As Will reported this weekend, a unanimous Ninth Circuit panel reinstated Uber and Postmates’s constitutional claim against California’s A.B. 5 on Friday. The panel remanded the case back to district court to reconsider enjoining the law in light of the decision. This decision represents the latest development in efforts by large employers of app-based workers to resist classifying those workers as employees.
Companies such as Uber assert that classifying their workers as independent contractors is essential to their business model. But others have observed that workers classified as independent contractors lack a slew of legal protections, making them vulnerable to exploitation. Recent years have seen hundreds of app-based workers — such as Uber and Lyft drivers — protesting for better working conditions and legal protections.
In its 2018 decision in Dynamex, the Supreme Court of California adopted the “ABC test” to classify workers for the purposes of California wage orders. The ABC standard adopts a presumption that a worker is an employee. To refute that presumption, the employer must demonstrate each of three factors: (A) that the worker is free from the control and direction of the hiring entity in connection with the performance of the work, both under the contract for the performance of the work and in fact; and (B) that the worker performs work that is outside the usual course of the hiring entity’s business; and (C) that the worker is customarily engaged in an...
Earlier this month, in United States ex rel. Zafirov v. Florida Medical Associates, Inc., the Eleventh Circuit joined four other circuits in holding that the qui tam provisions of the False Claims ...