Nancy Pelosi would love to see a new California law enacted nation wide. PROBLEM – its already killed many thousands of jobs in California.
With Assembly Bill 5, lawmakers not only came up with a solution for which there is no problem, they created hardships where there were none before.
The bill was peddled as means to establish fairness for California freelance and independent contractors. No longer will they be “exploited” by businesses. The law now forces companies to hire them as employees rather than allowing them to continue their existing labor relationships, which were arrived at freely and voluntarily by all parties.
In contrast to the image constructed by its supporters, AB5 is a job killer already robbing workers of their freedom. The Hoover Institution’s Lee Ohanian named it the worst California law of 2019. But a case could be made it’s the downright cruelest California law of the last 20 years.
The wreckage began to pile up even before the bill became law on Jan. 1.
Some of the heaviest bloodshed has been at Vox, which fired more than 200 California freelance writers. While 10% will reportedly be hired for part-time and full-time work, that still leaves more than 180 freelancers without their paying gigs.
Only a few months earlier, Vox was delighted by the passage of AB5. On Sept. 11, a headline gushed that “Gig workers’ win in California is a victory for workers everywhere.” The reporter called it “a historic moment for the U.S. labor movement,” and finished her ode to unions by declaring that “now that California has its win, it may only be a matter of time until workers across the country have theirs too.”
Most of the writers losing their jobs worked for SB Nation, a sports blogging network owned by Vox Media, based across the country in New York. Rebecca Lawson, editor in chief of Mavs Moneyball, an SB Nation property, explained to readers in a farewell note that “California’s terrible AB5 came for me today, and I’m devastated.”
“SB Nation has chosen to do the easiest thing they can to comply with California law — not work with California-based independent contractors, or any contractors elsewhere writing for California-based teams.”
Read the rest at: AB5 is BAD
