Uber Drivers Sue Company over Pressure to Support Prop 22
news.bloomberglaw.com
news.bloomberglaw.com
> No employer shall coerce or influence or attempt to coerce or influence his employees through or by means of threat of discharge or loss of employment to adopt or follow or refrain from adopting or following any particular course or line of political action or political activity.
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio...
Uber very publicly threatened to shut down in CA if they did not get their way with respect to AB5 and the suit alleges that they continue to threaten layoffs. If that isn't an attempt to coerce drivers to vote a certain way by threatening their jobs, I don't know what is.
A more cut-and-dry example might be clarifying: if there were a ballot initiative to outright ban strip clubs, and a strip club sent a memo to its staff, correctly noting their jobs would be gone if it passed, would that be a violation of this statute?
A few scattered, merely-the-facts statements that a business will shut down as a result of a new law is very different than a continuous campaign of political messages and surveys through the official work app. There's a lot more room to argue that Uber's communications amounted to an attempt to coerce or influence, though it will still probably be an uphill battle.
(I am not a lawyer)
They could either treat them as employees and provide benefits that law requires, or make drivers to be truly independent.
They are threatening to leave California, but that's similar to baby making a tantrum to get what they want. While I don't use their services, and don't care about them leaving, I really doubt they will leave California, because of AB5.
The failure of Prop 22 will cause a massive disruption of an existing marketplace. No matter what you think of the morality of the existing setup, the failure of Prop 22 will force some large structural changes to how it operates.
It seems likely that this will cause ride-sharing not to be economically feasible in rural areas where per-driver utilization is low.
Operating in SF and LA will likely remain profitable but many drivers will be forced, by AB5, to stop driving. This will increase wait times and increase prices and cause lower ridership.
It's very possible that Uber/Lyft will decide that the overhead of being an employer is not worth the reduced revenue, it's not like they're making a lot of money in the first place. It's also possible they'll decide they won't want to dilute their brands by offering a service which makes you wait 7 minutes for a ride.
It is, of course, also possible that they'll decide to send a message / throw a tantrum, but your comment implies this is the only explanation. It's definitely not the only possible explanation and I'm not even sure it will be the most likely explaination.
Here's the thing... they're not making _any_ money in the first place. Every single segment of Uber's business is loss-making. So AB5 will uh, force a loss-making, VC-capital-burning, parasitic business to be slightly more loss-making at the cost of providing a living wage to drivers?
The whole situation is frankly absurd.
Uber/Lyft have found a loophole that enables them to skirt by one of the "Riders Must Be At Least This Tall" measuring sticks, and the law basically says: No, you actually have to be this tall, sorry.
I don't see what the issue is.
If I want to hire teenagers on my street to mow the lawn or babysit the kids, should I be forced to pay them benefits as well?
The alternative is the way California is heading: instead of taking care of people's needs directly, it's regulation after regulation to lock everything up so that only entrenched corporations with the scale to afford all these benefits can afford to operate.
> The alternative is the way California is heading: instead of taking care of people's needs directly, it's regulation after regulation to lock everything up so that only entrenched corporations with the scale to afford all these benefits can afford to operate.
These companies spent almost 200 million for this proposition (highest in California history, and since it's California - highest in all of the states). They are not poor mom and pop shop.
The issue is that uber and lyft will likely shutdown in much of california.
I guess you can think that this isn't bad, if you want. But I can assure you that many of their drivers, and customers, do not agree with you.
> Making certain business practices financially unsound is the point.
Ok, fine. But most of their california drivers probably disagree with you that it would be good for them to be fired. Most of them probably do not want to be fired. Which will likely happen.
I'm not sure about that: https://www.cnet.com/news/uber-drivers-sue-they-say-company-... and who cares about the customers? Many of their customers wouldn't have problem if Uber was using a slave labor as long as price is low, and ultimately that's what it is about.
Well the customers do. Most people are customers are something.
And most people would say that the opinion of customers matter.
If your opinion is "I don't care about the opinion of people who buy things", I guess you can feel this way. But most of society and our legal system regarding businesses is targeted toward consumer welfare.
