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California Stranded: Uber and Lyft Killed Today by Unions, Democrats, Progressive Judge

A California judge denies a petition to extend a stay for Uber and Lyft to fight implementation of AB5 — the union-penned law pushed by Rep. Lorena Gonzalez that essentially bans freelancers, contract workers, and therefore, ride-sharing services.

California Stranded: Uber and Lyft Killed Today by Unions, Democrats, Progressive Judge

A California judge denies a petition to extend a stay for Uber and Lyft to fight implementation of AB5 — the union-penned law pushed by Rep. Lorena Gonzalez that essentially bans freelancers, contract workers, and therefore, ride-sharing services.

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Bill Whittle Network · California Stranded: Uber and Lyft Killed Today by Unions, Democrats, Progressive Judge

37 replies on “California Stranded: Uber and Lyft Killed Today by Unions, Democrats, Progressive Judge”

It is definitely becoming more and more like Ayn Rands Atlas shrugged in California. And from the looks of it someone wants to make it nationwide too. We definitely need to get out and vote not just like it means our job but also our lives. If nothing else just look at uncle Joe Biden, wanting to make everybody wear masks effective January 2021 if he gets elected. Think about that.

Something not dissimilar in effect has taken place in England. There is an IRS (it isn’t called that here, but for Americans I’ll call it IRS) rule called IR35, which is used to determine whether someone is an employee or an independent contractor. If you call it wrong, you as the person affected have to make it right by giving the Treasury lots of money (because contractors enjoy low tax rates). But the UK version of the IRS recently decided to hold employers liable to make up the huge financial difference if a contractor turns out to be an employee. The effect of this was, just as the Treasury intended, to make companies immediately say ok, no more contractors, everyone needs to be an employee, because they want to avoid IRS audits and hassle. So at a stroke millions of people are now employees of wholly artificial employer entities, without sick pay, holiday pay, pension contributions or any employment security. And it has all been done to gather ever more money into the endlessly hungry and never-satisfied maw of the govt. And it has worked.

I have never understood how non-right-to-work states’ laws ever passed constitutional muster. I’m with Steve here: the right to contract your labor is one of the most fundamental human rights there is. But we have so many laws and regulations that interfere with it, at federal, state, and local levels (even in right-to-work states.
I agree with Bill too: the only way to fix this garbage is to let them have it. I wish the most recent judge had not entered the emergency stay.
(I still love you too, Scott!)

I think I heard that the courts out that way issued an emergency stay order on Thursday to let Uber/Lyft continue to operate. I wonder if a judge was getting a ride this morning and found out it was going to be harder to get to work tomorrow .
The Democrats like their “truth to power” and “stick it to the man” slogans but they don’t work if there isn’t a “man” so they need to keep the large corporations alive and imitating life so that government has something to fight and doesn’t collapse under its own weight. I suppose the comparison between big government/corporations and the Establishment Uniparty are more similar than I thought.

This anti-contractor stance of the Left in California has been growing like a cancer for decades. I am personally aware of instances where they even went after charities, attempting to force the contractors into employee status, even when those contractors worked less than 10 days *a year*.
The happy bureaucrats spent time and money going after charities. Think about that!
And only so they would get their tax money a few months earlier than they would have anyway.
However, I look at this Democrat policy train-wreck as a good thing.
I’m reminded of what happened in the 70’s when the Arrogant Leftist California Legislators tripled everyone’s property taxes within one year.
Californians responded: BANG! PROPOSITION 13. Get back in your cages you arrogant Leftists; here’s a little reminder of who you work for.
But the Leftists have forgotten the lessons learned.
A few good radio and tv spots, well written, could jerk the voting centrists of this state a hard right as a result of this truly un-american policy.
At least, I hope so.

How did this ‘law’ ever get passed?? I sure didn’t vote for it and I wonder who did? Did I miss something? I should have watched the show first!

Just like bars “becoming” restaurants in Texas, I read Uber Eats will still deliver. Does that mean I can get a ride if I give someone a fry at the other end?

Maybe we will shortly see that BWDC has two new wholely owned subsidiaries: SODC and SGDC. Or we will end up with three membership billings per year, one for each totally separate legal entity. But then the amount will become 40% of a previous single membership: overhead costs for expanded contract management, dontcha know! 🙂

Yes, but at least Bill will have the color of law to mask his long-standing scheme to have all three boxes to himself.

I wouldn’t be surprised if those young, indoctrinated, flaming liberals will just feel very grateful to the wonderful government for bring their Uber back in November.

Not really on topic but you guys mentioned the AT&T breakup:

My first job out of college was in the field that is now called I.T. at the Western Electric plant in Allentown PA. That was 1983 and the breakup took effect on January 1, 1984. My dad also worked at that plant. We were having lunch one day shortly after I started and he told me, “This company [pre-breakup AT&T] is so big, we could be out of business right now and we won’t know it for 30 years.”

