More than 10% of all Americans live in California, so I think it’s really important that as we start voting we all know about Prop 22, which you might see adds for on Tumblr. Here’s a couple things:
Companies are spending millions of dollars to keep themselves from having to cover benefits for their employees instead of spending that money on, for instance, employee benefits.
And they’re doing this at a time when the job these workers do has become the most dangerous for drivers and in the highest demand for deliverers.
Their attempt is so transparently heinous that they had to dispute a neutral description of the proposal.
And their add campaigns are exactly the bullshit Amazon tries to pull, where they have people of color talk about how important their job is or how much “freedom” they need in their work life. If you’ve ever lived in a community with an Amazon warehouse/distribution center, you’d know they regularly chew up and spit out workers in poor and often minority communities desperate for work.
Please, we can’t erode the rights of workers in the most populous state in the nation or allow giant corporations to exploit the pandemic for profit.
tl;dr version
VOTE NO ON PROP 22 in CA
It’s the gig economy corporations fighting hard to have the right to exploit workers and deny them the basic benefits of employment.
Like, you know, the right to be paid for all the time you spend on the job, not the time you spend doing specific tasks. Like the right to overtime payments. The right to have your employer pay for necessary equipment. (In this case, being paid for gas, car maintenance, insurance, and so on.)
OR - if this really were “independent contractors just using an app to find clients” - the right to negotiate directly with those clients. The right to set their own rates. The right to discuss the terms of the work - like, agreeing to a delay on one side or the other. The right to build up a regular clientele. The right to refuse clients without penalty. The right to know the details of a job before agreeing to it. (Did you know that Uber and Lyft drivers don’t know the destination before they accept a job?)
Fuck this bill and its supporters.
You’re going to hear a lot of guff about 22 if you’re in Cali, don’t fall for it. No on 22 has been endorsed by pretty much every blue-collar union in the state. As a union employee, I know that voting in any law that weakens collective bargaining (and don’t be fooled; that is exactly what Prop 22 is) is going to get a lot of workers the shaft in the end.
And also fuck Uber and Lyft for spending hundreds of millions of dollars on propaganda instead of on their employees.