“Solar companies like to think of themselves as not part of the construction industry and better because they’re fulfilling a renewable energy mission to address climate change,” said Carol Zabin. “But they can be just as bad employers. There’s a fair amount of the most egregious violations of basic protections.”
“The same thing happened with Prop 22—obviously the companies can’t go to the public and explicitly say ‘we want to take drivers rights away.’ They have to include some handout, but look at California: UC Berkeley found that the California wage guarantee was worth $5.54.”
Over the past few years, Uber, Lyft, and other app-based gig labor platforms have fought a series of protracted battles across the country to erode U.S. labor laws that would challenge the murky legal basis upon which their wholly unprofitable enterprise works.
Proposition 22 seems to be doing what gig companies like Grubhub promised it wouldn’t: raising prices and cutting driver earnings.
The company-funded Yes on Prop 22 campaign claimed that not passing the ballot initiative would result in higher prices for consumers, and in early December, news first broke that gig companies would be charging more anyway to cover the cost of benefits promised in Prop 22 such as a healthcare stipend and a minimum pay guarantee.
“We should draw a really clear line between how union busters surveil workers, versus how workers offer up their own connections via wall place charting [an exercise unions use to identify social and communication networks within a workplace and track progress toward winning a union drive] in an effort to win [union elections],” said Jane McAlevey.
