The ad campaigns were overwhelmingly one-sided. The rideshare companies spent more on pushing this through than Marvel Studios spent to make Black Panther.
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Humans seem incapable of choosing to do what’s best for their own collective, self-interests. Bring on the A.I.s!
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Here’s the icing on the sh*t cake that is Prop 22. It takes a 7/8 vote of the legislature or another proposition to change it. That’s right, not > 50%, not even 2/3, but 7/8.
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Jesus, my state is so dumb sometimes.
That is all.
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As it happens, that’s the underlying business model of Uber.
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Could also just be common short-sightedness. Much easier to quantify the immediate impact of paying $15 instead of $12 for an Uber than the effects this exemption could have on one’s own income. I’m sure the analysis has been done somewhere, but it seems common sense to me that health insurance would pay back that $3 a ride difference pretty easily.
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When I learned this about prop 22, I didn’t care what the rest of it was about. I was “no fscking way”.
Is there any way this provision is unconstitutional?
Way to go California. So freelance musicians (as well as the broader arts world), who owned the term ‘gig’ from long before Uber, Lyft and Google were a glint in Lorena Gonzales’s eye, got fucked, and the companies who were the specific target of this get exempted. Brilliant.
Everything about how this was done is fucked. AB5 was crap, and prop 22 was crap.
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That’s pretty much what these money-losing companies did, carve out an exemption just for themselves.
I hope some enterprising young lawyer is able to figure out a way to use that “7/8ths majority to repeal” provision that’s in Prop 22 to make the entire thing invalid. This was what I had the most concern about, the end-run around democracy, effectively cementing this proposition in place.
Quote below from this Bloomberg article.
“It’s a super, super, super majority. It’s crazy,” said Mary-Beth Moylan, an associate dean at the University of the Pacific’s McGeorge Law School in Sacramento, California. “I’ve never seen this before.” Moylan said propositions typically require a two-thirds majority for the legislature to amend—a high bar, which can be difficult to reach, and makes Proposition 22’s higher threshold all the more striking.
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I’m genuinely baffled by the fact that propositions get to seemingly write their own rules for legislative remedy, rather than all being held to a single standard.
Actually, if you could change the law to establish a standard, would that be something you could retroactively apply to proposition-based lawmaking that’s already in effect? There has to be some way to write around that kind of blatant rules lawyering.
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I voted against that shit.
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the propositions are amendments to the constitution which makes things difficult. you’d have to have a new proposition or amendment to normalize the rules. ( which later amendments could still override. )
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Given that California Propositions modify the state constitution, no.
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My understanding is that CA ballot measures are impossible to change through legislature by default, so that clause actually makes it slightly easier (i.e. theoretically possible) for the legislature to amend. But yeah, getting 7/8ths of a legislative body to agree on something is the longest of long shots.
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As others mentioned this measure amends the state Constitution so that’s a no-go, so to be struck down it would have to be found in violation of the U.S. Constitution.
That’s exactly what happened after Californian voters passed Prop 8 to ban same-sex marriage in 2008, but I haven’t yet heard a legal argument for how that would work for Prop 22.
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WOOT! A huge win for indentured servitude, company stores, and corporate slavery! Now all uber and lyft have to do is to force their non-employees to buy their food, autos, gas, and housing from them.
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FDR: “No business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country.”
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Why wouldn’t all the companies in CA simply convert all their current ‘employees’ on their payroll into ‘contractors’? That seems like a no-brainier for any CFO or CEO to do now that its codified into the law.
Prop 22 was written to apply only to app-based drivers. It’s not like Uber and Lyft want to deny all workers of basic benefits, just the ones who work for them.
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Baby steps.
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