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Uber sues California to block gig-worker law going into effect this week:
Ride-hailing service Uber filed a lawsuit Monday against the state of California, alleging a landmark gig-worker law set to go into effect is unconstitutional. The lawsuit seeks to block AB 5, which has the potential to upend gig economy companies such as Uber and Lyft.
The complaint, which also lists Postmates as a plaintiff, argues that the law unfairly targets workers and companies in the on-demand economy, treating them differently than traditional employees and threatening their flexibility.
In September, California became the first state to pass a law aimed at protecting gig worker rights, which forces Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, Postmates and other gig economy companies reclassify their workers as employees. Using independent contractors allows the companies to shift many costs to the workers.
The lawsuit says the law arbitrarily exempts dozens of occupations, including direct salespeople, travel agents, grant writers, commercial fishermen and construction truck drivers, among others.
"There is no rhyme or reason to these nonsensical exemptions, and some are so ill-defined or entirely undefined that it is impossible to discern what they include or exclude," says the complaint (see below), which was filed in a Los Angeles federal court.
Postmates and Uber v State of California on Scribd
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 01 2020, @10:59PM
> This is what double-entry book-keeping is all about. For every debit there is a matching credit.
About 25 years ago my parents invited me to join the tiny engineering company that my father started when he retired. One of their issues was keeping up with the books (finances): invoicing, paying a few engineers that moonlighted as contractors, making sure all taxes and bills were paid, etc.
Naively I decided learn about Accounting--went to the library and took out a couple of text books that looked like "accounting 101". After some study, it hit me: Traditional accounting was developed by the owners/bosses to minimize embezzling and other forms of employee theft. By separating Accounts Receivable and Accounts Payable into two departments, and then further splitting functions among different people, cheating the books would be much harder for one person on the accountant staff.
If the company is so small that one person can do all the work, then you'd better trust them! Not an issue in our family, we discussed finances all the time and got along great (my parents are gone now). On the flip side, a few times a year I see a local news item about a book keeper caught with hand in the till. Sometimes it's a small company, other times it's a church or other charity.