Trump vs Biden 2020, Day 64 of the Pennsylvania count (pt 5) Read OP

DubInMeath wrote: »

In Ireland, no.
Good to see people on here dropping their "the market takes care of demand" beliefs now that Biden is elected however.

BTW trump decided to weigh in and support those companies fight to keep drivers as contractors, and not full employees so they could not receive benefits like holiday and sick pay that employees do.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/08/21/technology-202-trump-campaign-sides-with-uber-lyft-battle-over-future-gig-workers/

He's not the only one. There's a reason why the proposition to exempt app drivers passed by such a margin. I was still in CA when this kicked off a couple years ago. The law may have been well-intentioned, but really wasn't well thought through, to the point that they had to pass a "Whoops, we didn't think of that" law. If I may copy/paste my post on the matter from the politics thread:

Any uber driver I spoke with hated it, but I seemed to only find uber drivers who were working as side gigs, not full-time uber drivers who I would presume would have been in favour of the law. I believe the former greatly outnumber the latter. It wasn't the uber drivers that the money was targeting, it was voters who just saw "worker protections" in the title of the law they were trying to overturn. The State AG got to choose the title of the proposition, he picked "Exempts App-Based Transportation and Delivery Companies from Providing Employee Benefits to Certain Drivers"

The story of AB5 actually had nothing to do with the gig economy at all to begin with. I seem to recall it started out with a trucker's union around Port of Oakland who were pissed off with independent owner-operators coming in and taking loads, and it was something of a follow-on from a California Supreme Court Case involving a delivery service named "Dynamex" in 2018 which required classifying previously independent contractors as employees if they met certain criteria. In any case, AB-5 of 2019 expanded on that, requiring job benefits (healthcare, sick days etc) for those now-employees. Which also meant, though, that as employees, the companies would have much greater control over them, such as mandating working hours. One of the big appeals for working for Uber is you can clock in and clock out whenever you feel like it, so it's a great little pocket-money earner for folks who drive into town an hour or two before their regular work, for example, or just want to pull a couple of hours in the evening when everyone's going out for dinner. However, if Uber (and Lyft, Doordash etc) is going to have to pay to give you all the 'employee benefits', they're going to want their pound of flesh for it, and make you work more, and on the hours they determine. Obviously a lot of current Uber drivers would rather say 'sod that', and leave. Uber decided it was better to have lots of independents than try to manage full-timers, so they opposed it (As well, obviously for the financial reasons of not having to pay the benefits).

The first legal challenge came from the California Association of Truckers, on behalf of the independent owner-operators. It's been working its way through the system, in the meantime some truckers have lost work even with an injunction from the district courts protecting them as some large trucking companies (with employees) have already restructured operations to avoid hiring these independents. Argued at the Ninth Circuit two months ago, no opinion rendered yet to my knowledge.

Then it was realised that all sorts of people were being affected by the law, not just truckers and uber drivers. The legislature then passed AB2257 specifically exempted a series of contractors, to include photographers, content contributors, photo editors, musicians, barbers, translators, performing arts instructors (as long as they don't teach more than once a week), realtors, home inspectors, and a few others. A bunch of other gig economy workers were not exempted, including uber/lyft.

Enter Prop 22 on the ballot this month, an 8-page-long document of incomprehensible legalese. The way it's worded, it refers solely to app-based driving and delivery, which kindof sucks for a bunch of others, to include, most likely, the truckers. On the other hand, most everyone in California is familiar with and uses Uber and Lyft and can relate to it far better than someone who writes computer apps on the side. The list of opponents to the proposition includes Biden, Harris, Sanders, Warren, California Democrat Party, and a bunch of labour unions. They still lost as 58% voted to exempt the ride-share and doordash-type folks.

The saga continues for the truck drivers, performing arts instructors who do more than one master class a week, programmers, etc....