The Most Essential Command: Employers Urge the Removal of Worker Protections During a National Pandemic

“The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

1984, George Orwell

Craig Byrnes

With the advent of AB5 at the beginning of the year, a strict test for who is an employee and who is an independent contractor was put in place. Employers who routinely hired workers as independent contractors for no other reason than they wanted to save money were put on notice: this type of tax-dodging, wage theft-enabling behavior was coming to an end.

AB5 was a godsend to workers across the State. Prior to its passage, workers were consistently misclassified as independent contractors; some estimates say that as many as 1.5 million workers missed out on minimum wage protection, overtime, disability, workers compensation and unemployment insurance, meal and rest breaks, and the myriad other protections afforded employees in California. An IRS audit showed that about 20% of employers misclassified their workers as independent contractors on their tax returns, resulting in a loss of over $44 billion in federal tax revenue while the rest of us paid our fair share.

To no one’s surprise, big business sprang into action, seeking to repeal or weaken AB5. They worked on several fronts, but were met each time by organizations, like CELA, dedicated to the protection of workers’ rights.

Now big business has latched on to a new excuse to strip away AB5’s protections from California workers. With the global pandemic going on, they say, they can’t afford to pay their taxes or be held accountable for their wage theft violations. For example, Rep. Darrell Issa, former Republican Congressman and now candidate for Congress, has asked Governor Newsom to repeal AB5.

As Lorena Gonzalez, Democratic Assemblywoman who was one of the AB5’s authors, said, “It takes a special kind of politician to attempt to take away the new rights of countless workers to paid sick leave, unemployment insurance, and healthcare during a pandemic.”

It takes a lot of steps to arrive at the conclusion that AB5 should be repealed. The notion of forcing workers, especially low wage workers, to expose themselves to disease and illness by going back to work, while at the same time removing their employer provided healthcare required by AB5, reveals a distorted view of reality.

Every day, we read and hear the statistics of the novel Coronavirus-19 spreading, and doing so more now that states have begun prematurely allowing businesses to reopen. One would truly have to ignore the evidence of their own eyes and ears to conclude that this is the right time to remove the worker protections put in place by AB5.