It’s like Walmart saying, “if we pay a living wage we’ll become unviable!” Well, maybe you should be. Maybe stuff shouldn’t be that cheap.
They're currently unprofitable in the same way that Amazon spent a decade being unprofitable; every cent was invested back into growing future revenue. It's a little different; if Uber flipped their switch and started taking a profit Lyft would swoop in and steal away market share. But the unit economics do work out, I'm claiming that once prop 22 fails there will be markets for which the unit economics will no longer work out at all.
Have you even read their latest releases? Ridehailing in US as a singular unit is insanely profitable. The take home is incredible.
https://thespinoff.co.nz/business/13-01-2020/uber-is-a-case-...
No it won’t. Uber and Lyft will operate identical to how it is today. They will outsource the HR and employment issues to staffing agencies.
Drivers will simply have to be “employed” by one of these agencies and then go about driving the same way they are now. These agencies will likely allow their “employees” to drive for whatever companies the agencies have agreements with during their shift and call everything over minimum wage “incentive pay”.
Uber, Lyft etc will contract these staffing agencies and pay them per ride instead of the drivers and the agencies will passthru that income minus their cut.
If the employer has to provide benefits, those costs have to be passed on to the riders, even if there are drivers who don't need those benefits, e.g. because they get them through a spouse or a second job. Then costs increase even more and there aren't as many riders, which means there aren't as many drivers and even more lose their jobs.
How is a staffing agency supposed to solve any of that?
There's nothing about having a staffing company involved that forces drivers not to pick when they work or how often or where. When you're a contractor, your contracting company cannot enforce those things, however, when you're an employee, you absolutely can have those things -- or not -- at the discretion of your employer subject to the terms of your employment relationship.
All having a staffing agency involved does is force a minimum wage, and an employer-employee relationship. They, the staffing company, take on fares from Uber and disperse them across their drivers. They pool the fares to provide a minimum wage and benefits, and then anything else above that gets distributed to the driver who created the specific revenue as "incentive pay" in exactly the way the parent suggested. Or as profit sharing proportional to work performed.
There's nothing crazy or unprecedented about this.
tl;dr: The company contracting you cannot tell you when and how to work, an employer can -- but does not have to.
Zero chance the bulk of the surplus gets distributed to the drivers. I know of a few New York medallion era brokers keeping an eye on the California market, and they aren’t doing it because they plan on passing along profits.
If you force them to a fixed hourly wage, you can't hire that person and still let them work those hours in those places, because you'd be paying them for 40 hours while they're still only working 10. So the now money-losing employee either gets a pink slip or has to work different hours.
Next, you provide incentive payments for drivers proportional to the extra amount they brought in above and beyond the minimum wage for the hours they drove, as a slice of the pool of revenues after subtracting out minimum wages and benefits. Then you stack rank your drivers at the end of each half, and fire the bottom 20%.
I'm not even advocating this approach, I'm just saying there are ways of incentivizing this that are shown to work. This part here isn't rocket science.
A staffing company wants to reduce the amount of unprofitable hours driven. To do that they have to restrict working hours. It's not guaranteed but a highly likely outcome of the set up.
Are you sure? Have you ever worked in a job at the mall that was relegated to telling you to "I dunno, why don't you come in when you're feeling pleasant or comfortable?" Similarly, airlines that schedule flight attendants don't tell them to come in whenever they want. You can fire people who are your employees, yeah? And you can pay people who outperform more.
This is commonly repeated and there’s nothing inherent an employment forcing fixed hours or less flexibility. It’s false.
Or they will have to make allowances for areas that have very low supply and/or supply that is very dispersed. For example, charging for some/all of the the time/distance from the driver's origination point to the pickup point. That will necessarily make ride sharing more expensive in those places, but that's because providing rides in those places is more expensive.
Another option that might work in tandem is to allow drivers to log in as a sort of "if the offer is good enough I'll take it" sort of tier, and then you might get a lot more people in rural areas signed in in that state, and while any one potential driver might reject, a lot more eyes might see it that wouldn't bother to have been looking before, and that might make cheaper rides more likely as closer people are logged in as potential drivers. It's worth noting something like this might also have kept Uber/Lyft from having to classify the drivers as employees in the first place, since as I understand it choice of work is a big part of why they didn't qualify as contractors.
