The California Senate passed a bill reining in gig economy abuses on Tuesday night, and by Wednesday afternoon, before Gov. Gavin Newsom had a chance to sign it, Uber had already come out to say that it was confident the new law wouldn’t apply to Uber drivers, and also Uber had already allocated tens of millions of dollars for a ballot initiative overturning it.
Uber chief legal officer Tony West insisted that the company would pass the test for counting its drivers as independent contractors rather than employees because “drivers’ work is outside the usual course of Uber’s business, which is serving as a technology platform for several different types of digital marketplaces.” As Jamison Foser tweeted in response to this insult to our collective intelligence, “Just last week as my wife and I were leaving a bar, I turned to her and asked ‘are you getting a technology platform for several different types of digital marketplaces or should I?’”
Uber’s position boils down to “we will pour all our resources into fighting this and we bet we can buy a win by some means or other.” But the company is on the record that its drivers are a key part of its business model. Like, really on the record about that. And AB5 won’t leave the court battles to drivers—San Francisco’s city attorney has said that his office may take action to enforce the law.
For its part, Lyft sent drivers a threatening letter saying that drivers “may soon be required to drive specific shifts, stick to specific areas, and drive for only a single platform (such as Lyft, Uber, Doordash, or others).” While Lyft and other app-based services might decide that their best move was to limit the number of drivers at one time and the number of hours they could work, that’s not required by the law, and Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez, the author of AB5, questioned the legality of the threat that people might be required to “drive for only a single platform.”
In short, AB5 is a big step forward—but companies that got rich and powerful by exploiting workers and sidestepping labor laws are going to use their money and power to continue exploiting workers and sidestepping labor laws for as long as they can get away with it.
This article was originally published at Daily Kos on September 12, 2019. Reprinted with permission.
