The New Yorker:

The biggest change in the American labor market this decade came quietly from California on Tuesday, as the state legislature passed a bill requiring companies to treat workers as employees, not as independent contractors, in most regular jobs. The prospective law would reform the business models of Lyft, Uber, DoorDash, and other giants of the so-called gig economy—companies that routinely treat field employees as contractors. As legislation, it proposes to change what is often termed, with yellow floats of optimism attached, “the future of work.” For some years now, we have been told that working when you want, in pursuits you love, piecing together a salary outside the constraints of the time clock and the gray flannel suit, was a bright, creative life awaiting those who desired it. The new bill, which, if signed, would go into effect next year, concedes that this progressive vision has been a mirage.

It’s a major shift. In 2017, in a long piece for this magazine, I took a close look at the gig economy and its entanglement with Democratic politics. I discovered that companies such as Lyft and Airbnb not only shared a conceptual lineage in West Coast lefty culture—they were staffed inordinately with former Democratic operatives, who saw themselves as “democratizing” capital and offering employment freedom to the middle class. Yet something didn’t quite compute, because, by most measures, independent contractors within the gig economy struggled a lot. Yes, they could work whenever they wished, but most were unable to set their wages or assume the basic safeguards of employment. The enrichment they’d been promised rarely appeared, and, when it did, it tended to flow upward, to people who had the most opportunity from the start. What was presented as an opportunity for worker empowerment and self-determined pluralism was, in practice, more like carte blanche for exploitation—a new, less-regulated way of offloading risk and responsibility from companies and onto the workers in their yokes.

The new law, California Assembly Bill 5, is based on the notion that people who look like old-school employees are old-school employees and ought to be treated as such. (Employees, who receive W-2 tax forms, receive company benefits and a host of legal protections that independent contractors, who receive 1099-MISC forms, do not.) The progress of the bill through California’s legislature shows the blue establishment stepping away from the “democratizing” promises of techie disruption—ideas that have underlain much of this decade’s growth—and reëxamining the facts. 

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