Vote No on Proposition 22
By now you have heard about Proposition 22, a last-ditch effort funded and led by Uber, Lyft, Doordash and other multi-billion-dollar tech companies to buy themselves a loophole to California’s worker wage and safety laws. Digging into these companies’ slick marketing campaign for Prop. 22 reveals that this proposition does not address the needs of gig workers and their families. Voters should reject Prop. 22.
Prop. 22’s backers often tout the bill’s supposed higher-than-minimum wage pay guarantee. But a study by the University of California, Berkeley Labor Center found that if Prop. 22 passed, then Uber and Lyft drivers would earn about $5.64 an hour instead of the current $13 an hour state minimum wage guaranteed for traditional employees. What explains the difference? Simple: loopholes in Prop. 22’s supposed “guarantees.”
For example, Prop. 22 only guarantees a minimum pay rate for drivers and other gig workers when they are actively performing work for the companies’ customers. As the California Supreme Court reaffirmed in 2015, employees waiting on call in California must usually be paid for that waiting time. Prop. 22 takes away this protection from drivers and other gig workers for the time they spend waiting to accept a job, which is about 33% of working time for Uber and Lyft’s drivers according to an August 2019 study paid for by Uber and Lyft. As the UC Berkeley Labor Center study put it, “not paying for that time would be the equivalent of a fast food restaurant or retail store saying they will only pay the cashier when a customer is at the counter.”
Prop. 22 would also cheat drivers out of their vehicle mileage rate reimbursement when they cruise to find jobs or move to higher demand areas, which costs drivers about $3.83 per hour according to the UC Berkeley Labor Center study. Even the mileage reimbursement in Prop. 22 is almost $0.30 cents per mile less than the IRS mileage rate. By contrast, if these tech companies’ drivers were employees, they would be entitled to a full reimbursement of their gas and vehicle expenses under California Labor Code section 2802.
The other major talking point Prop. 22’s backers frequently repeat is that California’s AB5 law—making it clear who is and is not an employee under state law—would remove gig workers’ flexible work schedules. But the truth is that: 1) like many other California-based employers, the tech giants have many options to continue offering flexible employment to drivers and 2) the UCLA Labor Center found that the “majority of workers we interviewed felt that giving up the ability to work whenever they wanted was an acceptable tradeoff for regular and reliable schedules and guaranteed benefits….”
The backers of Prop. 22 spared no expense marketing this attempt to buy their way out of complying with the same state laws every other employer in California, large and small, must follow. But don’t be fooled by the high production values—Prop. 22 is a disaster for workers. Vote No.