More government regulation is always great in theory.
Then it gets applied to you.
The website that once proclaimed, “Gig workers’ win in California is a victory for workers everywhere,” is now suffering from that very “victory.” In September, when the California Senate passed a bill that capped freelancers at 35 paid pieces per year, Vox said the regulation would give workers “basic labor protections.”
Now, Vox Media is laying off hundreds of freelancers thanks to the same law. When California’s Assembly Bill 5 goes into effect next year, hundreds of freelancers will lose their jobs. Because the government will force prolific freelancers to be classified as employees, media companies will lose their flexibility to hire both part- and full-time workers in the way they once had.
“That new law makes it impossible for us to continue with our current California team site structure because it restricts contractors from producing more than 35 written content ‘submissions’ per year,” Vox Media subsidiary SB Nation announced on Monday. To comply with the new law, SB Nation won’t replace California contractors with contractors from other states, but it will hire employees for just a handful of “newly-created full-time or part-time employee positions.”
What once seemed like a win for worker protections is actually a huge loss for worker freedom. As my colleague Kaylee McGhee wrote earlier this year, “The bill is just another example of the elitism oozing out of California’s legislature. Politicians like Democrat Lorena Gonzalez, who spearheaded this project, think they know more about journalism than the men and women who have worked in the industry for decades.”
A few months ago, Vox reacted to the California proposal differently. It reported:
This law is already proving unhelpful for journalists, and it won’t turn out to be all that great for drivers of ride-sharing companies either. Uber and Lyft are currently amassing funds to overturn the law, and if they fail, then thousands of drivers will probably just be out of the job.
Big surprise — the more red tape that companies have to cut through to hire people, the fewer employees they’ll retain. Perhaps the law’s passage will turn out to be “a historic moment for the U.S. labor movement,” but not in the way Vox suspected.
