Isn't every law specifically intended to put a group of people in noncompliance with it? What's the point of making a law if everyone was going to comply regardless?
The power to create laws is not supposed to be used as weapon. It clearly was in this case.
AB5 was written in bad faith with the goal of hurting specific companies, not with the goal of writing a sensible law that sets a framework for how businesses ought to operate. They wrote it in such a hurry that it unintentionally hurt a bunch of other people and small businesses. That's not how laws are supposed to work.
So if a government sees a company's actions as too unethical what are they to do about it other than target them with a law? I don't know about the specifics of this law, Ill assume you're correct it's poor, but I have trouble understanding your point of the law not being used as a weapon against these companies. That seems to be all its for to me, something to be used to stop a bad actors behavior. I can't imagine the majority of laws are created preemptively.
Laws aren't allowed to be created as weapons, under US constitutional law this is often referred to as illegal taking, if AB5 was illegal taking these companies would've been able to get the law halted which it seems to have not happened.
Would you consider all labor and environmental laws to have been crafted as a weapon?
One could argue that much of our labor and environmental protective apparatus was written to curb behaviors of specific companies (or "business models," if you prefer).
It’s usually written to make existing manufacturing activity clean up after itself, or existing employment relationships better for the employees. There may be some collateral damage, but the intent is not to destroy.
“People’s jobs should be better” is a different goal from “bad jobs should not exist.” It may be used as a tool to achieve the former, but we care whether it’s actually effective at doing so.
Is the intent here really to destroy? Is it really the case compliance with the law is only possible for employers like Walmart, The Gap, and thousands of other small firms in California? I'm very in favor of gig work, but the notion that the only option left is to stop work rather than hire folks as employees seems obviously facile. Notably, there's no exemption for the many other companies that operate passenger transport in the state.
Your last sentence is interesting because the entire point of a labor law like this one is to bring jobs under the remit of labor protections so that "people's jobs should be better" is something that can even be addressed.
b) Its existence will trigger a “race to the bottom” that threatens all workers.
c) Gig work is not very important to casual gig workers, so taking it away would not harm them.
d) Taking away gig work will prompt gig workers to find real jobs which are better for them, anyway.
Low margin employers like Walmart and Amazon ruthlessly squeeze efficiency from
their employees to ensure productivity > cost for every shift. The could not do otherwise - such are the economics of a low margin business. The gig economy offers the option of working “inefficiently,” and some people value that enough to trade off compensation for it. Maybe the gig economy companies could operate like Walmart, but the point is people are choosing gig work over Walmart for a reason.
