...the California Supreme Court rocked the world of actual existing American capitalism by unanimously ruling that workers who are labeled “independent contractors” actually have to be independent and contractors—not mislabeled employees. In a suit brought by truckers for a delivery company who had formerly been that company’s employees until that company re-labeled them, the Court ruled that such mislabeling was illegal in the nation’s largest state.
The full implications of the ruling remain unclear, but it likely affects the tens of thousands of drivers who deliver goods from the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach to the warehouses of companies like Walmart, the tens of thousands of drivers for companies like Uber and Lyft, and the tens of thousands of construction workers employed on long-term construction projects. If the company sets the workers' wage rates and restricts them to working just for them, the Court ruled, then those workers are employees, no matter what their employers call them. California's stellar labor commissioner, Jerry Brown-appointee Julie Su, has been leveling back-pay settlements on a host of misclassifying employers for much of the past decade, but until now, she's been constrained to do so only when the individual worker has brought suit. The Court's decision might enable the state to render judgments on a broader basis.
It's interesting to note that among the justices who ruled in favor of the drivers were a number of Arnold Schwarzenegger appointees to the Court, including Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye, who authored the decision. In hindsight, Schwarzenegger increasingly looks like the nation's last moderate Republican elected official, a distinction he achieved by having been elected without having to go through a Republican primary (he won the governorship in the election, open to all voters, that recalled Gray Davis). Like earlier moderate Republicans—President Eisenhower, for instance, who appointed both Earl Warren and William Brennan to the U.S. Supreme Court—Schwarzenegger appointed justices who've taken notice of the lives of real people, which is certainly what they did in their emancipatory ruling earlier this week.
