#prop 22

11.4.20. California

Follow the money. Always. On the left, in blue, you see who is supporting the YES position, and how much they’ve spent. On the right, in red, you can see who is opposing and how much they’re spending.

In general, I support unions and I support workers. In general, I oppose corporations and monopolies who seek to manipulate our laws with deceptive advertising and ballot initiatives.

In general, as long as I’ve been a voter (since 1990) I’ve been able to conclude that I want to support the opposite position I’m seeing on television, because the corporations and sick billionaires who pay for blanket television advertising NEVER share my values.

So this is a very useful graphic that shows you who is paying for the pro and against campaigns in California. It follows my instincts, and doesn’t affect how I was going to vote, but it’s still striking to see, visually, how much corporations are spending to influence our votes.

Look at 22, which was put on the ballot to undermine legislation already passed to protect gig workers and require the companies who are exploiting them to pay them a living wage, offer benefits, and treat their drivers with the respect and compensation they deserve.

Uber and the rest of them are so greedy, they are willing to spend almost $200 MILLION DOLLARS to make sure they don’t have to pay their drivers a living wage. They want the public and their drivers to believe that, if Uber et al are required to pay them a living wage, it’s going to somehow hurt their employees. 

If these companies are willing to spend $200 million to enshrine into law their ability to exploit their workers, how much money are they withholding from their drivers?!

Prop 22 was (intentionally?) poorly worded and it indiscriminately covered too many contractors, like some freelance writers, for example.

Yes yes fuck Uber/Lyft rah rah rah meanwhile this is just as much on horrible government tax policy as it is on Uber/Lyft. The working person is getting squeezed between Uber’s rock and the tax code’s hard-place for independent contractors, who pay higher taxes on income than any other company or person in America, roughly 39.5% of all income for independent contractors get taken by the government. This income tax percentage is more like 19-25% for the richest Americans or for Americans who are able to have formal W2 employment in a year when over 50,000,000 American jobs were erased through violent governance and scapegoating a preventable pandemic. 

Make no mistake, I did my homework about prop 22 and eventually voted against prop 22 and encouraged everyone to join me. Only 42% voted against prop 22, meaning that now Uber/Lyft take as much exception to prop 5 as independent journalists, writers, and photographers. 

If the government just started taxing Uber/Lyft/Doordash/Instacart workers at the normal W2 employee rates that employees are taxed at, this whole labor mess (of rideshare drivers getting paid below minimum wage net every expense including astronomical income taxes) would evaporate. Meanwhile California billionaires still pay the lowest taxes in the state of any bracket, and they get to enjoy living in one of the nicest areas in the world essentially tax-free, meanwhile the paycheck-to-paycheck workers who shuttle their porky asses around get taxed at close to double the billionaires’ rate while making less than minimum wage, how the fuck is that fair in any way? If you’re a billionaire you should be tipping every Uber driver you hire like $300, and know that they are paid about $5 an hour to work in the SF Bay Area, one of the most expensive places in the world to live. Why have minimum wage laws at all when it’s this easy to get around them? Holy fuck. 

Sales people get this too, where the paltry “salary” they give you is taxed at W2 rates (aka 19.5%) while your “commissions” are taxed at the 1099 rate of 39.5%. But most companies sell people on earning high commissions as the way they will make the bulk of their salary, but again commissions are taxed double so you keep exponentially less of that than your W2 salary income. I call it total bullshit that stifles innovation to have taxes that high on working class people like myself, while the super-rich pay half that tax rate. And no republikkkan is coming to the aid of this defense because they hate the working class as much as a mosquito hates a cow (like “go ahead get malaria, bitch, i don’t care, i just need to suck your blood” vibes).