Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, Postmates, Instacart and gig economy pioneer TaskRabbit are among the high-profile Bay Area gig economy companies that face potential investor backlash under Assembly Bill 5.

It could shut them all down.

California has just voted to end the gig economy as we know it. They will regulate it to favor their labor unions.

ABSURD REGULATIONS

AB5 will codify the test for determining whether a worker is a contractor or an employee that was outlined by California’s supreme court last year in its Dynamex decision (pdf). Progressives sued.

The court instructed hiring firms to apply a standard commonly referred to as the “ABC” test, which says a worker is “properly considered” an independent contractor to whom certain wage and hour regulations don’t apply only if:

(A) that the worker is free from the control and direction of the hirer in connection with the performance of the work, both under the contract for the performance of such work and in fact;

(B) that the worker performs work that is outside the usual course of the hiring entity’s business;

and (C) that the worker is customarily engaged in an independently established trade, occupation, or business of the same nature as the work performed for the hiring entity.

BLAME THE PROGRESSIVES

This is the work of labor unions, judicial tyrants, and progressive politicians who now control California, a one-party socialist nirvana where the politicians tell the people what to do instead of the other way around.

Labor unions were by far the largest contributors to Lorena Gonzalez, the Democrat who wrote AB5, donating nearly half a million dollars to her 2018 campaign.

While socialists like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren complain about special interests and dark money, they’re fine with big money coming to them from labor unions, Planned Parenthood, teachers’ unions, and so on.

It is union money that is funding the all-out war against Uber, Lyft, DoorDash and other so-called “gig” enterprises in California and elsewhere. They want them shut down.

AB5 was mostly pushed by the Teamsters.

IT DESTROYS THE MODEL FOR THESE BUSINESSES

The law upends the exact model on which these firms were built.

As Liz Peek writes, Democrats like Warren, Sanders, Kamala Harris, and Pete Buttigieg endorsed the bill, which assumes that drivers who want the flexibility to work part-time don’t know what’s good for them. As usual, the socialist agenda is not just about money; it’s about control.

This won’t help the middle class, it hurts, but unions want them unionized. No more free enterprise for the USA.

There is pushback. We will have to wait and see, but the truth is California is corrupt and tyrannical. It’s lost.

This will spread to other blue states. Whatever these progressives touch turns to ruin.

The Legislature just left millions of CA entrepreneurs and #gigeconomy workers out in the cold. #AB5 is an abominable bill that this Governor will no doubt sign into law. This is what one-party dictatorial rule looks like and it’s only the beginning. #Dynamex pic.twitter.com/p5rZQPUnCU — Jim Patterson (@JimPatterson559) September 11, 2019