IF YOU REALLY want to get ahead in politics, you need a heroic story. You start with a standard biography, then focus-group and hone it to perfectly capture the imagination of voters and the media. In skillful hands, a good story can be the foundation of a meteoric political rise.
California Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez has a great story. A second-generation Latina immigrant—her father was an agricultural worker, her mother a nurse who fought for unionization; degrees from Stanford, Georgetown, and UCLA; a devoted mother with a background in community organizing and labor politics; elected to the California General Assembly in 2013.
If you take those facts and add any of the breathlessly adulatory profiles of Gonzalez by local and national press, the narrative of a rising political star begins to form. The Atlantic praised her for “setting the national agenda.” The Voice of San Diego named her their 2019 Voice of the Year. Politico called her a trailblazer, the LA Times described her as “pugnacious and powerful.” And Gonzalez herself is always quick to index herself as a former labor leader always looking out for the little guy.
Now that’s a great story.
But there’s a downside to having the perfect heroic story: The more you tell it and the more you see it repeated back to you in campaign commercials and friendly media coverage, the more you might start believing it. You might start believing you actually are the hero of this story you tell.
And that’s when you start making mistakes.
It seems like that’s what happened to Lorena Gonzalez when she declared war against California’s freelance workers with AB5, a law that’s shaping up to be one of the most despised policy innovations of recent California history (and that’s really saying something).
Gonzalez pushed AB5 expecting it to be welcomed by California workers falling victim to evil corporations, but she was forced to respond to Californians more concerned with their liberties than Gonzalez’ opinion of how they should make a living.
LORENA GONZALEZ considers herself a champion of working people, but when she says “working people,” she usually means “union members.” Before joining the state legislature, Gonzalez was a union leader. She still routinely evangelizes on her belief that people should have good union jobs—whether they want them or not. In her words, “It would be great, I think it would be great if all employees were unionized.”
In Gonzalez’ seven years at the Statehouse, she has won legislative victories that read like a progressive wish-list: minimum wage increases, guaranteed sick leave, automatic voter registration, workplace protections for NFL cheerleaders, vaccination requirements, and repeal of a tax on diapers. “It’s fairly unusual for a newer member (of the legislature) to make so much of an impact,” a political insider said of Gonzalez in that glowing Atlantic profile.
AB5 was supposed to be her next big win. AB5 massively re-engineered the entire California labor market, targeting the corporate behemoths that Gonzalez accused of “exploiting” workers by hiring them as contract workers in order to—according to Gonzalez—avoid paying higher wages or benefits.
Gonzalez sold AB5 as the natural policy follow-up to a controversial California Supreme Court decision in 2018, in which the court ruled that Dynamex, a courier and delivery service, had misclassified workers as contractors to avoid complying with labor laws. Gonzalez claimed that the Dynamex decision impacted every industry in the state and would force all California freelancers and other workers to be classified as employees, so AB5 cleared up the confusion surrounding Dynamex.
In reality, however, the Dynamex decision only impacted a small percentage of workers in select industries. But when you’re talking about detailed legalese, nobody looks at the fine print. Now, under the cover of Dynamex, Gonzalez could drive a stake into the heart of supposed corporate vampires like rideshare companies Uber and Lyft, and other “gig economy” pioneers that allowed people to earn money on their own schedules making deliveries, doing tasks for people, or doing freelance work for clients. In Gonzalez’ view, however, companies allowing people to work on their own terms were exploiting workers and “doing the wrong thing.”
BUT THE AB5 narrative Gonzalez was trying to sell Californians didn’t go over as easily as she thought it would.
First, getting AB5 through the legislature required many different carveouts and exemptions for specified professions. Lobbyists for the medical industry, legal industry, and many other white-collar jobs demanded exemptions from AB5’s stringent requirements. It wasn’t ideal, exempting so many of the workers she was purportedly helping, but let no one say Lorena Gonzalez can’t be pragmatic when she needs to be.
It also wasn’t lost on people that the groups that got the exemptions just happened to be the same groups with large, well-funded lobbying teams in Sacramento.
Then there was the haunting presence of one of the bill’s most prominent supporters, the California Labor Federation— one of California’s biggest labor unions. The CLF is one of many labor groups that donated to Gonzalez’ campaigns, and if AB5 passed, the CLF would potentially have thousands of new full-time employees who would be eligible to join the union and pay union dues.
But despite any grumblings about carveouts or dirty politics, AB5 passed in September 2019 and was promptly signed into law by Governor Gavin Newsom. Media coverage was predictably flattering and Democratic presidential campaigns scurried to include AB5-style policy proposals in their platforms.
Lorena Gonzalez, the progressive power player of California politics, was now driving a national conversation.
