After spending millions on a yearslong campaign against classifying gig workers as employees, the ridehailing services got their way.
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Uber, Lyft, and DoorDash workers in California will remain independent contractors after the state’s Supreme Court upheld Proposition 22, as reported by CalMatters. The unanimous decision issued on Thursday is a win for ridehailing and food delivery services, which have spent millions campaigning for Prop 22 to avoid having to classify gig workers as employees.
While Prop 22 guarantees workers some protections, such as 120 percent of the local minimum wage for each hour spent driving, a health insurance stipend, and reimbursement for job-related injuries, it’s far from the full range of benefits Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, Instacart, and other services would’ve had to provide if workers were classified as employees.
After voters passed Prop 22 in 2020, a group of Uber and Lyft drivers filed a lawsuit that challenged the law. Prop 22 was overturned in 2021 when a judge deemed it “unconstitutional,” but an appeals court upheld the law in March 2023. In the California Supreme Court’s decision today, Justice Goodwin H. Liu reaffirmed that Prop 22 “does not conflict” with the state’s constitution.
Uber, Lyft, and DoorDash have all issued responses in support of the court’s decision. “From the moment it became law, Prop 22 has been working for the millions of drivers and couriers that earn on platforms like ours,” Uber writes in a post on its website. “Uber alone has delivered more than $1 billion in direct benefits to date.”
Opponents of Prop 22 are frustrated with the outcome. “We are deeply disappointed that the state Supreme Court has allowed tech corporations to buy their way out of basic labor laws despite Proposition 22’s inconsistencies with our state constitution,” Lorena Gonzalez, the president of the California Federation of Labor Unions, says in a statement posted online. “These companies have upended our social contract, forcing workers and the public to take on the inherent risk created by this work, while they profit.”
Other locations, such as Massachusetts, Minneapolis, and New York City, have established some protection for Uber, Lyft, and DoorDash drivers, but they’re still classified as contractors.
