The antitrust case against gig companies
Either they’re violating employment law, or they’re violating antitrust.
Gig work companies like Uber and Doordash are committed to misclassifying their workers as contractors, which lets them escape employer obligations like a minimum wage, health care or worker’s comp (driving for Uber/Lyft is one of the most dangerous jobs in America).
These companies spent $225m to pass California’s Proposition 22, a ballot initiative that formalized worker misclassification, paving the way for all kinds of companies to convert employees to contractors at the stroke of a pen:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/05/manorialism-feudalism-cycle/#prop22
Hilariously, all that money was wasted. Prop 22 was unconstitutional (it usurped the California Assembly’s constitutionally mandated duty to establish universal worker’s comp), and it was (idiotically) drafted such that if any clause was struck the whole thing would go out the window:
But they’ll try again — they already are, in Massachusetts, where the same companies have already poured $100m into “the East Coast’s Prop 22”:
