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Update on AB5

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Re: Update on AB5

#221

Post by shkkmo »

shkkmo wrote: post #208

The reporting around this law is absurd. Despite how it is covered, the law notably fails to do ANYTHING to help gig employees as it just codifies existing case law. What this law does do is carve out exceptions in that case law so that gig employees have LESS protection. This law could have been paired with other real protections for gig employees but that did not happen. No minimum wage guarantee extensions, no rig…

I guess it might be considered a protection in that it won out against bills like AB71 that would have reversed the Dynamex precedent.

Re: Update on AB5

#222

Post by henryfjordan »

biggestdecision wrote: post #159
TaylorAlexander wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know at least in some situations it goes like this: A group of people have been living off the land for centuries. At some point a government comes in and takes the land from them to sell to a factory owner so the government can profit. With no land to farm, working at that factory becomes their best option. But the workers get abused. Women get raped. Their pay is stolen. Still they don’t have a better option. The…

There's truth to that story, but it doesn't paint the whole picture. Rural life is dull, you have a limited social circle and limited access to culture. And you have few opportunities. People today still crowd into overpriced cities with poor living conditions, because they dream of 'making it', and they can't bear the thought of toiling away at agriculture (or at a lesser job). In China, an entire generation has bee…

I don't get the comparison with China. They still have an incredibly significant agricultural workforce (like 30% of workers are in agriculture) compared to 2% in the US. The US already moved people off farms to factories before WWII and we're in a different stage of economic development.

We're not talking about subsistence farming vs driving for Uber here.

Re: Update on AB5

#223

Post by dehrmann »

avocado4 wrote: post #166
tyxodiwktis wrote: post #62

When the ACA passed, mandating that large employers offer health insurance to all full time employees, there was a massive push by large employers in retail and food service to cap people's hours and make sure very few qualified as full time. This was because health insurance costs employers about $10k per employee per year, and if you are paying someone $10/hr ($20k/yr at 40hrs a week), raising labor costs 50% is a…

Real solution is universal healthcare.

The problem is that health care is attached to employment. The solution might take the form of universal health care, it might be not-so-universal private health care, it might be some hybrid. But don't gloss over what the problem is because you'll lose common ground with people and end up arguing over the solution and not agreeing that there's a problem.

Re: Update on AB5

#224

Post by asdfgasd »

matz1 wrote: post #158
ixtli wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to be implying a false choice here. Specifically that we (the government is comprised of individuals) can not engage both in labor protections at the same time as we attempt to create a universal health care system.

I'm questioning the current convoluted way government have to do to protect worker. What is the purpose of the labor protection in the first place ? To help the worker right ? Then why not just directly help the worker. Instead of forcing company to provide health care to their worker, why not the government itself provide health care directly.

Right, but you're questioning a position that doesn't really exist. Pretty much everyone that is a strong advocate for labour protections would also like universal healthcare, it's just much more likely we can achieve labour protection in the short term than universal healthcare.

Re: Update on AB5

#225

Post by rectang »

spookthesunset wrote: post #199
compiler-guy wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is somewhat true for higher level jobs, but once you hit retail, and blue collar jobs generally, it stops being true. McDonalds doesn't care if I also work at Burger King. Target doesn't care if I also work at WalMart. A plumber is generally fine if their assistant also works for another one. All of this is subject to still doing the first job satisfactorially, of course.

You aren’t “clocked in” in to Target, McDonald’s and Walmart at the same time though. I imagine many of these drivers are marked “available” on lyft, Uber and probably some delivery stuff all at once. I’ve always wondered what would happen if legislation required them all to open Go their API’s so drivers could use some “app to rule them all” that talks to lyft, Uber and more and helps them choose the best assignment…

At the moment, rideshare drivers don't get paid for being available, so the analogy to being "clocked in" at a regular job falls down.

This is how the rideshare companies claim an absurdly high hourly rate for driving — you only get that rate while actually giving rides and it is generally infeasible to be giving rides all the time. The effective hourly rate is much lower.

Re: Update on AB5

#226

Post by brianpgordon »

spookthesunset wrote: post #215
brianpgordon wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many people have multiple jobs (even full-time jobs) and receive multiple W2s in the mail every year. I'm not an expert in employment law but I haven't seen evidence that the current multi-job system isn't workable here. You can have multiple part time jobs, and if one job goes over a certain threshold of hours then they have to provide you benefits. If you have multiple full-time jobs, all of them are required to of…

Uber and lyft and DoorDash etc aren’t paid as wall clock hours though. You can be “clocked in” to as many as you want at once. One drive you might be working for Uber and the very next might be some Postmates order. Maybe even both on the same trip. Focusing on wall clock hours doesn’t make sense for these kinds of jobs.

