200 million dollars question: are Uber drivers employees or contractors?

 While people are refreshing websites every 10 minutes for the presidential election vote counts, California has another vote counts for Proposition 22 that might have not catch your attention. Proposition 22 is a proposition made by Uber, Lyft, Doordash and others alike to classify their drivers as contractors to avoid providing health care and other benefits. These companies spent around $205 million on their Yes campaign. And it is paying off: Yes has 58% support comparing to No has 41% support. Interestingly, both sides have strong data from “independent research” to back their arguments.

From the Prop 22 campaign, It was calculated that “‘hundreds of thousands of jobs’ will be lost if Proposition 22 fails”. And survey shows that 4 times more drivers would like to remain as independent contractors. However, these studies are heavily financed by Uber, Lyft and others. Berkeley Research Group took $400k from them and their research result is that “at least 80% of driver jobs would disappear if gig economy companies were forced to classify workers as employees”. And even University of California, Riverside has research funded by these companies and unsurprisingly concluded results in favor of them.