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Last week, California legislators passed Assembly Bill 5 (AB 5), expanding legal protections to more than a million workers, including gig workers like rideshare drivers for companies like Uber and Lyft, who had been misclassified as “independent contractors.” The misclassification scheme is popular in Silicon Valley as well as industries like trucking, construction, and even adult entertainment, because it shifts risks and operating costs onto workers while maintaining company control over the price, pace, and style of labor. Worst of all, misclassified workers are legally barred from organizing unions. As part of a broader divide-and-conquer attack on worker organizing, companies have exploited misclassification to slash unions’ membership rolls and undermine wages, benefits, and protections for all workers. Naturally, Uber, Lyft, and other companies fought tooth and nail to block AB 5. Instead of accepting defeat, they’re escalating their resistance by threatening to bring a ballot measure to undo the law in 2020 while promising lawsuits to delay its implementation. While AB 5 ends the relegation of gig and other workers to a hyper-exploited underclass (assuming companies’ efforts to roll back the law fail), other inequalities between workers will continue to undermine workers’ organizing. These inequalities — including on the basis of race, gender, skill, and geography — not only hurt workers directly, but empower companies to pit workers against one another, because a divided working class allows for an unchecked ruling class. That’s why it’s essential that organizers bring lessons from the AB 5 victory into all sectors while uniting unions and militant workers to fight for the whole working class.

The Solidarity Strategy How was AB 5 won in California, despite the immense pressure of major companies and even public lobbying on their behalf from former Democratic senator Barbara Boxer? It turns out that even in Silicon Valley’s home state, organized labor — with 15 percent union density in California compared with 10.5 percent nationally, and far less in Southern states — can still throw its political weight around to great effect. Outside the legislature, AB 5 was championed not only by militant but mostly unorganized gig workers, but also major unions, including the Teamsters and the building trades, in conjunction with their statewide umbrella group, the California Labor Federation. While gig workers are not unionized, unions recognize the need to fight for those workers’ rights for two major reasons. First, newly reclassified employees of Uber, Lyft, port trucking “dispatchers,” and other companies can now be organized into unions like the Teamsters (who already represent truck drivers, among others), the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) (who could organize food delivery workers at DoorDash or Postmates), and building trades unions (who can now organize formerly misclassified construction workers). More profoundly, these unions have an interest in protecting and expanding the rights of all workers, union and nonunion alike. The old motto of the radical Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), “an injury to one is an injury to all,” isn’t just a statement of morals — it’s also workers’ best political strategy. California Labor Federation leader Art Pulaski invoked the spirit of the IWW in a statement celebrating AB 5: “The misclassification of workers creates a corrosive effect that ripples through our entire economy, undermining our laws to protect and support working people.” Companies use the misclassification scam to pull workers out of the legal framework protecting workers and out of the unions helping enforce those protections. “Traditional employers” are then able to pit these hyper-exploited workers against union workers: those “independent contractors” are getting paid below minimum wage and working terrible hours, so either you can accept a worse contract now or expect your job to be misclassified into the gig economy sooner or later. In cases where misclassification allows pay so low as to sustain businesses that wouldn’t survive paying at least minimum wages, companies are able to use the threat of layoffs to bully workers and legislators alike into protecting the status quo. Meanwhile, standards for workers fall across the board.