CALIFORNIA
FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, JUNE 26, 2020, OR THEREAFTER
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, JUNE 26, 2020, OR THEREAFTER
BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“MAKE
ONE THING EASIER THIS YEAR: REPEAL AB 5”
From
local newspaper columnists to court reporters, from musicians and sound mixers
to seamstresses, it’s difficult to find a skilled field where the most
destructive law California has adopted in the last few years does not hurt
substantial numbers of people.
Even
before the COVID-19 pandemic threw unprecedented millions of workers onto
unemployment and wrecked myriad businesses, the measure known as Assembly Bill
5 was destroying careers willy-nilly.
It’s become extremely obvious just how amateur and clumsy an
effort this bill was from the moment of its conception. In a California economy
that thrived for years on gig workers (who themselves often thrived as they moved
from company to company, taking the best offers available), this law, signed
last September by Gov. Gavin Newsom, became sawdust in the gears of business
and employment.
Freelancers in many fields were dumped by the hundreds,
adding up to many thousands in the months between the bill signing and its Jan.
1 effective date.
The bill’s inept author, Democratic Assemblywoman Lorena
Gonzalez of San Diego, soon admitted it needed revisions and submitted a few
for legislative consideration. These were quickly placed on the back burner as
lawmakers, like other Californians, sheltered at home most of the spring. On
their return to Sacramento, where they essentially sanctioned months of one-man
rule by Newsom, they were justifiably consumed with budget issues, a preoccupation
brought on by vast tax losses from the state’s long lockdown.
It’s plain why AB 5 passed in the first place: Labor unions
badly wanted to organize the many thousands of drivers working freelance for
rideshare companies like Uber and Lyft, folks who worked when they pleased, as
long as they pleased. What befell others in a wide variety of freelance
occupations was collateral damage in the war between unions and the big
rideshare outfits.
But the virus lockdown reduced traffic in California’s
urban centers anywhere from 35 percent to 65 percent. This did more than merely
allow remaining drivers to feel like they could set land speed records every
time they ventured onto a freeway. It also took vast numbers of rideshare
drivers off the road.
With businesses shuttered and the majority of Californians
sheltering at home and/or working from home, there has also been little need
for Uber or Lyft. Where are folks sheltering at home going to go?
Meanwhile, insecurities some women had about encountering
attempted rapists or gropers when drivers showed up during the heyday of
ridesharing quickly evolved into worries about getting exposed to COVID-19 if
they ventured into a stranger’s car. A stranger whose medical history and past
exposure to contagion were of necessity unknown to riders.
So why keep a law intended to instigate the unionization of
a workforce that’s greatly reduced? There really is little or no reason. Even
the unions wouldn’t get much in the way of dues if they managed to organize every
driver still working.
If Gonzalez admits she erred in writing a blunderbuss law
that inadvertently – she says – damaged the prospects of people she didn’t know
she was involving, why not just get rid of the whole thing?
Why should make-up artists have lost their jobs en masse
just because unions wanted to gain new members among rideshare drivers?
Even worse, why should newspapers, which were already in
precarious financial shape before the pandemic but then lost most of their
local advertising income, still be forced to hire anyone who writes more than
35 stories per year (the limit set in AB 5) as a regular employee when they’ve
had to lay off even more reporters and editors and ad takers than before? For that
matter, why the specific limit on articles for freelance writers, when there
are no analogous limits for any other gig workers? That limit alone suggests
Gonzalez deliberately targeted newspapers and some of their writers.
The bottom line: This was a bad law when it passed. Now the
coronavirus lockdown has exposed it as even worse than it first seemed. That means
lawmakers should scrap the entire amateurish mistake, not merely tinker with
it.
-30-
Email
Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough:
The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch
It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias
columns, visit www.californiafocus.net
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