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Comment by slg | Hacker News Reader

There is a clause in Prop 22 that would make it nearly impossible for it to be amended or repealed except by another proposition.[1]

>Amending Proposition 22 would require a seven-eights (87.5%) vote in each chamber of the California State Legislature and the governor's signature, provided that the amendment is consistent with, and furthers the purpose of, Proposition 22. Changes that are not considered consistent with, and furthering the purpose of, Proposition 22 would need voter approval.

These ride sharing companies are spending hundreds of millions of dollars and engaging in shady tactics targeted at both their drivers and customers so they can give their employees fewer benefits all while completely circumventing the state legislature. This is a absolute perversion of democracy.

[1] - https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_22,_App-Based...

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Prefacing this with the disclaimer that I work for Uber.

This talking point completely ignores the fact that California Props are, BY DEFAULT, not amendable by the legislature unless otherwise specified. If anything this 7/8ths clause gives the legislature more flexibility than the vast majority of propositions which the legislature cannot touch without putting another prop up for vote.

Which is how we get into the pattern of having the same issues on the ballot every election and constantly amending them with direct voting. Many propositions wishing to avoid this issue require some small super majority in the legislature. That is the standard practice for giving "the legislature more flexibility". Requiring 87.5% is new and it is so high to be completely impractical avenue for change. Claiming it is about flexibility is the type of dishonesty we need to remove from politics.

https://californiaglobe.com/section-2/save-local-journalism-...

https://www.courthousenews.com/governor-newsom-signs-newspap...

The CA legislature just passed AB323, which exempts journalists from AB5, with a 71-4 margin (94.7%) in the Assembly and unanimously in the Senate. So 87.5% is certainly doable!

Funnily enough, the website advocating for journalists to be exempt says the following. Sound familiar?

==========

* If forced to comply with AB 5, many community newspapers, including local, ethnic, urban, suburban and metro papers, will be unable to sustain operations. They will close their doors, leaving many communities with no local news source.

* For those that continue to exist, news operations will be forced to make deep cuts to both print and digital community coverage and offerings in order to survive.

[IF NEWSPAPERS ARE NOT EXEMPTED FROM AB 5, READERS WILL LOSE.]

* Limited home delivery.

* Fewer local news reporters and less hometown coverage.

* Loss of sports, comics, games and investigative reporting.

* Days of week eliminated from print.

More at: https://savemypaper.com

>The CA legislature just passed AB323, which exempts journalists from AB5, with a 71-4 margin (94.7%) in the Assembly

The link you provided says 67-4. The Assembly has 80 seats so 67/80 is 83.75% and therefore wouldn't be enough to amend Prop 22.

One big difference between that change to AB5 and this one is that almost zero journalists actually wanted AB5 to apply to them. Journalism is profession that is much closer to true freelance work than rideshare workers who flip back and forth between a couple employers.

I do see the first link says 67-4, but the second link uses 71-4, which is the correct vote count. You can see on the ca.gov website:

http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billVotesClient.xhtm...

If you agree that the workers should decide, the majority of drivers also don't want AB5 to apply to them.

https://therideshareguy.com/california-proposition-22-2020/

In this blog's survey ~70% of drivers want to be independent contractors, and ~60% are a Yes on 22. In case you think it's biased, the writers ultimate argued for the No vote.

>I do see the first link says 67-4, but the second link uses 71-4, which is the correct vote count. You can see on the ca.gov website:

Fair enough.

>In this blog's survey ~70% of drivers want to be independent contractors, and ~60% are a Yes on 22. In case you think it's biased, the writers ultimate argued for the No vote.

My point was not necessarily that the workers should always decide. It was that there is a huge difference between roughly 0% who support it for journalists and a roughly 30%-40% who support it for rideshare workers.

Also that 60% who support Prop 22 is wildly influenced by the money spent by these companies and the underhanded practices that were the topic of this post. If these workers were given an unbiased account of Prop 22 and the ramifications, I think the numbers would be different. If this was truly a popular proposal, why would this become the most expensive campaign in history with roughly 95% of the money coming in support of Prop 22?

According to the Rideshare Guy, the proportion of drivers in favor of being an IC was higher pre-pandemic and higher outside of CA. You could make the opposite argument -- that political voices have influenced people in the other direction. I'm not sure which would be correct. I've personally seen a lot of misinformation in the other direction. The top post in this thread (which I replied to) is a distillation of general sentiment and misinformation from AB5/No22 voices.

Also, the "against" was not 40% even when "for" was 60%. It was 60% for, 24% against, and 16% undecided. I'm not sure where you got the number that 0% of journalists wanted to be employees but I doubt it's actually 0%.

Anyways, happy to get into a deeper discussion offline -- I think there's a lot of interesting philosophical arguments for both sides but with politics the way it is the Yes/No voices are currently talking past each other. Feel free to reach out to me directly!

Direct democracy wouldn't work if the legislature could just overturn anything the people had voted for with a majority. It would be an endless back and forth between representatives voting for something, the people voting against it, and the represantives voting for it again. So unless you see direct democracy as "an absolute perversion of democracy" I don't know what your problem is.

There is a difference between making it harder to amend the result of direct democracy and making it nearly impossible. Many propositions are difficult to amend and require something as high as 67% of the legislature to change. That is at least achievable with broad support. However requiring 87.5% is in no way normal and some are calling it unprecedented[1]. It is high enough to make any changes practically impossible without another proposition.

The reason this is a perversion of democracy is because it is fundamentally a handful of companies banding together to buy their own law. They are only able to do it because of the huge amount of money they have. This is literally the most expensive ballot measure ever. They are straight lying to the public about who support it and hoping they can convince enough people to vote yes. It is a perfect combination of abusing the US's lax laws on corporate political speech and California's lax laws on propositions.

[1] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-07-07/uber-lyft...

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