<story><title>California Voters Exempt Uber, Lyft, DoorDash from Having to Reclassify Drivers</title><url>https://www.wsj.com/articles/california-voters-exempt-uber-lyft-doordash-from-having-to-reclassify-drivers-11604476276</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mbgerring</author><text>No matter how you feel about AB5, allowing an industry to write laws and then coerce its workers into acting as campaign volunteers whether they agree with the law or not is a horrible precedent. This is not how our laws should be made, and we will come to regret this.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>cactus2093</author><text>What evidence do you have of this &amp;quot;coercion&amp;quot;? To me it just seems like there&amp;#x27;s a much simpler Occam&amp;#x27;s razor explanation. These companies business models rely on part time workers rather than full time workers (mainly due to very spiky demand). The workers prefer doing this job to their other options (otherwise the millions of them in CA wouldn&amp;#x27;t be doing it to begin with). Therefore it&amp;#x27;s in both the company and majority of drivers&amp;#x27; best interests not to let AB5 stand.&lt;p&gt;It also seems a bit disingenuous to say this is allowing an industry to write its own laws. It&amp;#x27;s just an ad-hominem - who cares who wrote the law? It&amp;#x27;s the content of the law that is important, and the process that it goes through to pass. In this case if it is voted on and approved by the public, that seems like a perfectly legitimate example of direct democracy.&lt;p&gt;(Whether you think direct democracy is a good idea for nuanced policy decisions, or whether what amounts to a constitutional amendment that can&amp;#x27;t be changed by the legislature is a good process for regulating a fast-changing new industry, are separate questions. Those are very valid concerns IMO. But that has nothing to do with the arguments you brought up).&lt;p&gt;Edit: and thinking about a precedent that this sets, I see that differently as well. AB5 was pretty clearly a bad law, and the legislators behind it completely shut off all negotiations with rideshare companies and were intent on playing hardball instead of coming up with a compromise. It was clearly all about retaliating against these companies that these legislators didn&amp;#x27;t like, with no thought given to how it would actually work or what would be best for constituents (as evidenced by just how many other industries, from journalists to musicians, were caught in the crossfire and had to be exempted one by one).&lt;p&gt;Given that, I think this sets a precedent to legislators that they actually need to do their jobs. They need to do the hard work of designing practical laws that will actually work for all of their constituents. Their job is not just to make bold symbolic gestures to fire up the most extreme members of their base, and if they do and they insist on doubling down on bad policies that work against a large number of their constituents best interests, it can backfire like it did with prop 22.</text></comment>
<story><title>California Voters Exempt Uber, Lyft, DoorDash from Having to Reclassify Drivers</title><url>https://www.wsj.com/articles/california-voters-exempt-uber-lyft-doordash-from-having-to-reclassify-drivers-11604476276</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mbgerring</author><text>No matter how you feel about AB5, allowing an industry to write laws and then coerce its workers into acting as campaign volunteers whether they agree with the law or not is a horrible precedent. This is not how our laws should be made, and we will come to regret this.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hodgesrm</author><text>I voted against Prop 22 but you have to respect that it got 58% of the vote according to currently posted results. That is a pretty good majority. The result (a) undermines the argument that workers were widely coerced and (b) demonstrates there&amp;#x27;s a widespread reaction to AB5.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s hard to avoid the conclusion that the California Assembly brought this situation on the citizens by writing a bad law.</text></comment>