California AB 5: The law on the regulation of large retailers is a gain for workers

After two hours of debate on Tuesday, it happened: the California Senate voted AB 5. This was adopted.

Democratic lawmakers applauded. Supporters of the bill applauded online.

"I have tears in my eyes and goosebumps on my limbs," wrote Veena Dubal, Professor of Law at the University of California at Hastings.

The passage of AB 5 – which should still be formal – a vote of the state assembly and the signature of Governor Gavin Newsom – should be considered a new progressive victory in California. But it's more than that. It is also a historic moment for the American labor movement.

By preventing employers from qualifying employees as self-employed independent contractors, millions of California workers who have not been laid off will for the first time enjoy basic labor rights, such as overtime and unemployment benefits. This includes janitors, construction workers, security guards and hotel cleaners – and yes, this group also includes Uber and Lyft drivers.

"It's symbolic, it's huge," said César Rosado Marzán, professor of labor law and co-director of the Illinois Institute of Law and Labor. Institute of Technology. "The pride of California is the technology. Now they are passing a law saying that these people are your employees and that you must take care of them. This shows that unions and activists are very attractive. "

The transition from AB 5 also means that millions of new workers will now have the right to join unions. Consider this: When US state tax investigators audited about 8,000 California companies in 2017, they discovered that nearly half a million employees had been misclassified or had otherwise been overlooked.

The increase in misclassification is one of the reasons that unions have been systematically weakened since the 1980s, "said William Gould, a law professor at Stanford University. former chairman of the National Labor Relations Board. This partly explains why only 1 in 10 workers is unionized today, compared to 3 out of 10 in the 1950s.

"This bill will, for the first time, really tackle the phenomenon of misclassification," he said.

Moving AB 5 to the Legislative Assembly is perhaps one of the most important union victories in decades, if only because the labor movement has had very few victories in the past 40 years. years. But this is especially important because of California's position as one of the world's largest economies and its disproportionate influence on national politics. If a state can begin to reverse the downsizing of unions, it is California.

Where California goes, other states often follow

As Republicans decided to defeat unions in Midwestern states starting in 2010, progressive state lawmakers lobbied for more work-friendly policies. These policies often began in California and were subsequently adopted by other states.

For example, in 2004, California became the first state to impose paid time off work for families. This has prompted a wave of other states to do the same, including Rhode Island, Washington, New Jersey and New York. In March 2016, California was the first state to adopt a $ 15 minimum wage bill. Since then, more than a dozen other states have also done so. In July, California lawmakers were the first to ban natural hair discrimination in the workplace. A few days later, lawmakers in the state of New York passed a similar bill.

This dynamic is one of the reasons why AB 5 could have such a wide impact, says Gould of Stanford.

But AB 5 will not solve everything. In fact, Gould predicts that not all companies will happily convert their independent contractors into employees. They can wait for workers to take legal action, particularly those that force them to sign arbitration agreements, under which they pledge to file a complaint in a private arbitration court instead of the court system.

Uber, for example, has always resisted regulation, so that the company can wait for the workers to file an arbitration complaint to obtain employee status. Senators, however, amended the bill on Tuesday to give cities the power to enforce the law.

There is also a debate as to whether workers in the mass economy sector can unionize, even under AB 5. The National Labor Relations Commission of Trump, which enforces federal laws on trade unions , recently decided that workers in this sector are independent contractors and not employees, which means that they do not have the right to unionize.

"It's a big problem at the national level, but there are still huge hurdles to overcome," said Gould.

However, hundreds of thousands of workers – perhaps millions of people – will see an immediate impact on their working conditions after the change. Those who can join unions would also have the right to negotiate their wages and benefits.

What does AB 5 mean for technology companies and workers

Ten years ago, Silicon Valley technology companies were the pride of California and America. Global investors have invested fortunes in startups like Uber. Legislators across the country have backed down, but failed to regulate them. Congressional and Sacramento lawmakers sat down and watched technology companies take more power, buy competitors and turn themselves into giants.