I have a few parallel objections:

1. It's not like it would be difficult to track all of the little chunks of time worked and add them all up. Everything is automated anyway, and nobody is filing time cards.

2. In the end, the wall clock is how workers experience time when they're out doing work for these companies. They get their bike out and go deliver food for a few hours, or get in their car and drive around the city picking up and dropping off passengers. It's not clear to me that the interstitial minutes between gigs should be considered free time for the workers that goes uncompensated. If they drop off a passenger and pick up a new one within five or ten minutes, they've been working continuously. They haven't had a chance to go home and take their socks off and relax. They're working. It seems like a step backwards for everyone's mental well-being to use technology to clock the exact minutes that they produce value for the company, and cut off their pay the instant they stop producing. It's like a widget assembly line monitored by cameras where workers get automatically clocked in only when they're physically touching the widgets, so that if they sit up to stretch, or walk over to the cabinet to grab a different tool, or even if the conveyor belt is sending the next widget over to be worked on, they stop getting paid. I wouldn't want to work like that.

3. The fact that someone can be doing work for multiple companies at the same time doesn't seem like such a big problem to me. If they're on a segment of a route in which they're simultaneously delivering a passenger and someone's lunch, they should get paid for both. And the same contiguous-time rules I mentioned in #2 above can apply - as long as they're continuously picking up lunches and passengers within a certain interval, they're working two jobs.

Re: Update on AB5

#227

Post by matz1 »

asdfgasd wrote: post #224
matz1 wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm questioning the current convoluted way government have to do to protect worker. What is the purpose of the labor protection in the first place ? To help the worker right ? Then why not just directly help the worker. Instead of forcing company to provide health care to their worker, why not the government itself provide health care directly.

Right, but you're questioning a position that doesn't really exist. Pretty much everyone that is a strong advocate for labour protections would also like universal healthcare, it's just much more likely we can achieve labour protection in the short term than universal healthcare.

I'm arguing that this kind of labour protections of changing employee classification rule is a weird thing to fight for.

Just because the fix is easier and more likely to achieve but if it doesn't address the core issue, its useless.

Re: Update on AB5

#228

Post by rando56473 »

aliston wrote: post #202
rando56473 wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just dropping in to say that “legislation from the bench” is a charged, shallow criticism that says nothing except about the critic’s own political philosophy. The fact is, courts have been legislating from the bench for as long as we have had courts, and before then — the U.S. inherited its judicial traditions from England, after all. California is a common law jurisdiction. The essence of common law is that courts…

Without going down the rabbit hole of Constitutional Law, I’ll just point out that there are folks on the Federal Supreme Court that disagree, in principle, that courts should be making laws. That aside, if you think it’s a shallow criticism in this case, why do you think it required legislative action to have any effect? In other words, if this wasn’t legislation from the bench, ab5 is a noop.

I’m well aware that there are Supreme Court justices who claim to believe that courts should not make law. And yet... they continue to make law every time they contribute to a majority opinion.

As to AB5, I’m not really educated on the particulars of Dynamex or the political process around AB5 to opine on why it’s been codified. There are many possible reasons, ranging from a desire to try to freeze the law in place, to, as you say a “noop.” This, too, is just a part of the system.

Re: Update on AB5

#229

Post by bubmiw »

jakelazaroff wrote: post #36
npmaile wrote: post #8

As someone who drives Uber on occasion when I'm a little bored and looking for something to do, I think it's great that I'm not an Uber employee. I can do 10 hours or I can do 0 hours based on nothing but my own whim. I don't have a problem with people organizing to get a better deal for themselves, but I like the way it works now. I've worked for companies that misclassify workers, and Uber isn't it as far as I unde…

The bill is intended to protect people for whom driving is one of their primary sources of income. Not to be callous, but most people aren't particularly worried about how this affects those who drive for Uber on occasion when they're "a little bored and looking for something to do".

90% are not full time .

Re: Update on AB5

#230

Post by Legogris »

I can read between the lines an assumption that Uber will do the bare minimum required by law while exercising all restrictions on drivers they are legally allowed to.

How can they be for self-organization of drivers (as states in the release) while battling in other state courts for prohibiting unions?

If they want to allow drivers to also drive for other platforms (again, from the text), just don’t enforce such clauses in employment contracts.

They’re talking about all the changes they supposedly want to see while the only thing stopping it from happening is Uber deciding not to.

As if being an employee must mean a rigid schedule and inflexible working hours.

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