2020 California Proposition 22

But when they support Democrats, they're mostly more moderate, business-friendly candidates.

I think of Marin as being a pretty very liberal county, but I went back and looked at Proposition 22, which was on the ballot in 2020.

That was the one that Lyft and Uber put on the ballot to kinda get an exemption so that their drivers could be, you know, exempt from...

They could be contractors instead of employees, and it w- you know, so a vote for it, it passed it statewide pretty easily.

Um, I mean, for folks who just say, "This is only California, always California," I mean, this is not California, because this, there has been a settlement in New York State, there has been a settlement in Massachusetts, um, settlement, you know, in California now.

But then we have something called Prop 22 in California, where after ignoring AB5 completely, for a whole year, actually, um, Uber and Lyft, you know, and DoorDash and all these companies spent 220 million to pass something called Prop 22.

And, uh, which is absolute disaster in my opinion, I mean, it's just, it's horrible.

Yeah.

So it's like what you're getting is not gonna even probably buy like a loaf of bread for you.

But, um, so yeah, I, I'm shocked that, you know, because drivers don't get installments on stuff, you know what I mean? Like, I don't know.

Uh, in fact, we get paid two weeks later with Prop 22.

That's true.

And one thing that had not happened when I wrote the piece, um, but happened the, the, the week or so afterward, is that California announced a settlement with Lyft for underpaying drivers from 2016 to 2020.

So this is before Proposition 22, which was a ballot initiative in California that stripped drivers and delivery workers of, of certain rights in California.

But before then, the state AG's office and several other players had sued Uber and Lyft for misclassifying workers and- I think it was just last week or so, they announced a settlement of, I think, two hundred seventy-two million dollars.

And so what strikes me about all of this is like, okay, so that's four hundred million dollars just in the last couple of weeks of these settlements, and that's with one company in one state for four years in the California Lyft case, and one company in one city for a similarly compact time period.

And yes, torn apart.

To those that still think like, well, it wasn't, you know, and to the people who always say, yeah, Prop 22 is horrible.

It is horrible, but that's not the real, that's not the root of AB5.

AB5 wiped out people, not just gig workers, everybody.

Do you see the leprechauns?

It was really hard to get the read on California because it was the first and it spread over so many years.

You know that the Prop 22 thing alone was fought until last year when it was finally solidified.

Screw you.

If you want to open a business in the transportation sector and you look at the difference between taxi and TNC today, The playing field is so unlevel.

And so you would scratch your head and say, why do I want to be in this box versus that box? And in California, you can be a one-stop shop with light touch regulation of the PUC where Uber and Lyft passed Prop 22.

And so you have the easiest independent contractor standard in the entire country.

And the list goes on and on and on.

That test presumes every worker is an employee unless the hiring company proves the worker is free from its control, performs work outside the company's usual business, and runs an independently established trade of the same kind.

Voters carved app-based rideshare and delivery drivers out of that test in November two thousand twenty through Proposition 22, and the California Supreme Court upheld the carve-out as constitutional in Castellanos v.

State of California two thousand twenty-four.

No comparable carve-out exists for a startup that classifies data labelers, content moderators, or task-based gig workers as contractors.

The Labor Commissioner's Office stated it would forego its own statutory share of the penalty recovery so that an additional $5.45 million reaches more than one thousand six hundred wage claimants, and mileage calculations for those claimants were doubled.

The settlement remains subject to judicial approval.

Lyft's drivers today continue to work as independent contractors under Proposition 22, so the settlement compensates past misclassification without changing the drivers' current status.

Why the Uber case is still open.

Assembly Bill 1340 helped bring the union to fruition by allowing the independent contractor drivers to engage in collective bargaining.

It's considered the most significant change to labor laws governing the ride-hailing industry since the California Supreme Court upheld most of the industry-backed Proposition 22 last year.

Labor and industry sat down together, worked through their differences, and found common ground that will empower hundreds of thousands of drivers while making ride share more affordable for millions of Californians, Governor Gavin Newsom previously wrote in a statement.

It's proof that California can do big things, tackle tough issues, and improve people's lives.