You're assuming they're all being exploited. In the case of the folks I know, that is very much not the case.
They were all doing gig work on the side, didn't need the benefits and just wanted the extra cash. The business was basically like a guild in an adventure RPG/ anime where they acted as the source for information and scheduled the gigs and the workers just came in and took the jobs they wanted. The business took a cut for setting up the gig and the workers took the rest.
That's how the business model was set up because that's how it was allowed to be set-up. Prop 22 would have destroyed that, meaning everyone involved would have lost all the income from that and none of them wanted that.
The company wasn't threatening to kill their job, the business would have been closed completely because it couldn't support the cost of doing business anymore if it had to pay the extra stuff Prop 22 was requiring, which the workers didn't want, didn't need, or didn't care about because this was all side work for the vast majority of them.
There are many different types of gig workers, acting as if it's a one size fits all space and having one part of it act differently than another doesn't make them a class traitor. They're not all the same "class" because they're not all in the same situation.A model a great many despise and have been aggressively lied to about, and a model that many accepted simply because they needed to work and this was all there was for them. Or they needed a second gig and this is all they could get. Begging for scraps from corporate overlords ain't great, and that's again, pretty "class traitor".
Gig workers work differently than regular employees and had different rules and regulations as a result of that. I don't think a one size fits all requirement for gig workers to be treated as regular employees is the best option. They're not regular employees. In some cases they work one gig a month, even a regular company doesn't pay for benefits for workers that don't work "full time."Correct, it was built around exploiting the ever-living fuck out of drivers and gig workers, pushing off costs to them while limiting expenses by denying them benefits etc.
Generally the history of labor is companies trying to do this very thing and getting eventually owned by the workers.
I'm still not really understanding how they're "exploiting the fuck" out of their workers, when in the case of the business/ people I know, this was all done on the side and not one of them needed, wanted or cared about the benefits and extra stuff Prop 22 was requiring because they already had those benefits from their regular job, were retired and had benefits, etc...So they don't have a functional business model that's not built on exploiting the fuck outta their workers? Sounds like AB5 was a pretty good thing, then!
"that's what their workers signed up for" remains the worst corporate-slave argument around.
"I guess we shouldn't ask for bathroom breaks, we knew what we signed up for."
"I guess we don't deserve days off or overtime, we knew what we signed up for."
"I guess we don't need safety regulations, we knew this dangerous job we we signed up for."
That's obviously not the case for everyone, though.
I'm all for fixing the situation, but Prop 22 wasn't how to do it, and apparently folks agreed because that's how they voted.