"When California’s Proposition 22 passed late last year, its immediate dangers were already widely understood. The measure, which effectively allows companies like Uber and Lyft to create a new employment category that is neither employee nor independent contractor, seems certain to make gig-economy work even more precarious than it already is — the state’s rideshare workers being stripped of basic rights and benefits like overtime pay, sick leave, and eligibility for unemployment insurance (not to mention the ability to form a union). Their wages, meanwhile, are also destined to drop: one estimate from the UC Berkeley Labor Center suggesting that hourly pay for gig drivers may sink as low as $5.64 an hour, a sum more or less equivalent in real terms to the minimum wage when Harry Truman was president.
The circumstances surrounding the initiative itself were also pretty Orwellian, the companies including a proviso in the measure’s fine print that will make it practically impossible to undo — its repeal requiring no less than seven-eighths of all votes in the state legislature. Between this, a misleading ad campaign, and a marketing offensive upward of $200 million, it’s no exaggeration to say that multibillion dollar corporations are now just buying laws and rewriting the labor code to suit their own bottom lines."