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Comment by chance_state | Hacker News Reader

Do we know what the net gain/loss of jobs will be?

Creating a handful of better jobs while firing "hundreds" might not be a good trade-off.

Is there ever a situation where its preferable to have shitty jobs (shitty meaning no healthcare and no minimum wage protections in this example) regardless of the number?

Uh, yeah. When I was younger I got to choose between working as a contractor with no health care or not working, and I happily chose working as a contractor. Once I found something better, I voted with my feet and went there, but I don't appreciate legislatures "looking out for me" by reducing my options.

In this case, there is no option. You either work contractor or don't work. This law is in place to establish this option of "better job". You wouldn't have an option without it.

No, that's the thing. It's not turning 300 contractor positions into 300 better jobs. It's turning 300 contractor positions into a very small number of better jobs (not all of which will actually go to those contractors), leaving a lot more people unemployed.

US unemployment is the lowest it’s been in 50 years and wages are starting to rise due to employers desperate for labor. This is the best time for labor policies that cause churn to be established.

I think it's the least damaging time for those policies to be established, but that doesn't mean it's a good thing to do.

...and those unemployed people will find better jobs with other companies, since all California companies are required to comply with the new law, and the collective amount of work performed by California companies (and thus the collective number of workers required to do this work) is not affected by the new law.

Why wouldn't the collective amount of work performed by California companies be affected? It seems very likely that consolidating a lot of contractors into a few employees would reduce the total number of working hours needed.

The collective amount of work performed by California companies is absolutely affected by the new law, because it's not a constant. The amount of work a company has to do is affected by the cost of performance. If costs go up, a lot of work is no longer affordable to complete, so that work doesn't happen.

Except that there are 49 other states that don’t have meddlesome legislation like this.

> California contractors can apply for a full-time or part-time position in California

> A writer named Rebecca Lawson, who covered the NBA's Dallas Mavericks from San Diego,

AB5 created good jobs in CA at the expense of worse jobs outside of CA. Seems like a win for the people of CA.

Sounds like a pretty big loss for Rebecca Lawson, person of CA.

All regulations (worker protection and otherwise) exist because the required changes are things that wouldn't have happened on their own due to good will or market forces. They're always an above and beyond thing which costs someone money, potentially reducing the number of jobs available, increasing the end-user cost, or triggering automation efforts.

So it's a balance. There are probably also people out there who would happily drive a fork truck with no training or handle chemicals with no PPE, and resent that the government places limits on those jobs. But the reason we do it is because sane and safe work is in the end a commons— without some floor in terms of what's acceptable, it would be (and has been historically) a straight up race to the bottom. Banning certain types of contract work is on the same scale as limiting the number of hours a person is supposed to work in a given day or week.

Is that floor of acceptability in exactly the right spot at present? Maybe, maybe not. But there are good reasons to have your elected body and regulatory agencies "looking out for you."

Sure, like when it’s a side gig. If you’re picking up a bit of extra dough writing a few articles a month on something you care about, and then the State of California suddenly says you can’t.

AB 5 allows part-time jobs.

Yes but due to employment law a lot of them are no longer economic; hence the firings at issue.

The bill [0] Says you can't write more than 35 articles per company excluding content that is provided on a recurring basis on a general topic, to be specific. So you could write 2-3 articles (of a non-recurring format) a month and still get paid. But of course if the company policy now becomes "We just don't want to keep track of the article count done by contractors, so we just won't ever hire any contractors", then you can't contract with that company. Is that on California's legislature?

> Together, over 200 people on California sites wrote thousands of blog posts in 2019 [1]

Even if "thousands" is 9,999 and "over 200" is 201, that's about 50 a year on average. Likely there are some contractors that are way above 35, and some are below. If that's the case, they could have continued hiring contractors for some things and hired full time / part time for others.

Will it cost more to hire 20% of these folks full time and pay benefits, etc., or would it cost less to create a policy that people can apply to be full time employees after their 35th article, or 30th article? Could they hire some people full time, some people part time, and simply contract with the rest?

Was this really their only option? Their best option? Only hiring full timers can also limit the kinds of things they can report on sine they always have to send a full time employee.

AFAICT here's the relevant section of the bill. [0]

> (x) Services provided by a freelance writer, editor, or newspaper cartoonist who does not provide content submissions to the putative employer more than 35 times per year. Items of content produced on a recurring basis related to a general topic shall be considered separate submissions for purposes of calculating the 35 times per year. For purposes of this clause, a “submission” is one or more items or forms of content by a freelance journalist that: (I) pertains to a specific event or topic; (II) is provided for in a contract that defines the scope of the work; (III) is accepted by the publication or company and published or posted for sale.

[0] https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm...

[1] https://www.sbnation.com/2019/12/16/21024100/thank-you-calif...

Sure there is; it's typically better than no job. I've also done side jobs with no benefits to pay for college, and would have had much more debt without doing so.

Yes, John Siracusa now known mostly as a co-host for Accidental Tech Podcast said that if he actually calculated all of the time he spent writing his 100+ page reviews of MacOS for Engadget from 10 to 10.10, he earned less than minimum wage. He did it more as a hobby.

I had a part time working hobby as a fitness instructor for over a decade that definitely wasn't worth the money once you took into account the prep work, travel, etc.

Edit Correction: Ars Technica not Engadget

John's reviews were at arstechnica:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/04/after-fifteen-years-...

Creating more restrictive employment regulations will result in job losses 100% of the time. Something that is very arrogantly dismissed by people who promote them. Also the idea that these jobs are better comes with its own set of problems. If you had one of the jobs that was outlawed by these regulations, you now possibly have no job at all. It’s self evident that anybody who had one of these jobs would prefer it to having no job at all. It also carries the not-at-all-self-evident assumption that anybody working one of these jobs would prefer to have a full time employment contract. I’m a contractor, I like being a contractor, if I lived in California I would have just had my livelihood taken away from me by the government, who would say they’re doing it for my own good.

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