> It's also possible they'll decide they won't want to dilute their brands by offering a service which makes you wait 7 minutes for a ride.
7 minutes is actually on the lowest end I've seen where I live, and that's in a metro area of ~250k people. Usually it seems to be around 15-20 minutes. Maybe it's just particularly slow around here, but my guess is that you don't get under 10 minute pickup times on average anywhere except for major cities.
Yeah, definitely. I agree that to make it work they'll have to raise prices. My guess is that they'll have to raise prices by so much that riders decide to just drive themselves. If drivers must be paid minimum wage that might raise the cost of a ride by enough that in some locations there is no clearing price.
> Another option that might work in tandem is to allow drivers to log in as a sort of "if the offer is good enough I'll take it" sort of tier
AB5 is strict enough that this will not save Uber. You are an employee unless "The person performs work that is outside the usual course of the hiring entity’s business." Though, they did experiment with this model [1] and I wonder why they decided not to pursue it. If they had allowed drivers to set their own prices that might have been enough to prevent AB5 from being passed.
> 7 minutes is actually on the lowest end I've seen where I live, and that's in a metro area of ~250k people. Usually it seems to be around 15-20 minutes.
Yeah, absolutely :) Sorry, I should have been more specific! In major cities it's usually something like 2-3 minutes, I would not be surprised if it becomes 7 minutes once prop 22 fails. Wait times in places which are not major cities will increase by even more.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/21/21075062/uber-test-califo...
People complain that california living cost are so expensive, yet they vote for this kind of law.
Wait… I thought Uber was in FAVOR of disruption? Will we see a "Venture funded firms against disruption" PAC next?
"It's good if I like it. It's bad if I hate it." There is no substance to it.
> many drivers will be forced, by AB5, to stop driving.
If it's "ride sharing" then the drivers were going that way in any case, so a lack of paying passengers won't stop them.
If a lack of paying passengers will stop them then they're not "ride sharing"; they're a taxi service, and deserve the associated legal protections.
I agree with the argument I think you're implying: there's a minimum level of protection that everyone should be afforded. Though your assumption that your employer must be the source of those protections seems unwarranted. If people deserve healthcare then surely unemployed people also deserve healthcare. If people deserve a minimum standard of living, some kind of minimum wage, then surely even the unemployed deserve that minimum standard. And once even the unemployed have these protections, what does it matter whether you're an employee or a contractor?
Why not attack the problem from that direction?
This is the workers' rights version of a gadgetbahn. I am arguing for universal healthcare and for central government to cover things like medical leave and childcare. As and when that's actually implemented, I might support some relaxation of the standards for when people are considered as employees (though I suspect Uber probably wouldn't care whether these people were classified as contractors if it didn't mean they were on the hook for healthcare and benefits). In the meantime, the laws that we currently have are that employers are required to provide these things; Uber needs to step up and fulfil their legal obligations.
Making drivers that take contracts from Uber employees of Uber is so unreasonable, that even in London black cab drivers aren't treated the same way.
FYI that is not my opinion and I never claimed any such thing.
We had Uber for a short period and consumers loved it. The taxi medallion cartel got together and pressured the Danish government to push on Uber. The government complied with hefty fines. Uber left.
Now things are back to what they were: hundreds of taxis idling somewhere in Denmark to protect the cartel and no one taking taxis because it's literally 50 dollars for a 15 minute ride. It sucks. Everybody hates it except the taxi services. I really hope this isn't what happens in the States.
On the other hand, Japan has amazing taxis and they're everywhere all the time, AND extremely affordable. Japan also has very strict labor laws, and becoming a driver is not the easiest thing in the world.
By your logic that's not a threat, just a statement of fact that it would be a shame if the thing you care about were to be damaged/destroyed somehow.
If they were saying it would be a shame if something would happen to your precious belongings, and they were talking about regulations designed to stop electrical companies from starting fires, it would be completely kosher.
[0]Effectively banning Uber will literally kill people, for starters. To say nothing of the increased economic friction going back to the cab system.
