CALIFORNIA’S PROP 22 STANDS TALL, AND A.B. 5 IS DEALT ANOTHER SETBACK: MARCH 2023 IC LEGAL NEWS UPDATE
Three of the five court cases of note in this monthly update involve California’s Assembly Bill 5, which has exponentially increased litigation involving independent contractor misclassification in that state. That development dispels any notion that that law would provide clarity, simplify the test for independent contractor status, and reduce litigation. Instead, it upended decades of settled law by codifying a strict test for IC status that now contains as many as 75 exemptions. Moreover, few businesses in California have reclassified workers from ICs to employees. The three cases summarized below include one that validates Proposition 22, a voter initiative that rejected A.B. 5 for app-based ride sharing and courier companies. Another involves a lawsuit by companies in those same industries alleging that A.B. 5 did not provide them with an exemption, as it does for dozens of other industries, due to the “animus” of the legislature toward those app-based businesses. A federal appellate court agreed that the lawsuit is plausible and may proceed. The third case involves litigation filed in 2015 that has seen a number of appeals over the application of A.B. 5. One way by which companies operating in California can minimize IC misclassification exposure is to utilize one of the exemptions in A.B. 5 and its successor law, A.B. 2257. Many have sought to do so by resorting to a process such as IC Diagnostics (TM), which enhances IC compliance by restructuring, re-documenting, and/or re-implementing IC relationships in a customized and sustainable manner in view of applicable law, including A.B 5.
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