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For these reasons, the labor-law professor Veena Dubal recently described Prop 22 as the most radical undoing of labor legislation since Taft-Hartley in 1947the Truman-era bill that curbed the power of unions and laid the groundwork for the adoption of so-called right-to-work laws across many states. If tech companies ultimately succeed in their quest to export the California model nationwide, they may hasten an even more profound transformation of Americas labor market. As The American Prospects Alexander Sammon has pointed out, Prop 22s almost immediate embrace by grocery chains is beginning to make companies like Uber, Lyft, and DoorDash look more like traditional staffing agencies than innovative, high-tech products. Tantalized by the possibility of lower labor costs, businesses of every kind may convert to an independent workforce when laws allowpotentially cementing the gig economy and its ethos of precarity-enabled consumer convenience as the norm everywhere.

The ballot measures backstory is arguably as noteworthy as its contents. Although anti-worker policies have a storied history in relation to Republican governors and conservative ideology, the milieu that gave birth to Prop 22 was as blue as San Francisco Bay. Five Big Tech companies bankrolled the $200 million Yes on Prop. 22 campaign, but the idea has deep roots in the Democratic Party and in American liberalism as a whole.

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Most obviously, its core concept (the need for a third category of worker alongside employees and independent contractors) comes from a 2015 policy paper co-authored by former Obama Acting Labor Secretary (and presidential-campaign adviser to Joe Biden) Seth Harris. Harris, who departed the Obama administration for a perch at the employer-side law firm Dentons, argued that the flexibility nominally associated with gig workers (particularly the fact that employers like Uber dont technically fix their hours) sets them apart from traditional employees. Tony West, another Obama alum and a senior vice president at Uber, helped write the tech companies legal strategy, and also co-chaired Kamala Harriss 2016 Senate transition team. (West is also the now vice presidents brother-in-law.)

Despite their ties to Silicon Valley, both Biden and Harris did officially come out against Prop 22as did other prominent national Democrats (Californias Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, revealingly, stayed silent). Not clear yet is how vocal theyll be on the issue in office, although the prominence of personnel from the likes of Uber, Lyft, and Amazon during the recent presidential transition was certainly less than encouraging.

However these tensions ultimately play out in the new administration, the Prop 22 debate, which pitted gig companies against a badly outgunned alliance of unions and labor-advocacy groups, was also in a sense a battle between an older incarnation of liberalism and the form its taken since the 1990s. Although the Democratic Party has never been a straightforwardly labor-based or social-democratic formation in the mold of Britains mid-century Labour Party, its greatest lasting achievements (notably the New Deal) inarguably came, to quote the Princeton historian Matthew Karp, because it was a party of workers.

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Liberals Are Choosing Convenience Over Workers - The Atlantic