It's a weak argument if you move from "people will die, to say nothing of the impact to the economy" — presumably, of using a different taxi app?
The strict adhesion to economics you're proposing would say a new marketing clearing price would be reached, not start making alarmist overstatements about what higher prices could imply
- If it can be achieved via such a simple change, then why wasn't it?
- Medallions and gig economy have vastly different incentive models, which tie very deeply with coverage and supply volume
- What of the countless anecdotes of taxi no-shows even after rideshare became prevalent?
- In most markets, it took a multinational giant burning through billions of dollars to get competitors to start playing catch up technology-wise
- etc
I'm not sure to what extent we can infer a correlation between the app-based aspect and DUIs there.
Though to be clear, I do think the app-based aspect plays a role. It's just that when I say "rideshare", I assume we are talking about the whole package as it exists in reality, as opposed to dissecting what aspects of Uber affect what types of statistics.
The state is morally responsible for folks who cannot work, however, they don't have to achieve this responsibility by creating below-market-rate or otherwise crap jobs. They can achieve this responsibility through, for instance, basic income, unemployment benefits or a social safety net.
The moral responsibility of a state is not to make people work at all costs. It's to look after its citizens and to your point make sure they don't die. Americans tend to conflate the two but they are distinct.
Combining the two creates a weird world where the state needs to stay out of the way of individuals getting any job at all no matter how bad or underpaid, and that's not really the mission statement.
If you're talking about "killing people" because of drunk driving, I would suggest that there are plenty of other ways for folks to get home, between public transit, a designated driver, or yes, a taxi. I enjoy drinking as much as the next guy, but not having Uber isn't going to cause me to die. At some point personal responsibility comes in to play when the goal is to optimize for the greater good. I do think having Uber or Lyft is strictly better.
Drunk drivers tend not to only kill themselves. I'd also like to point out that your argument for 'personal responsibility' has a lot of similarities with the 'abortions would stop if people just exercised abstinence' argument. The flaw is the same: people don't act responsibly[0] and others suffer for it[1].
>They can achieve this responsibility through, for instance, basic income, unemployment benefits or a social safety net.
Those would be reasonable approaches but instead CA seems more interested in hacking a massively useful service into unprofitably. It's akin to pushing mass transit by bulldozing highways instead of building subways.
[0] A lot can be written about why people don't, but its demonstrable that lowering the barrier to alternatives decreases irresponsible behavior.
[1] If you consider abortion and/or drunk driving to be social ills.
I will very much give you this one, and that's the first thought I had as I was writing up my post. Still not entirely sure how to reconcile that tbh, and I tried to encapsulate that in "I do think having Uber or Lyft is strictly better."
This seems a bit misinformed. The reason they stated for leaving CA is due to logistics, i.e. a company can't process hiring paperwork for hundreds of thousands of people out of thin air. A more apt comparison would be your state government saying you have 6 months to rebuild your wooden house with bricks or face exorbitant fines. In that position, it wouldn't be a tantrum for you to decide to leave said state.
Regardless, CA is a big market for rideshare, so even if they leave, Uber will surely come back to CA once they make whatever changes they need to their platform to conform with the local regulations. That's what they did in Austin.
That's a really good argument. Personally - and admittedly this is purely speculation - I think they would find some creative way to conform to the letter of the law without a drastic shift in business model. Someone elsewhere suggested, for example, something akin to an agency model, where they pay some amount to a sourcing company, and said company then retains a pool of workers that service requests from all rideshare and delivery apps. They could spin it into an opportunity to become said middle man themselves and profit from competitors and/or enter different gig economy verticals. Or they could settle for some middle ground with some loss of coverage but still more or less the same service. Or find some way to devour or partner with the taxi industry proper. Etc.
The thing w/ regulation and precedents is that it doesn't have to be Uber. If a precedent is set by any other company, your hypothetical scenario of risk to profitability profile would affect Uber regardless, so it doesn't seem in their best interest to just part ways with CA and call it a day.
On an opposing note, something else to consider is that the rest of the country (or the world, for that matter), may not agree with CA policymaking, especially as the CA political landscape drifts more and more towards the radical left side of the spectrum.
