Last month, the California Supreme Court issued a ruling that would hinder businesses’ ability to designate workers as independent contractors rather than employees. Long overdue in an increasingly precarious labor landscape, the decision would theoretically challenge the business models of companies—Uber, Lyft, Amazon, Postmates, and GrubHub, among others—known for their reliance on contracted drivers and deliverers.

The ruling stipulates, among other things, that an independent contractor must be “free from the control and direction of the hirer.” Uber, for one, contends that its drivers already enjoyed that perk, and that furthermore this was of paramount importance to them. When asked by The Verge last week about the changes, CEO Dara Khosrowshahi insisted, “When I asked drivers what they like about Uber, then every single time their top answer is ‘I get to be my own boss. I get to use you when I want to. I can do whatever I want.’”

The previous week, Jianming Zhou, CEO of SherpaShare, which makes a management app for rideshare drivers, voiced staunch opposition to the ruling. In an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, he fretted that the changes “might make a lot of people unhappy,” adding, “If they become employees, the company will tell them when to work.”

The message Khosrowshahi and Zhou convey—that flexibility, above all else, is what employees crave—is endemic to Silicon Valley. As the tech industry faces mounting challenges from the courts and regulators, it is increasingly weaponizing the concept of flexibility to sell its utopian-libertarian vision of the future.

For years, gig-economy corporations have vaunted worker flexibility, even naming themselves after it. Yet, despite Khosrowshahi’s and Zhou’s assertions, rideshare workers continue to seek employee status and union protections to counter their dwindling wages and fiscal burdens as contractors. Moreover, as Benjamin Sachs has noted, worker flexibility doesn’t require independent contractor status; reclassifying contractors as employees would have no necessary bearing on workers’ schedules. (A look at any Fast Company- or Inc.-profiled firm touting “flexibility” for full-time white-collar workers, for instance, dispels this notion.)