“Overall, it creates a framework where fast-food workers will have a strong voice in establishing the conditions under which they work,” Jacobs told VICE News. “SEIU and others have been talking about working on various forms of sectoral bargaining, and this effectively is a form of sectoral bargaining using public institutions.”
Author and union organizer Jane McAlevey told VICE it’s essential to get ahead of management’s campaign and “inoculating” workers against these lines of attack.
A Berkeley Labor Center study found Prop 22 would net ride-hail and delivery drivers a minimum wage of $5.64 an hour—California’s minimum wage is $12 an hour.
“The biggest thing is control of the Senate and the ability to pass a law for gig workers,” Ken Jacobs, a gig economy expert at the UC Berkeley Labor Center, told Motherboard. “We’ll know more after the Georgia election, but things like an ABC test that takes legislation will be more difficult for Biden in the short run.”
At a press conference organized by the No on Proposition 22 campaign, app-based drivers in L.A. and the Bay Area expressed their frustration at Uber’s latest tactic to gain an exemption from regulations.
Proposition 22 is meant to give drivers more protections while allowing Uber to still minimize labor costs, but researchers at the UC Berkeley Labor Center found that the measure would only guarantee $5.64 an hour, not the $15.60 an hour that Proposition 22 advocates promise.
Misclassification is a key part of Uber’s elusive path to profitability as the strategy minimizes labor costs and liabilities by increasingly shifting its burden onto workers and taxpayers. This strategy allows Uber and Lyft to dodge paying $413 million in unemployment taxes to California and another $630 million in California wage claims.
A new report from the UC Berkeley Labor Center finds that Uber and Lyft avoided paying California $413 million in state unemployment insurance (SUI) taxes by misclassifying drivers as independent contractors from 2014 to 2019.