With that said, I have also read that Uber did do significant changes to its platform for the UK market (another place where there was an existential crisis for Uber). So platform changes are not entirely outside the realm of possibility.
"I don't really have a personal connection to this thing, pay much attention to it, wouldn't really care if it went away, but by God we need to set this rule I want to make it work exactly how I say it should. No, I haven't really studied it, I'm not going to rely on any data or "facts" or any of that nonsense, I'll only argue from first principles in a vague, hand wavy way. And I am not going to acknowledge any complexity the world, this is black and white and it will work exactly the simple way I say."
And then by the time it's clear what the result of this decision was, you've already forgotten about it because, like you said, you don't even really care that much if these companies stay or go, and by extension if these drivers can keep driving to earn money or not.
There's a great Mitchell and Webb sketch about the issues with leaving things be implicitly communicated rather than explicit. (NSFW) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VgX6JFoV0TM
And, if I left out a clip of Always Sunny In Philadelphia's take of the pitfalls of implication, I'd be remiss. (NSFW) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-yUafzOXHPE
Imagine a totally different scenario, where the government is about to cancel a defense acquisition program (like the F-22, which was cancelled). Could Lockheed-Martin bring this to the attention of the employees? If so, how?
To seriously answer the question: I don't know where or how you'd draw the line in the sand.
If Uber just presented an explanation of the issues and allowed drivers to decide for themselves without any way for the platform to track their decision, no problem.
I think the meat of the issue is that Uber doesn't get to decide Prop-22, it's a decision by California and if you want to sway CA talk to CA. If you legitimately think your business and all it gives to the economy and community would be destroyed by that proposition then tell that to all the residents of the state - targeted messaging to your employees is just all sorts of shady and, whether intended or not, it will leverage the power imbalance of the employer/employee relationship for some people.
It's pretty much the same reason you should look elsewhere for love - there is an existing relationship between an employer and employee - bringing other relationships into the scenario just makes things murky.
Large employers, with a lot of market power would still be able to communicate to their employees via public channels. Small employers with very little (employment) market power would be basically muted.
Is this what you're looking for?
In which case, I think we're back to this being more on the, if-not-reliatory, at least coercive side; the club owner is trying to coerce them to help him stay open as a strip club, but he could just as well be a different kind of club and stay open.
You'd very literally be imposing a gag order on certain parties with regards to political speech. Laws of that nature were very clearly struck down by SCOTUS in Citizens United.
They 'threatened' to shut down the same way a shopkeeper 'threatens' to shut down when the mafia boss wants 100% of the profits. It's not punitive shutting down, it's existential shutting down.
Uber as it exists right now (with the service level, coverage etc.) cannot exist if AB5 has its way.
(Could the downvoters please reply explaining what I said wrong? I think the numbers make it clear that Uber doesn't have the margins to do what AB5 expects it to do while not changing prices drastically)
It also looks like the sort of political speech the First Amendment was designed to protect.
Uber threatening to fire employees who don’t support a measure is a labour issue. Uber opining on what it might do if a law were passed, without specifically regulating its employees’ or contractors’ views, voting or activism on the matter, is policy discussion.
It's like saying that oil company management cannot state that they will close or layoff most of staff, if gasoline vehicles are banned by law.
Those companies are unprofitable by design and try to shift the losses to taxpayers.
The campaign for prop 22 has been an amazing pool of misinformation. Voting YES on prop22, means that you allow Uber and Lyft to get away with their greed. You will end up paying more through your taxes.
[0] https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/AB5-gig-law-enf...
Prop 22 makes sense exactly because those things shouldn’t be tied to employment. The state should tax businesses more and offer the benefits itself.
I'm not against moving to such a system, but it cannot be applied selectively to a couple few companies that would profit from it (in this case Uber, Lyft, Doordash etc).
Uber and Lyft are unprofitable by design. They are only profitable if you don't account for the huge driver's incentives and other users promotions that are always written off as a "one time thing". (I looked at Uber's financials).
If they want to become profitable, they need to increase price and most users would stop using it all together. They don't want to go this way as it would instantly make the stock tank.
I'm not sure it's reasonable believe that drivers would get kicked off the platform for answering "Ok". In fact, I think if you asked almost anyone, they would say that's a totally unreasonable belief.
