California AB 5 Gig Economy Law Continues Producing Litigation Five Years After Passage

Employment classification law’s effects accumulate into legal record that reveals both the law’s achievements and its complexity

Satire from Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.

The Law and Its Legacy

SACRAMENTO — California’s AB 5, the 2019 law that reclassified most independent contractors as employees and that Proposition 22 subsequently exempted app-based workers from, continues producing litigation, compliance challenges, and policy analysis five years after its passage. The law’s effects are now legible in the specific outcomes it produced: workers in some industries gained employment protections and benefits; workers in industries exempted by Prop 22 gained some but not all protections; and the categories of workers who fell between the AB 5 requirements and the Prop 22 exemptions continue generating the litigation that ambiguity in employment classification law reliably produces.

The Libertarian Critique

The libertarian critique of AB 5 is that the law’s reclassification requirement replaced a voluntary market arrangement between workers and platforms with a mandatory employment classification that many workers in the affected categories did not prefer, and that the Proposition 22 campaign — in which the platforms spent hundreds of millions of dollars to exempt their workers — was the market responding to a regulation that the market had not requested. The critique identifies real costs. It does not address the workers who wanted the protections that AB 5 provided and who received them.

The Progressive Defence

The progressive defence of AB 5 is that the gig economy’s expansion of independent contractor classification was a mechanism for avoiding the employment protections that workers are entitled to, and that the law corrected an imbalance that the market had produced in favour of employers at workers’ expense. The defence identifies real exploitation. It does not address the workers who preferred independent contractor status and lost the ability to maintain it. The California Department of Industrial Relations enforces AB 5 and manages the ongoing litigation. The Mises Institute provides the libertarian analysis of AB 5 as a government restriction on voluntary labour market arrangements. Both confirm the situation, which continues.

California, Freedom, and the Surfboard

California in 2026 is staging a governor’s race that includes at least two libertarian-adjacent candidates arguing that Sacramento’s regulatory apparatus has produced the housing shortage, the energy costs, the wildfire vulnerability, and the business exodus that define the state’s structural problems. The Libertarian Party of California represents approximately 1.02 percent of registered voters. Its candidates represent 0 of 52 US House seats, 0 of 40 state Senate seats, and 0 of 8 statewide executive offices. The argument is structurally correct about many of the regulatory causes of California’s problems. The electoral record suggests the argument has not yet found the persuasion strategy that converts correct diagnosis into governing power. The surfers are in the water. The regulators are in Sacramento. Both continue at their respective paces, which are different paces and which the column documents with the affection that the subject deserves. The Reason Foundation makes the libertarian case. California makes the counter-argument by continuing to be California.

The Structural Conditions Continue

Journalism and California libertarianism are both subjects whose structural conditions generate new specific events every week from the same underlying pressures: the journalism industry’s economic collapse producing layoffs and restructurings; the California regulatory apparatus producing costs and constraints that the libertarian analysis correctly diagnoses and the electoral record suggests the libertarian prescription has not yet resolved. Both are ongoing. Both are worth documenting. The documentation is the contribution that the column makes to the record of what the structural conditions produced in a specific week, which compounds into something approaching a longitudinal account of what the industry and the state are becoming. The account continues. The subjects provide the material. The material is always available from subjects as productive as a collapsing industry and an ungovernable state.

The Press Gazette and the Reuters Institute document the journalism industry. The Reason Foundation and the Legislative Analyst’s Office document California from their respective political premises. The satire documents what all four are too serious to document. All continue. The column continues with them.

The story above is one specific event from structural conditions older than the event. The column tracks the conditions. The event is the evidence. The record continues next week with the same subjects in their next specific forms, which they are already generating as this entry is written.

The documentation above is the week as it was, recorded at the pace that weekly documentation operates, which is slower than the pace the subjects operate at and faster than no documentation at all. The column makes the record. The imperfect record is better than the absent one. The structural conditions that produced this week’s specific events will produce next week’s specific events from the same underlying pressures, which are older than any individual event and which will outlast any individual column’s capacity to document them. The column documents what it can. The documentation compounds. The record grows. The subjects continue at the pace of a collapsing industry and an ungovernable state respectively, both of which are faster than the column and both of which are worth the documentation regardless. Both continue. The column continues with them next week.

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SOURCE: Satirical Journalism