Following their successful effort to gull California voters into endorsing their method of exploiting their drivers and field workers, Uber, Lyft and other gig companies expanded their campaign to gut labor protections into other states.
That included Massachusetts, where the companies managed to get two measures resembling California’s Proposition 22 certified for the state ballot. On Tuesday, the state’s Supreme Judicial Court threw them out.
The high court’s reasoning was similar to that of Judge Frank Roesch of Alameda County Superior Court, who ruled Proposition 22 unconstitutional in August: The Massachusetts initiatives were overly greedy, and designed to confuse voters about their real purpose.
[Proposals ] that bury separate policy decisions in obscure language heighten concerns that voters will be confused, misled, and deprived of a meaningful choice.
— Massachusetts Justice Scott Kafker
Indeed, the Massachusetts justices wrote, they themselves found untangling the obscure language of the proposed ballot measures to be “no simple task.”
The gig companies say they will now try to persuade the state Legislature to enact the provisions they tried to sneak past the voters.
“We hope the Legislature will stand with the 80% of drivers who want flexibility and to remain independent contractors while having access to new benefits,” Conor Yunits, a spokesperson for Flexibility & Benefits for Massachusetts Drivers, the campaign group for the gig companies, told me by...
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