to the standards for dialysis clinics, even a highly engaged voter would struggle to cast an informed ballot. The companies dispute this figure, but data show a steady decline in driver wages over time: they fell 53 percent between 20. Berkeley Labor Center estimates that the guarantee works out to $5.64 per hour after accounting for loopholes in the law. For example, it includes an earnings guarantee of $15.60 an hour, amounting to 120 percent of the state’s minimum wage (which rises to $13 an hour in 2021). The companies also offered new benefits under Prop 22, although these are less than workers received under AB5. Alas, a vote against freedom is a vote against America. In our age of plague, many workers adhere to no schedule at all. Employees from grocery baggers to bus drivers control or negotiate their work hours all the time. In fact, nothing in AB5 requires employers to set work hours, as labor groups pointed out. “I just don’t understand if people want to be employees why they don’t just go get a job,” she told me via Facebook, adding, “I don’t think that those who want to be classified as employees understand exactly what it would entail, the freedoms that we would have to give up.” Christina Wilson, an Instacart employee contractor, took that message to heart. ![]() They would become wage slaves or lose their jobs altogether. Without Prop 22, drivers would be forced to punch a time clock, they said. The companies pitched their bespoke law on a platform of freedom and benevolence. They have even failed to turn over employment records for workers trying to collect unemployment during the pandemic. In the eleven months since AB5 became law, the companies have been openly flouting it. As in Massachusetts and New York, the California law was written expressly to combat labor exploitation by ride hailing and courier businesses. AB5, known as the “gig worker” law, applies a strict test to determine whether a worker qualifies as an independent contractor. (The delivery companies are privately held.)Ĭalifornia’s current rules governing independent contractor status went into effect in January. Uber and Lyft stocks both popped overnight, jumping 14 percent and 21 percent, respectively. On November 3, that investment paid off when Prop 22, the labor law they wrote themselves, passed by a wide margin. The gig companies paid about $24 per vote labor mustered only $4. “They don’t have to provide their workers with any protections under the wage and other employment laws.” “They effectively bought themselves an exemption from the law,” labor lawyer Shannon Liss-Riordan says. Over the course of several months, Uber, Lyft, Instacart, DoorDash, and Postmates invested more than $200 million in a scheme to strip their workers of labor protections guaranteed under California state law.
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