This non-intervention approach has since returned to us. A scandal after a scandal caused the Silicon Valley halo to lose a lot of its spark: technology companies sold unauthorized user data, allowed bad actors to manipulate their platforms, built systems for the worse. Artificial intelligence, took advantage of exploitative business models and created misogynistic working cultures.

Meanwhile, the technicians called the managers on the impact of the industry on society. Google employees, for example, have changed the policies of their company with sustained actions, testifying to the growing power of workers and the labor movement as a whole. After thousands of Google employees and contractors organized a global event in November, the company accepted some of their requests to change its rules on sexual harassment.

The pilots Uber and Lyft were also vocal. More than 5,000 of them joined Rideshare Drivers United, an unofficial group that defends the interests of taxi drivers across the country. The California-based group helped organize a global strike in May to protest Uber's pay cuts before the company was made public.

"Global unions are also paying close attention to the transition from # AB5 to the legislative process. We want an international governance framework for #gigeconomy workers that can help end the scourge of misclassification. #Canada can be a source of inspiration, tweeted Ruwan Subasinghe, legal director of the International Transport Workers Federation, last week.

Ten years ago, Democratic legislators would have been terrified of suppressing the entertainment economy with a bill as ambitious as AB 5. But the power dynamics have changed. It was clear when the leaders of the presidency, including Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris, approved AB 5 last month.

"All Democrats must stand up and say, without coverage, that we support AB 5 and that we support employee status for entertainment workers," Warren said in an editorial earlier this month.

The adoption of the law is a triumph for workers after decades of brutal political losses.

How the victory of AB 5 fits in the recent history of losses of the trade union movement

To truly understand why the adoption of the AB 5 by the California Senate is a historic moment, it is important to understand the three most devastating losses for the labor movement over the last three decades and how they paved the way. to the revival of American labor.

At the height of the labor movement in the 1960s and 1970s, it was common for private and public sector workers to go on strike. In fact, it was the most effective tool for negotiating higher wages for working-class Americans. And while companies have the legal right to replace striking employees with temporary workers, employers rarely did so at the time, for fear of angering their staff.

All this changed in 1981.

On August 3, 1981, nearly 13,000 air traffic controllers went on strike after the failure of negotiations with the federal government to increase their wages and shorten their workweek. Approximately 7,000 flights were canceled. On the same day, President Ronald Reagan declared the strike illegal and threatened to fire anyone who did not return to work within 48 hours.

Reagan was angered and executed his threat by firing the 11,359 air traffic controllers who had not returned to work. In an astonishing gesture, he declared a lifelong ban on rehiring strikers by the Federal Aviation Administration.

In ending the Air Traffic Controllers strike, Reagan and his National Labor Relations Board encouraged businesses to do the same. In the following years and decades, employers began hiring lawyers to deploy aggressive tactics against striking workers to deter them from rebelling.

Unsurprisingly, major strikes in the United States have gone from an average of 300 per year in the decades leading up to the air traffic controllers' strike to less than 30 in recent years:

United States Department of Labor

"More than any other labor dispute of the last three decades, Reagan's confrontation with the [air-traffic controllers] undermine the bargaining power of American workers and their unions, "wrote Joseph McCartin, a Georgetown University historian, in a New York Times editorial.

Workers everywhere were afraid to go on strike. Then, about a decade later, union workers suffered another blow.

Despite strong resistance from unions, President Bill Clinton signed the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1993, paving the way for tariff-free trade between the United States, Canada, and Mexico. .

Trade union leaders feared at the time that letting the goods cross the border without being taxed would cause American manufacturers too much to move their factories and jobs to Mexico, a country where wages were extremely low and environmental standards less stringent. NAFTA proponents rejected the idea, saying that boosting trade would raise the wages of low-skilled Mexican workers, lift millions of people out of poverty and make it less attractive for companies to transfer factories. in Mexico.