Sounds like a lawyer is trawling for settlement fees, not that any driver actually wanted to do this.
You've clearly never been involved in any sort of union push if you think that employers are so above something like this. Even if they wouldn't do something like this, there are often behind the scenes conversations about how to create the perception that they would - because that is equally as effective.
In that context, repeatedly pinging drivers asking if they support the legislation (with yes in bold/highlighted) could definitely be a calculated move to create that environment.
Uber is a profit seeking entity that aims to ‘move fast and break things’ as the SV culture promotes, which includes now violating worker’s rights with Prop 22.
Aside from that, this isn’t an ‘a few bad apples’ issue, this behaviour originates from deep rooted systemic issues that have to do with (Platform) Monopoly Capitalism, which has the contradictory and exploitative capitalist system as a basis.
"Intellectual Property is the oil of the 21st century"
— Mark Getty
The Intellectual Property/Monopoly system is at the root of it the most recent wave of exploitation. ‘Intellectual Property’ monopolizes possible configurations, and robs people of the ability to learn about the basic building blocks of technologies and useful tools.
How can we pretend that one Silicon Valley entity and owner can make the best use of a given discovery? I would even argue that if we would have better access to various technologies we could stop climate change. In other words: if the ‘Intellectual Property’ system didn’t block most humans that are alive from asking questions, and using their curiosity to learn and grow, we’d be closer to a more beautiful world our hearts know is possible.
You're unable to use the app unless you click "OK". You're unable to drive. Being unable to drive is essentially being kicked off the platform.
I've heard anecdotal evidence of overwhelming support for it from drivers but I can't find any polling that's from an unbiased third party.
The real underlying problem is that we've been papering over our underemployment crisis with these low-skill, low wage jobs. You can't turn them into viable careers by legislative fiat.
Drivers earn about $9.21 which is less than minimum wage in most cities. SF has a minimum wage of $15.59: https://www.epi.org/publication/uber-and-the-labor-market-ub...
Pretty sure most drivers wouldn't be driving for $9.21 if a job at the local ice cream parlor could get them almost double on the spot. Yet you still see folks driving 30 hrs per week for years.
This isn't as easy as it sounds. Much of their income will go towards paying vehicle maintenance costs, and those are not obvious from the start. Your accounting can show you making decent wages for six months and then suddenly you need new tires and recalculating your wage will show you aren't making a ton of money. At which point many of them do quit and work somewhere else.
There needs to be greater orientation around skill acquisition that helps drivers, package handlers, etc. move up the skill stack.
You nailed it.
It's worse. We have been papering over the lack of any social security net and lack of affordable healthcare by forcing these things onto an employer-employee relationship.
If you try to rethink the system from the ground up, there is no logical reason health insurance needs to be tied to employment. Employment law should be about removing highly coercive situations, but other than that, adults should be allowed to provide a service in return of a payment without getting embroiled in byzantine regulatory requirements.
It gives large corporations a competitive advantage.
They were also willing to throw uber under the bus for other transgressions, but liked making a few extra quid and couldn't see themselves driving if it doesn't pass.
Take that for what its worth.
When it first came out, I thought it was a way for people to supplement their income, retirement, or that of their spouse or parents.
I think it sucks as a primary source of income and as a rider I tend to prefer part-time rideshare drivers to full-time ones.
Basic income can't come soon enough.
they must be really desperate.
Your conspiracy theory makes no sense.
SMS is still the most attention getting messaging medium. When these messages are in an SMS it looks more like it's coming from the driver's personal number. If it were instead sent through the app, people are far more likely to ignore it as a broadcast corporate marketing message.
> 2. message only this one user instead of everyone else who also has registered like me (and probably you too)?
I got the same sort of message purportedly from an Uber driver, but enough people had reported that number as a source of SPAM by than that my phone automatically marked the message as spam.
Therefore, it sure seems like the same numbers are being reused via an SMS proxy service of some kind - or drivers are being provided a list of numbers by Uber to send the same form message.
It's really no different in that way from all the political text messages that have flooded our phones of late.
It's not like 22 ever had 100% driver support.
