I felt this was about Uber being told they had to treat drivers like employees in California too, and look how that turned out: A dystopian rule that lawmakers can't overturn to enable worker exploitation.

Well, that's electoral politics for ya. Without organized labor power to stand up to capital, things are close to a one-way ratchet.

Classifying gig workers as employees was a terrible idea. Not to mention the law that did so had so many exclusions it was ridiculous.

Generally, we should be moving away from linking health insurance and other benefits to employment.

Have you taken a look at a public health insurance exchange recently? Buying your own health insurance is a terrible deal. I'm self-employed so have had to deal with this myself. Nothing solidifies deep disdain for any politician who doesn't support Medicare for All faster than looking at that webpage of health insurance plans.

There are a lot of reasons health insurance is way too expensive, but one of them is that many individuals are shielded from the true price because it's provided through their employer. This essentially removes downward price pressure from individuals.

Having insurance tied to employment is bad for workers. It makes switching jobs far more difficult and stressful, and makes losing your job that much more of an issue.

Yes, I agree having insurance tied to employment is bad for workers. The conclusion is "therefore M4A", not "therefore everyone should buy their own insurance on a public exchange, paying half as much as their rent". You can use COBRA to stay on your job's health insurance when you leave it, which is not notably more expensive than the public exchange plans.

The insurance market model for healthcare coverage is such a fractally broken failure that if you're still stuck on the stage of twisting some knobs and adjusting some levers in the hope that second-order market effects will improve things then there really is just nothing that will convince you to move on.

Normally people create downward pressure on prices by not buying the product when it becomes overpriced. However with healthcare there is a captive market. Are you not going to get a cast put on a broken leg because the doctor wants to charge too much? Are you going to just opt out of cancer treatments and die?

Healthcare is an area where market forces are inherently perverted because people often don't have a choice of not buying the service. This is why every sensible country uses a socialized system instead. Not only does it provide better service, but without the perverse market incentives and multiple layers of middlemen infesting the system it is much less expensive.

You still have a choice between competing hospitals / doctors in a system where prices are not inflated for insurances' catalogues.

That would be true iff prices were disclosed upfront and the pricing model was clear. I had a hospital experience recently where the surgeon provided one bill, the hospital a second, and the anesthesiologist a third.

Only the surgeon's pricing was available ahead of time. The hospital provided an invoice at the time of surgery, marked as "SUBJECT TO CHANGE". The anesthesiologist himself didn't know how much his services would cost.

Three weeks later, we're still watching invoices and insurance claims roll in.

Medical tourism is a direct testament to inflated charges as a systematic problem. Finding a hospital with non-inflated costs requires crossing international borders.

The best time to shop around for the best deal is after you've been hit by a car and are having trouble breathing.

The real problem is that health insurance is overly expensive - mainly thanks to the relationship between gov / insurance. You should fix that; thinking that nationalising health care will fix the problem is just some politician's dream. The extra money needed for nationalised health care will have to come from somewhere - and because poor people don't have money and rich people are too good at eluding their tax obligations, the usual middle class will pay for it.

I'd rather have a fully private market without national entities messing with the prices and charities for those who can't afford it.

Of course, no politician will ever champion such a system, because it removes the gov from the equation, making them less powerful and needed by the masses that keep paying taxes.

I'm sorry but this is just a complete fantasy. The "extra money" for nationalized healthcare can come from taxes instead of premiums, and enormous efficiency gains with the elimination of N x N redundant billing departments & business units. It has worked all over the world. Your scheme has not, and is also immensely cruel to people who can't afford health insurance. Charity has never solved a social problem.

I honestly never paid any attention to the law, but I really don't understand how it would be feasible to treat Uber drivers as W4 employees in the first place.

What other sort of W4 job lets you chose both how many and which hours you want to work, and let you skip any assignments you don't want to complete? That honestly is so totally backwards to even how part time jobs work that I'm not convinced it would be viable.

Assuming you mean W-2 job. This arrangement is actually quite common for software engineering contractors. There are a number of "proxy" contracting companies (ex. iWorkGlobal) of which the independent contractor is a W-2 employee, but the contractor really works on an hourly contract for a third-party company that is contracting with the proxy company. It has all the trappings of independent contracting where you can choose your own hours, renegotiate/modify the contract, whatever. It's common when contracting with tech giants.

