Civil Eats - California Sets a Dangerous Precedent for Food Delivery Workers Nationwide
Senior reporter & researcher, Claire Kelloway, writes about how California’s Prop. 22 was really just a plot by food delivery companies to avoid paying employee benefits and protections.
On November 3, Californians approved an Uber-sponsored ballot measure to undermine workers’ rights and transform labor law.
Proposition 22 exempts app-based transportation and delivery companies from another law in the state that requires certain businesses to reclassify their workers as employees instead of independent contractors. Unlike employees, independent contractors do not receive a minimum wage, overtime, workers compensation, unemployment insurance, healthcare, discrimination protection, or protections to form a union.
Tech corporations—including Uber, Lyft, Instacart, DoorDash, and Postmates—spent a record-breaking $200 million to convince voters that Prop. 22 would help workers by providing new benefits and preserving the flexibility that draws people to gig work. But in reality, the law sets a dangerous precedent for employers to legally evade decades of hard-fought worker protections and misclassify more workers as independent contractors. An unprecedented provision in the proposition also will require a 7/8ths vote from California legislatures to change the law, making it nearly impossible to amend without another ballot initiative.
While car service drivers have been at center of the Prop. 22 discussion, many food delivery workers, including the people picking up your groceries or biking over your favorite noodles, will also be impacted. And the ramifications expand beyond California; tech corporations want to take their Prop. 22 victory nationwide with legislation to permanently classify gig workers as independent contractors, opening the door for a new, codified class of under-protected workers across the country.
“We’re disappointed in [this] outcome, especially because this campaign’s success is based on lies and fear-mongering,” said the Gig Workers Collective, a national group of Instacart and Shipt shoppers, in a post-election statement. “Gig work is real work, and gig workers deserve fair and transparent pay, along with proper labor protections.”
The gig economy benefits from an idyllic techno-utopian veneer. In the middle of the Great Recession, tech companies promised new, accessible opportunities for people to work whenever they wanted, for as long as they wanted. Undiscriminating platforms could particularly open doors for marginalized workers, experts posited. But over time, gig work has proven to be a new way to avoid labor laws and shortchange workers who are disproportionately immigrants and people of color.
Read the full article on Civil Eats here.