It certainly did not happen. Competition from American farms was largely responsible for put over 1 million Mexican farm workers are unemployed and the unemployment rate in Mexico is higher today than it was at the time. The trade agreement was also directly responsible for the loss of more than 840,000 jobs in US factories, most of which have been transferred to Mexico. Last year, Ford announced the closure of one of its auto plants and the opening of another in Mexico.

Steven Greenhouse, former union reporter for The New York Times, writes that the decline in manufacturing jobs over the last 20 years has seriously eroded the number of union members. He sums up the impact in his new book, Beaten, worked: the past, the present and the future of American work:

Globalization has thrown workers into direct competition with low-wage workers in China, Mexico, India and other countries, leading to lower wages. Partly because of imports and outsourcing, more than 60,000 factories have closed since 2000, pushing many unions and workers to fear aggressive wage demands, which could create even more jobs exported abroad.

President Trump's administration recently negotiated a version of the NAFTA with stronger labor protections, known as the US-Mexico-Canada Trade Agreement, but union leaders fear they will not be strong enough . Meanwhile, US companies are still moving manufacturing jobs in Mexico because they can pay poverty wages.

Another loss of labor occurred when Republicans took control of a historic number of state legislatures at the mid-term in 2010. With support From pro-business groups, lawmakers have begun to extend anti-union anti-union laws from the South to the Midwest through a strong union presence.

These laws, called right to work laws, prohibit unionized workplaces from charging fees to employees who do not want to pay them. This creates what is known as the "stowaway" problem in which some workers benefit from union contracts but choose not to pay them. These laws also weigh on the finances of the unions because they encourage workers not to pay dues.

In 2012, lawmakers from Indiana and Michigan passed bills giving the right to work. At the time, the country was going through a period of great recession and politicians had promised that the loosening of labor laws would attract business to the state and reverse the economic situation. Since then, Wisconsin, Kentucky, and West Virginia have also enacted laws on the right to work.

Missouri was becoming the 28th state to adopt such a law. In 2017, Republican Eric Greitens, then governor of the state, signed the bill of right to worksaying that it would encourage businesses to move to the state. But Missouri workers and union leaders fought. They gathered about 300,000 signatures – more than double the number required – to freeze the law and put it on the ballot for voters to decide. In August 2018, voters rejected the bill.

The public rejection of the Missouri Right to Work Bill was a small victory for American workers during years of repeated defeats. But of all the states, it is usually California that wins these small gains for the workers.

The future of the labor movement

Despite decades of loss, the labor movement has intensified over the past two years.

It started with the widespread teachers strike in West Virginia in January 2018, followed by teachers from Oklahoma, Arizona, Kentucky, California and Colorado. Soon, thousands of Marriott workers were on strike to demand a higher salary too.

In fact, a record number of US workers went on strike or stopped working in 2018 due to labor disputes with employers, according to new data published in February by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. In total, 485,000 employees were involved in major work stoppages last year – the highest number since 1986, when flight attendants, garbage menand the steelworkers left work.

The growing number of workers involved in labor strikes suggests that average Americans do not know the "economic miracle"That President Donald Trump has described. They see the expanding economy and the profits go up, but that does not extend to their paychecks.

A new generation of young workers, who do not remember the crackdown on striking employees and who suffered the most from rising income inequality, took the lead in organizing a grassroots labor movement.

Frustrated public school teachers were behind the biggest walkouts of last year but hotel housekeepers and the steelworkers also organized strikes that lasted several days. And in most cases, the actions worked.

But it is not only striking that the return in vogue. Many of the progressive policies adopted in states like California, Oregon, New York and Washington have been transferred to the federal level.

Congress is currently considering bills to give workers benefits such as paid sick leave and paid family leave. Democratic legislators have also introduced important labor reform bills that would greatly facilitate union membership of workers. One of them is the Law on Protection of the Right to Organize, which would prohibit the right to work laws in all states.

There is even a version of the Congress that imitates AB 5, called the Workplace and Democracy Act, introduced by Senator Bernie Sanders. The bill would require all employers to apply the same strict standards as California to determine whether a person is an employee or an independent contractor. Now that California has won, it may be only a matter of time before workers from all over the country have theirs.