As Election Day nears, California voters are being bombarded with ads featuring smiling Black and brown faces championing Proposition 22, the initiative by Uber Technologies Inc., Lyft Inc. and other gig companies that seeks to exempt them from a state law requiring them to treat drivers and delivery workers as employees.
In the Yes on 22 campaign’s expenditures reported to the California Secretary of State, payments to Huffman’s consulting firm, AC Public Affairs, were identified as payments to “campaign consultants.” The campaign has disclosed $3.97 million in payments to more than two dozen campaign consultants, roughly a fourth of what their opponents have spent in total but less than 3% of the money that the Yes on 22 campaign has collected.
The Yes on 22 campaign lists a few dozen supporters it calls “community advocates,” and uses the names of those groups prominently in its many mailers to California residents. But one of those groups, Black Lives Matter Sacramento, was taken off the list after MarketWatch brought to the campaign’s attention that its leader, Tanya Faison, said she was an individual supporter of the initiative but that the rest of the group was not.
Likewise, Bay Area-based Black Women Organized for Political Action said in a statement that “Our PAC board deliberated on this position and ultimately surveyed our membership and drivers within our circle of family, friends and colleagues who happened to be largely African-American. Most felt strongly that they wanted to remain as independent contractors/freelancers with this freedom to work when they choose to do so.
The companies tout schedule flexibility as their main selling point, and warn that hundreds of thousands of people in the state could lose their ability to make money if they must be considered employees instead of independent contractors. Over the summer, Uber and Lyft even threatened to leave California when a judge ordered them to immediately comply with state law and classify their drivers as employees.“Uber and Lyft leaving California would hurt us more,” Tulloss said.