Lets set aside the legal question for the moment: Is that good user interface design, or is it more of a dark pattern? Do you like when apps do this?
No it's not good user interface design, not only because it's annoying af, it doesn't achieve the goals it sets out to do.
As one example of how Prop 22 is extreme, it imposes an absurdly high 7/8 supermajority requirement to make legslative changes "consistent" with the proposition and a new initiative vote to make inconsistent changes. Entrenching self-interested corporate-written legislation to that extreme is awful.
And, honestly, what Uber has been doing with its platform recently has been really worrying me. I get a push notification almost every single day now asking me to vote Yes on Prop 22. I'm worried for what the future holds if this sort of thing is permitted because of Citizens United.
By default, laws enacted via ballot initiative in California can't be changed by the legislature at all without voter approval -- California has some of the strongest protections in the country for these (see https://ballotpedia.org/Legislative_alteration)
I agree that the 7/8th's thing is ridiculous, and it is most of the reason why I have decided to vote against 22, but it's not particularly notable, this is just how ballot props work and it is why your presumptive answer to most CA ballot props should be no.
a ballot measure cannot be overturned without another ballot measure
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_National_Bank_of_Boston_...
I don’t know if this link will work for others, but searching by name will turn it up:
http://corp.sec.state.ma.us/CorpWeb/CorpSearch/CorpSummary.a...
Florida pulled their stunt where they override the public referendum on restoring felons voting rights, because they wanted to and they could. You might not like Prop 22, but imho if the public wants an amendment then their will should be sacrosanct.
Expanding on this, it traces from classical observations on the relative strengths and weaknesses of monarchy (modern: autocracy), oligarchy (modern: junta) and democracy (modern: mob rule to anarchy). It is why we have our three branches of government, and puts U.S.-China (and previously, U.S.-Soviet) competition on long-term rails.
Who knows what to believe anymore. I don't live in California anymore so I have no vested interest in the politics there. Let this be a lesson to not believe everything you see on the internet.
The legislature can always work around this, however, with a simple majority, by passing a proposed constitutional amendment to be approved by referendum.
Proposition 22 is also bad because it’s anticompetitive, which is why Uber and Lyft support it. It would prevent smaller scale businesses from competing. The California government needs to stop attacking the foundations of capitalism.
It’s obvious why so many people and companies are leaving and want to leave California
In any case, AB2257 fixes the issues with AB5 that needed to be fixed.
For those unfamiliar with the AB2257 ABC test...
The provisions of AB 2257 sets forth the ABC Test in statute. The statutory ABC Test codified the language used by the state Supreme Court in its Dynamex decision. “A person providing labor or services for remuneration shall be considered an employee rather than an independent contractor unless the hiring entity demonstrates that all of the following conditions are satisfied:
A. The person is free from
the control and direction of
a hiring entity in connection
with the performance of the
work, under the contract for
the performance and in fact.
B. The person performs work
outside a hiring entity's
usual course of business.
C. The person is customarily
engaged in an independently
established trade, business,
or occupation of the same
nature as the performed work
A. The person is free from
control and direction of
the hiring entity for the
performance of the work
- Viola is given the location of the venue and a list of songs to play. She has some flexibility in the specific musical arrangements of those songs, and her performance. Ultimately she is trusted to show up on time and play, to her ability, the requested songs.
B. The person performs work
outside a hiring entity's
usual course of business.
- Viola provides musical performance services. JNP will claim they are not a musical performance company, but a wedding & event planning agency. Nevertheless, JNP offers wedding music and entertainment right on their website ("String quartets, variety bands, experienced and diverse Disc Jockeys and MC’s, specialty lighting and photography packages, and more... Joel Nelson Productions has the right plan at the right price to make your wedding dreams a reality."
C. The person is customarily
engaged in an independently
established trade of the same
nature as the performed work
- Viola has a full-time job as an accountant. She only does violin gigs on some weekends. She only gigs through JNP.
Who is an employee and who is a contractor? Seems like Viola would be classified as an employee, because doesn't fulfill requirement 'C'. IMO all three of these stipulations are not very concrete, open to many interpretations/arguments, and thus not a very good law.
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