Posted on 12/23/2019 4:28:36 PM PST by karpov
A nonprofit legal foundation is suing California on behalf of freelance workers who say the state's recently passed Assembly Bill 5 (AB5) will destroy their livelihoods. Set to take effect on January 1, 2020, AB5 will make it illegal for contractors who reside in California to create more than 35 pieces of content in a year for a single company, unless the outlet hires them as an employee.
"By enforcing the 35-submission limit, Defendant, acting under color of state law, unconstitutionally deprives Plaintiffs' members of their freedom of speech as protected by the First and Fourteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution," states the lawsuit, which was filed by the Pacific Legal Foundation.
The bill's pending implementation has wreaked havoc on publications that rely heavily on California freelancers. Just last week, Vox Media announced it will not be renewing the contracts of around 200 journalists who write for the sports website SB Nation. Instead, the company will replace many of those contractors with 20 part-time and full-time employees. Rev, which provides transcription services, and Scripted, which connects freelance copywriters with people who need their services, also notified their California contractors that they would no longer give them work.
"Companies can simply blacklist California writers and work with writers in other states, and that's exactly what's happening," Alisha Grauso, an entertainment journalist and the co-leader of California Freelance Writers United (CAFWU), tells Reason. "I don't blame them."
Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez (D-San Diego), the architect of AB5, has heard these stories. "I'm sure some legit freelancers lost substantial income," she tweeted in the wake of Vox's announcement, "and I empathize with that especially this time of year. But Vox is a vulture."
"These were never good jobs," Gonzalez said earlier this month. "No one has ever suggested that, even freelancers."
(Excerpt) Read more at reason.com ...
That takes money, and it wipes out the people who do the occasional pickup for extra money. This hurts the 5% with a part time gig for extra money more than the 10% who do this full time for a living.
The worst thing about California is that a lot more things cause cancer for you than they do for people from other states; at least that’s what the labels say.../s
California Uber Alles!
What you just posted is very interesting and of great importance. More Californians should know about it!
Maybe you can re-post this comment as a Vanity Post on FR,
if you ever felt like it.
Ha...you must be joking
A simple LLC designation cost minimum tax of $800 a year in CA
Incorporation is more complex and CPA advised
Better just learn to code.
The elephant in the room that has not weighed in on this yet are Tech contractors. Companies like Microsoft, Google, Facebook and Amazon all have contingent workforces that are often equal in size to their direct staff. I know I am one. If I were limited to producing only 25 deliverables for a customer, I know some customers that I could only work for about 1 month/year. If this is applied to tech contractors, imagine massive wailing and gnashing of teeth from Big Tech.
>> The watch dog media are lap dogs
That would be Comcast, Disney, and now ATT.
Yeah. Way screwy, Way unfair. But it has never really been about fairness but about attempting to legislate results. It reminds me of Dingus Moore on Monty Python. A Robin Hood character who steals from the rich and gives to the poor until the poor are rich and the rich are poor and he has to reverse the whole thing.
She wrote the law to create unionized work, which in turn will kill majors parts of several industries. Democrats have become the very animals the Classical Liberals protested hard against, in fact even worse than they ever conceived. Todays Democrats are yesterdays Fascists
Not a half bad idea. Though I imagine it could be published online on any obscure site after a fixed period of time of exclusivity for the main publisher, where the author would earn from ad revenues off that page. On a side note, the upside for readers of news is the industry may end up hiring better talent if they can’t rely on too few of these college age freelancers.
Someone mentioned musicians. What about session musicians who are hired for gigs or recordings? Sometimes they will do 35 takes just for a single song - does each take count as a submission?
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