California Assemblywoman Celebrates The RIAA Giving Her A Gold Record For Exempting Musicians From Her Terrible AB5 Law

Politics

from the that-seems-hellishly-corrupt dept

For a year now we’ve been writing about the disastrous impact of California’s AB5 law that was designed to “protect” gig workers by basically outlawing nearly all freelance work in California, and requiring much of it to be only done by salaried employees. It has impacted many industries very hard, including freelance journalists. The author of the bill, Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez has been insultingly dismissive of those who have highlighted how much harm her bill has done.

Though, as the complaints got louder and louder, she finally admitted that she might be open to some changes of parts of the bill. But, that’s not what actually happened. Instead of fixing the larger bill, she just agreed to duct tape on a bunch of exemptions — including for many of the industries that were most vocal about how much damage her bill was doing. This included freelance writers, photojournalists, freelance editors, copy editors, youth sports coaches, landscape architects, cartographers, and musicians among many others.

Now, normally, if you have to go back to the drawing board to add a dozen and a half exemptions to the bill you just passed, it would be a sign that perhaps the bill itself is a problem. Indeed, lawyers are already saying that this “may be just the start of amendments to AB5 that will carve out other industries and occupations.” And even the journalist exemptions are not complete and still have many journalists worried that they won’t be able to freelance under the law.

But what’s really disgusting is that Lorena Gonzalez took to Twitter this weekend to celebrate the fact that the RIAA sent her a gold record as a “thank you” for carving musicians out of AB5. Of course, that’s not the way she put it in her tweet about it:

She says:

I never imagined that my only ?gold record? would be a thank you from the Recording Industry Association for working to right-size Dynamex & AB5 for musicians. But, I?ll take it! (Have you heard me on Karaoke though??)

“Right-size” is a funny way to say “oops, we fucked up your ability to make a living, and then had to rewrite the law to exempt you from my own disastrous law.” And that’s not even mentioning just how corrupt it seems for her to then be showing off that the lobbyists for the recording industry sent her a gold record as a thank you. Are other industries looking for an exemption from her damaging law now supposed to send gold plated awards as well? The whole thing is unseemly. AB5 was a bad bill from the start that has harmed a ton of people. Instead of creating exemptions, we should get rid of it — or, even better yet, write a law that fixes the Dynamex decision that Gonzalez insists requires AB5 in the first place.

Filed Under: ab5, awards, california, exemptions, freelancers, gig workers, gold record, journalists, lorena gonzalez, musicians
Companies: riaa