This is an extremely heavy handed law which would be destructive to large parts of the economy by making many people’s livelihoods illegal. The drafters of the law knew this, which is why 90% of the text of the law is carve-outs for various professions. But forcing people to live their lives through loopholes never works well. For example, they have this carve out for high skilled professions: > (3) An individual who…
They're not carving out high-skill professions. You'll notice that doctors aren't on that list. They're carving out professions that are already under special regulatory regimes that affect how they're able to sell their work. In part because people/businesses are required by law to contract with people who hold these licenses. Like you cannot build a building without a licensed architect and civil engineer. There wo…
> Lorena González, the San Diego Assembly member who authored AB 5, says she’s working to make sure that is not the case. The point, she says, is to protect workers from exploitation and to classify them as real employees with the power to unionize, not to stifle their independence. “We don’t want to deny somebody the opportunity to, say, submit a story to The New York Times,” she says. “So we are looking at freelancers and working with some of the associations and unions to come up with a definition for what a ‘real’ freelancer is.”
https://www.lamag.com/citythinkblog/ab-5-freelancers-bill/
She acknowledges the fact that this will cause a lot of problems for a lot of people who have nothing to do with the gig economy, and that they are working on a lot of carve-outs because of this. But I guess the software dev's union didn't make it in time to do the proper lobbying, so we're out of luck.
Some laws lay out elegant general principles that can be applied in many scenarios, and some laws fail at this and require people to contort themselves into the limited categories thought of by the politicians and their lobbyists at the time they wrote the law.