Considering that taxi companies haven't offered such benefits for decades, it seems safe to imply that it's highly unlikely that a non-premium transportation service will have the necessary volume to make its margins anywhere outside NYC, LA and SF.

A resident of SF thus might have a very different outlook on this than a resident of Ann Arbor. They won't face a loss of service as a result of new government restriction.

Time-based limits on any kind of labor also seem to hit the wall at some point, and you can see it in Bay Area. At some point a court decision mandated extending full-time benefits to contractors with employment record longer than 12 months, and if you browse contractor listings for any of the Bay Area mega-corps, they're pretty explicit the contract is for 12 months and 12 months only without a possibility of extension.

Similarly Uber app will likely just go dark after N hours of work have been reached in a given year. Do we as a society win from having the worker switch to Lyft or look for another job?

Game studios in California hire QA mostly as contractors. Because of the regulation all these contractors get a "break" of 3 months after every 12 (or 18 months?) to prevent them from becoming FTE from the point of view of the law. From what I can tell, the only people hurt by this are the QA themselves. They either need to find a new job or live off their copious savings for 90 days to return to the job they already had.

This is not "double Irish" scheme, a bright 8 y.o. could have figured this outcome, yet, this being California, people still vote for the people who bring these laws on them. Boggles my mind.

One way to deal with this (what I'd say is the right way but hardest way) is to take the burdens usually placed on employers to provide and have the state take the tab...funded by an increase in taxes.

If you're talking about property taxes, you might want to read up about Prop 13(1978) and how it fundamentally altered the tax base of California.

There are some good points that we are still fighting the after effects of this policy to this day. A good example would be how business owners encapsulate their properties to not trigger the re-assessment of the property to current values. It explains a number of the remaining low cost/slum-lord apartments still around.

After which 100% of state's private employer workforce is converted to contractor status.

are handymen on angieslist, or freelancers on upwork, or babysitters on care, musicians on craigslist, or callgirls on backpages working for angieslist upwork care craigslist backpages etc?

drivers arent working for uber, uber is an app that facilitates a connection between a service provider and a client, not all that different than the yellow pages. uber is a communication provider, the same as att.

No, I don't know, probably, no, no.