After the breakup, Western Electric (along with Bell Labs, where the first transistor was invented) became AT&T Microelectronics and then Lucent. Lo and behold, Lucent ceased to exist in 2003, thirty years after I had started.

My dad, the prophet. 🙂

Management at Western/ME/Lucent was…not good. They never overcame the monopoly mentality. In 1984, they gave me about $3 million to bring in a large computer network for managing microchip testing. Naturally, there were many approvals involved. In one meeting, I was trying to get a signature from a mid-level management guy who insisted that he wouldn’t sign off unless I could prove that the system worked. I asked him what I needed to do to show that to him and he replied, “You have to bring it in and run it.” I had to get his signature to bring it in and bring it in to get his signature.

P.S. I left Lucent for a small software startup in 1990.

Unrelated career advice: never go into business with a close friend. A 30-year friendship was destroyed by that venture. And I’m owed about $30,000 that I’ll never see.

correction:
The first working transistor was developed by Texas instruments. Those guys actually won Nobel Laureates.
Me? I spent 24 years of my life at Motorola/Freesclale. This is where the semiconductor aluminum barrier was broken.
That project damn near killed me.

Correction correction. 😉

From Wikipedia:

Austro-Hungarian physicist Julius Edgar Lilienfeld proposed the concept of a field-effect transistor in 1926, but it was not possible to actually construct a working device at that time. The first working device to be built was a point-contact transistor invented in 1947 by American physicists John Bardeen and Walter Brattain while working under William Shockley at Bell Labs. The three shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics for their achievement. The most widely used transistor is the MOSFET (metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistor), also known as the MOS transistor, which was invented by Mohamed Atalla with Dawon Kahng at Bell Labs in 1959. The MOSFET was the first truly compact transistor that could be miniaturised and mass-produced for a wide range of uses.

…

The first “prototype” pocket transistor radio was shown by INTERMETALL (a company founded by Herbert Mataré in 1952) at the Internationale Funkausstellung Düsseldorf between August 29, 1953 and September 6, 1953. The first “production” pocket transistor radio was the Regency TR-1, released in October 1954. Produced as a joint venture between the Regency Division of Industrial Development Engineering Associates, I.D.E.A. and Texas Instruments of Dallas Texas, the TR-1 was manufactured in Indianapolis, Indiana. It was a near pocket-sized radio featuring 4 transistors and one germanium diode. The industrial design was outsourced to the Chicago firm of Painter, Teague and Petertil. It was initially released in one of six different colours: black, ivory, mandarin red, cloud grey, mahogany and olive green. Other colours were to shortly follow.

So, invented by Bell Labs and a new type was later manufactured by Texas Instruments.

I remember in SoCal, driving to work every morning past the section 8 housing…not a creature was stirring because they had no job to get up for! Nor did they have to fix breakfast or lunch or take the kids to school, all provided by taxpayers, even afternoon snacks! I have never understood the “feed the starving children” programs, when all the meals are provided by us in the schools, food stamps, AFDC, welfare payments, cell phones and ten dollar a month internet. In the afternoon I would drive past these same section 8 areas and bbq’s were going, blasting music and drinking were in full swing. It made me think that if we had to go around every payday and hand out twentys to these lazy butts as they guzzled another beer, in time we would simply refuse to do it. Easier to ignore when it is taken in taxes, and you never see it!

You’re right! One close friend, obese with comorbidities, is completely house-bound. (Is that by choice or by necessity ….) Everything is delivered!

You’ve scripted a perfect example of the small thinking of foolish minds.
EDIT: … or was that supposed to be “the foolish thinking of small minds”?

Me as well, born there in 1955 when much of the area was strawberry fields, citrus groves and dairies. By the mid 1960’s these farms were being plowed over for housing tracts where we use to play, businesses and freeways were being built with all the usual infrastructure. In time, nice tidy neighborhoods became crime ridden, gang infested and graffiti plastered areas filled with trash and homes with bars on the windows. Sirens and police helicopters circling overhead became the norm, long commutes on jammed freeways and roads as well. My work commute of twenty miles often took over an hour, and over time more than that. The camp grounds in Angeles National Forest we found so much pleasure in before, were now often closed due to drugs and gang activity, same as the local parks with homeless and illegals sleeping under the trees and on the tables. I miss Los Angeles, for what it was…not for what it has become. We got out in 1997 and moved to the North Carolina mountains. We are very happy and at peace with our move, but I still miss the weather, the beach, the skiing and the desert recreation, also the entertainment and dining options. But I will never go back, the cost in so many ways is simply too high to ignore and tolerate. Heartbreaking and sad the home of my youth has been largly distroyed.

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