Don Mitchell: "From Share-Farming to Ride Sharing: How Cucumber Farmers and Strawberry Workers in the 1980s Shaped the California Gig Economy in the 2020s"

ABSTRACT:

Passed by California voters in November 2020, Uber-sponsored Proposition 22 swept away the suite of labor rights and protections for delivery and “ride-share” workers the legislature had vouchsafed in 2019 when it passed Assembly Bill 5. AB5 had its roots in a landmark 2018 California Supreme Court decision called Dynamex. The jurisprudential roots of Dynamex are to be found not among gig workers in the 2010s, however, but pickling cucumber and strawberry workers in the 1970s and 80s, when growers sought to reclassify many of their workers as sharecropping “independent contractors.” A landmark 1989 case, Borello & Sons, determined, however, that sharecroppers in California were in fact employees. But because a related case, concerning Furukawa Farms strawberry workers in was never satisfactorily resolved, a crucial question – whether sharecroppers could be both employees and share in profits – was left hanging, leaving an opening for the later tech delivery and chauffeuring companies to misclassify their workers as independent contractors. It was this opening that Dynamex and AB5 sought to close and that the tech companies vanquished with Proposition 22. This talk will trace this series of events and decisions, focusing especially on the struggles at Furukawa Farms to show the difference missed opportunities make in shaping workers’ rights.