Uber & Lyft drivers are employees - video
Uber and Lyft have been preliminarily enjoined from classifying their drivers as independent contractors rather than employees and the California Court of Appeal has affirmed that injunction. The People v. Uber (Cal Ct App 10/22/2020) [PDF].
The California legislature adopted Assembly Bill 5, which adopts the ABC test for determining who’s an employee and who's an independent contractor, and that statute allows the Attorney General to bring a law suit to enjoin violations.
Assembly Bill 5 presumes that workers are employees unless the company can prove A, B, and C, and this case actually involves only the B part which is whether the drivers perform duties that are outside the normal course of business of Uber and Lyft.
Of course Uber and Lyft are saying well look … we're technology platforms, and all we're doing is lining up drivers with passengers. We're not in the transportation business.
And the court took a lot of evidence and they decided that yeah, Uber and Lyft are actually in the transportation business. So their drivers are performing the work of a transportation company.
The Court of Appeal took a look at that preliminary injunction and said Uber and Lyft are very likely to lose on the merits, and it'll be a substantial hardship if the Attorney General can't get this injunction, and when they balance the harms from the standpoint of the defendants and the standpoint of the plaintiffs, it all shook out so that the Attorney General is going to keep that injunction.
Now, what's happened is that the court has put a stay on that injunction until after the November 3d election, and on that election day we have Proposition 22, which would remove Assembly Bill 5 and substitute a whole new classification of workers just for these gig employers. So we'll wait and see what happens on November 3d. Otherwise, Uber and Lyft are going to have to classify their drivers as employees.