Re:Why is San Francisco trying to strangle its golden goose?
by pandaman on Sunday September 25, 2016 @01:52AM
(#12574162)
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.
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?