These kinds of takes are always weird to me. Shouldn't it matter, at least a little, that the rule was what a 17-point majority of voters wanted? You don't have to personally agree with every democratic outcome, but it almost sounds like you're saying the results of a vote aren't legitimate if they go the wrong way.

Well, this is where we see inequality as a force that perverts democracy. The side of capital has an enormous quantity of resources (by definition) that they use to influence electoral outcomes. So in a way, yes, the votes aren't very legitimate when the side of capital out-spends the side of labor by thirteen to one: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-10-16/skelton-...

Do you think there's any chance that this was actually what a majority of Californians wanted? You seem very confident that you know better what the voters wanted than they did.

While differences in spending surely have some effect, spending isn't the only way to get the word out. I didn't measure, but I feel pretty confident that no more than 60% of the total communication about Prop 22 that I heard from any source was pro. I think it could have been a minority actually. For every PR firm the pro side hired, there were thousands of unpaid activists on the con side (which does say something positive about the con side!).

I noticed you brought out the "lawmakers can't repeal" line. This is true, but also effectively standard for ballot measures in CA. In fact the default is that you can't repeal or change the law under any circumstances. This was one point that initially swayed me to vote "against", but once I learned that this was basically how all ballot measures work (including ones you support, I'm sure), I swung back to voting "for".

For me, this was a difficult call, but I voted "for" on the basis of the net good for the entire pool of current drivers, admittedly at the expense of the smaller number of drivers who would have been able to drive under a better deal had this passed.

The net effect this would have had on driver welfare is far from obvious, so it always bugs me when people assert that the only reason this passed by a 17 point margin is that people were tricked and confused by the ride sharing companies.

I think there's definitely a good chance a majority of Californians wanted it: Because a lot of Californians are blatantly unaware or unconcerned about how Uber takes advantage of their workers.

All that most people, unfortunately, care about, is that they can open an app that solves a problem for them, and it's solved. They don't care about the people who are hurt in the process.

And then, yeah, incredible spending on Uber's part is going to slide the scale a bit too.

Look, if you put a vote out to say that Amazon workers are now indentured servants of Jeff Bezos and have to work for free and can never leave, but their Amazon purchases will all be 15% cheaper... the vote would pass, because the majority of people don't work at Amazon.

Majority rule leads to tyranny of the minority. The majority, by definition, will be ignorant to some of the minority’s needs.

You’ll note the issue of slavery wasn’t put to a public vote to outlaw it. It was still of a struggle to outlaw as it was.

This is just an anecdote, but perhaps other people can comment, since the plural of anecdote is data...

I personally know several people who voted for the proposition under the impression that it was a pro-worker proposition that would guarantee benefits for drivers. There were 3 other people for whom I explained the context around it (including the fact that it was preempting a flawed bill from the legislature) before they mailed their ballots in and they changed their vote.

I also know several people who think that we should eliminate the rules for treating workers as employees in general, and they voted for the bill as well, so there's definitely some support. Its definitely clear from my point of view that a significant fraction of the people who voted for the proposition did so because they misunderstood what they were voting for.

OTOH that's probably true about all ballot measures ever, and probably most legislation as well.

I mean, that’s exactly what these companies spent $204,222,779.20 on. And that’s just what was spent. All of these companies also advertised for free in their apps and on their mailing lists as well. Valuable space that would have likely cost millions more.

Advertising works.

Elected officials not being able to turn over laws passed by popular vote is dystopian? It's kind of the opposite.

Not OP, but the dystopian part about it to me is that it’s essentially a few corporations pooling their money together to buy a law that overrules one passed by elected officials. The previous law was one that could be iterated on and improved. Instead, we now have something equally (or even more) imperfect and unlikely to change.

The people voted on it. If that isn't the highest authority, then it isn't Democracy. If corporations can buy elections, then they also would have bought the elections for the state legislature, so, if you decide to go down the path of claiming manipulation to de-legitimize results you don't like, there is no way out.