The California Supreme Court has declined to pick up a union-backed legal challenge to Proposition 22, the gig worker initiative approved by voters in California. While the case may proceed in lower courts, for now, the strong rebuke to the ill-conceived Assembly Bill 5 stands.
AB5, approved by the Legislature in 2019, codifies a California Supreme Court ruling strictly limiting the conditions under which Californians can work as independent contractors.
Even granting that the law was a well-intended effort to ensure workers are provided the benefits and protections of part- and full-time employment, the law, as conceived, written and implemented wreaked havoc across California.
Though the law was clearly aimed at companies like Uber and Lyft, writers, translators, musicians and many other categories of workers who choose to support themselves as independent contractors found themselves out of work.
Ostensibly, this was for their own good. But to make matters worse, legislators carved out several industries and lines of work from AB5, revealing a destructive and illogical arbitrariness at the core of AB5.
It is in this context that Prop. 22 emerged in the first place.
Prop. 22, approved by 58% of California voters, creates a carve-out for app-based transportation companies that offer independent contracting opportunities to workers willing to drive or deliver without benefits and constraints of employment.
This editorial board preferred the outright repeal of AB5 to this sort of carve-out, and we continue to support the repeal of AB5, but Prop. 22 was a rational rebuke to the irrational California Legislature.
Unsurprisingly, the Service Employees International Union filed a legal challenge last month before the California Supreme Court, arguing that Prop. 22 “grossly deceived the voters, who were not told they were voting to prevent the Legislature from granting the drivers collective bargaining rights.”
With the California Supreme Court declining to take up this challenge, it is still likely unions will continue to challenge Prop. 22 and defend AB5.
The unions will do what they do, but better way forward for the Legislature is for lawmakers to learn the lessons of Prop. 22’s success and the widespread backlash to AB5.
The wide net cast by the Legislature with AB5, and its subsequent efforts to exempt lines of work from the poorly written law, is not only convoluted but harmful to those who truly do prefer independent contracting arrangements.
Especially in this time when California and Californians need as many economic opportunities to present themselves as possible, laws like AB5 not only directly harm workers and job creators but they also contribute to a business environment which stifles the state economy.
