California Voters Exempt Uber, Lyft, DoorDash from Having to Reclassify Drivers

Proposition 22 imposes the same 7/8th requirement across a _massive_ scope, not just the specific text amended by the proposition itself but also for any statute that prohibits ridesharing apps from "performing a particular rideshare service or delivery service" or "otherwise imposes unequal regulatory burdens upon app-based drivers". Additionally, any law that would unionize app-based drivers is similarly subject to this requirement.

The threshold is so high that the legislature is effectively barred, and rather than just having the limitation apply to the measure itself is a generalized shield against legislation.

For example: No sex offenders on ridesharing apps? 7/8ths vote required. Separate tax for road wear created by inefficient routing by ridesharing apps? 7/8ths vote. (Prop13 and Prop26 eat your heart out!) Additional liability insurance requirements for rideshare drivers? 7/8ths vote. Law requiring ridesharing apps to automatically forward user's reports of assaults by drivers to the police? 7/8ths vote.

Essentially Prop22 acts as a fairly generalized shield against new laws that would interfere with the core activity of particular set of businesses.

In addition to the 7/8th requirement all amendments or other statutes that trigger Prop22's oversight are also required to be "consistent with the purpose" of Prop22 ("...to protect the individual right of every app-based ride share and delivery drivers to have the flexibility to set their own hours for where, when, and how they work...").

And if there is a really good cause to impinge the right of 'app-based' rideshare drivers to drive whatever hours whereever, or however they want? It seems like the answer even with unanimous support of the legislature is: Tough luck, time for another ballot initiative but this time it'll have the ride-share companies spending a hundreds of millions against it instead of for it and it'll still be a sweet deal at twice the price.

Have these companies shown themselves to be such good citizens, going out of their way to protect the public interest, that they could be trusted with this near diplomatic immunity level of protection? Of course not.

However... the drafting of Prop22 does allow laws restricting app-based rideshare so long as these laws impose criminal penalties. I wonder what would happen if the legislature became as shameless at exploiting legal loopholes as Uber has been? "Overwork app-based drivers? CEO right to jail! Under-pay app-based drivers? Right to jail, right away. Driving too fast: jail. Slow: jail. You make an appointment with the rider and a driver doesn't show up, believe it or not, jail, right away." It would be quite interesting as a television drama ... but I wouldn't expect such absurdity to be a good use of our public resources. :)

If I had to bet the courts won't allow Prop22 to have quite that expansive an effect, it's simply too offensive.

The end result is that the state will inevitability end up in a pile of time wasting litigation with Uber arguing that the people of California really intended to make them as exempt from the law as they've been acting as though they were for all these years.

These people aren't slaves to the system. They willingly are seeking their own self interests on their own time. They can quit tomorrow if they wanted to. The simple fact that they need money is irrelevant. They aren't some serf subservient to these Gig businesses. The simple fact that they have a car and a tank of gas alone goes to show they can literally go anywhere and get a better/stable job instead.

Wage slavery is when people essentially become serfs. Nobody in the US is even close to a serf. Even if they go homeless, there are plenty of homeless people that still get by every day and have the capability to move elsewhere for work. They aren't forced to work at mcdonalds until "master says so."

Yes, both.

> focus on decreasing healthcare costs for the country as a whole

Most importantly, I believe that through the patent system 1) Pharmaceutical Corporations, together with 2), politicians - who are corrupted through lobbying and who thus make advantageous laws (for Corps) - are getting away with murder. Yash Tandon gives a great example of this below:

“During the 1980s and 1990s I worked in many countries in eastern and southern Africa, and then for four years at the South Centre—2005–09. I can say from my experience that the industrialised countries of the North have been trying systematically to block all efforts by the countries of the South to industrialise. Their mega-corporations have tried—and, alas, succeeded—in privatising knowledge, and using it to promote corporate profits over the lives of people."

[...]

“It is the seeds and pharmaceutical companies of the West that have pirated the knowledge of seeds and medicinal products from the South. But whereas in the South this knowledge was shared as a public asset, the Western companies, having learnt from the South, proceeded to claim it as their private property. They are guilty—morally guilty—for the avoidable deaths of millions of people in the South who cannot afford their ‘patented’ medicines against, for example, AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis and other killer diseases. It is a sordid story. But it is not all doom and gloom. Those who control the system (the global corporations and the international organisations that the West controls) do not get their own way entirely. Wars do not always end in the victory of the militarily or ‘intellectually’ powerful.”

- Yash Tandon, Trade Is War: The West's War Against the World