What if, one day, the government took your livelihood away? For countless California freelancers, this nightmare is a reality because of a harmful law known as Assembly Bill 5.
Joe Biden vowed as president that he would expand California’s approach to the rest of the country. He should visit our Golden State to meet the independent contractors whose professional lives were ruined by their legislators’ supposed good intentions.
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AB5 is a byproduct of a 2018 California Supreme Court decision known as Dynamex. The decision, which concerned wage orders for delivery drivers, narrowed who can be classified as an independent contractor. It was cheered by labor unions, which prefer that workers be classified as full-time employees (who can then be unionized.) At labor’s urging, the state legislature in 2019 chose to “codify and clarify” the Dynamex decision and make it apply to all independent contractors in California and those who hire them.
The chief intended target of AB5 was gig companies — think Uber, Lyft, or DoorDash — the businesses of which rely on a network of independent “gig” workers. These companies are currently locked in a legal fight with the state and are backing a ballot measure (Proposition 22) that would exempt them from the law.
While deep-pocketed gig companies resist, hundreds of thousands (some say millions) of other freelancers have already been shut down or severely hampered by the law.
Consider my story. Last Christmas, when I first heard about AB5’s passage in news stories, I assumed I wasn’t affected. I was a high-earning professional consultant and content creator with my own California corporation, not some exploited low-wage worker or someone trying to make a full-time living as a gig driver. I slept soundly knowing that AB5 couldn’t possibly apply to people like me.
I could not have been more wrong. As 2019 turned into 2020, everyone I knew — freelance writers, webmasters, coaches, and others — began hearing from longtime clients, saying they had to part ways. “We love your work,” they’d say, “but we can’t work anymore with any contractors in California.” I received the same phone calls. Many of my close friends lost five- and even six-figure streams of income without warning.
The advent of COVID-19 made AB5 even worse. In a cruel irony, when everyone was suddenly working from home, those of us who had been already doing so for years found ourselves cut off from many of the opportunities we’d always counted on.
The stories are heartbreaking and too numerous to count. There’s the music festival organizer who can’t subcontract with other organizers as before, so the festival dies. There’s the translator, a disabled immigrant who lost a freelance career of 20 years and can’t do anything else, who now considers suicide. There’s the senior who was making a few hundred dollars a week on the side as an editor or writer, now cut off from the work that gave him purpose and engagement as well as income.
A Facebook group, Freelancers Against AB5, has collected hundreds of similar stories.
Many of my friends have left the state or are planning to, their only option, short of changing careers. But if Biden has his way, this drastic measure may be futile.
Biden supports the deceptively named PRO Act (Protecting the Right to Organize) that would take AB5’s consequences national and make California’s misery everyone’s problem. An estimated 57 million people are freelancers, according to a survey of 6,000 freelancers from Edelman and Upwork. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that 79% of them “prefer their work arrangement over a traditional job.” Other studies focusing specifically on gig drivers found a similar percentage prefer to remain independent contractors.
The PRO Act would take the choice of how to work away from the individual and place it in the hands of the special interests that conceive and promote these laws and the lawmakers who act as their agents.
California’s experiment has scrambled party allegiances. I know dozens of lifelong Democrats who are crossing party lines in November for the first time, voting red locally and even (gasp!) voting Trump instead of Biden because this issue is so fundamental to their lives and because no one on “their side” appears to be listening. That vote might not do much in deep-blue California, but it’s a preview of the bipartisan fury that a Democratic Congress and president would face in 2021 should they pursue the path of ending freelancing as we know it.
Lisa Rothstein is a branding consultant, writer, and cartoonist living in San Diego.