UNFORTUNATELY FOR Gonzalez, her AB5 honeymoon was short-lived. Many Californians initially thought that AB5 applied only to rideshare companies (it was, after all, sold as the “Uber Bill”), but workers started pushing back before it even passed, realizing how the law would totally upend hundreds of industries and professions.
In November, the California Trucking Association challenged AB5 in federal court, citing its destructive effect on independent drivers, and won an injunction for their industry.
In December, days before the law took effect, Vox Media, which had supported the bill, announced that to comply with the law, it would end contracts with 200 freelance writers and editors in California. Losing their jobs at Christmas—that was a tough hit for the self-proclaimed champion of the working people, but she didn’t let it get her down. She responded via Twitter, her tone blasé: “I’m sure some legit freelancers lost substantial income, and I empathize with that especially this time of year. But Vox is a vulture.”
Then a couple of associations of freelance journalists and photojournalists filed a challenge to the law in federal court. Represented by Pacific Legal Foundation, they argued that the law violated their First Amendment rights by limiting how freelance journalists can report and the number of submissions they can publish. Jim Manley, one of PLF’s attorneys fighting the AB5 lawsuit, described the problem at the core of the AB5 debate: “Fundamentally, it is an inherent injustice when lawmakers enact a terrible law that exempts the law’s loudest critics from its full effects while subjecting the politically powerless, unpopular, or unlucky to the full force of the law. Yet that is precisely what AB5 does.”
It seemed like every day Gonzalez was having to explain her law’s benefits to freelancers and contractors lamenting that AB5 was destroying their livelihoods. Freelancing, it turns out, is quite appealing for people who need flexibility and who value being their own boss. Far from feeling exploited by evil corporate overlords, they actually choose to be freelancers.
Yet she continued to downplay the fact that people were losing work and routinely dismissed the value of the gig economy as a whole. “These were never good jobs,” she said at one point. “No one has ever suggested that, even freelancers.”
ACCORDING TO Pew Research, 42 percent of gig workers do gig work for fun and 37 percent of gig workers do it to earn extra income on top of other jobs. Freelancing allows part-time gig workers to set their own schedules and make a living on their own terms. For them, it’s a good job.
According to a separate study by the Federal Reserve, 56 percent of gig workers are females who supplement their household income with freelance gigs that allow them to work from home and set their own hours. For those women, that’s a good job.
Or think about musicians, doing what they were born to do. Most musicians playing gigs at clubs or concerts are paid as contract or freelance workers. Ari Herstand, an independent musician, said that AB5 could “singlehandedly crash the California music economy.” For musicians like Ari, being able to make a living doing what you love is the definition of a good job.
What Lorena Gonzalez seems to have missed, in blindly falling in love with her personal political narrative of championing the union worker, is that other people—even non-full-time, non-union people—have their own stories, and they’re just as important.
WHEN GOVERNOR NEWSOM ordered a statewide lockdown to combat the COVID-19 pandemic, the fury against AB5 only gained strength. With companies throughout the state shedding jobs at a furious rate, Californians were pushing back against state legislators like Gonzalez who were denying them the right to make a living working from home now that they had no other option.
Caleb Trotter, another PLF attorney fighting against AB5, wrote about the stark reality for Californians dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic: “The situation for freelancers grows more precarious by the day. AB5’s unreasonable restrictions, together with the state’s ‘stay-at-home’ order, have so hampered their ability to ply their trades as to make a living income a virtual impossibility.”
Many of the same media organizations that had cheered AB5’s passage started to cover the damage it was causing in people’s lives. In San Diego, right in Gonzalez’ backyard, the local TV news outlet KUSI interviewed dozens of freelancers struggling because of AB5. Gonzalez chided the station for focusing only on people who have been hurt by AB5, but when they asked the congresswoman for workers they could interview who’ve been helped by AB5, she couldn’t offer a single person willing to talk.
When people criticize Gonzalez and AB5 on Twitter—and dear Lord, do they ever—her tone is snappish and short-tempered. When one person criticized AB5 for taking away people’s ability to have two to three side hustles, Gonzalez responded, “They shouldn’t f****** have to. And until you or anyone else that wants to b**** about AB5 puts out cognizant policy proposals to curb this chaos, you can keep your criticism anonymous. Good God.”
Gonzalez doesn’t just lash out at the workers she claims to be helping in her frequent Twitter bursts. She’s saved some energy for PLF, dismissing the journalists’ lawsuit as self-serving opportunism from a “neoliberal right-wing org,” whatever that means. And to add insult to injury, when Gonzalez bashed PLF, she received a multitude of replies and responses directly thanking PLF and our attorneys for taking the case.
To this day, Gonzalez continues to dismiss objections to AB5, but in good political fashion, she’s admitted the law wasn’t perfect and has even pledged to take further legislative action to repair what she broke. However, as a writer for The City Journal noted with wry understatement, “A sign of poor legislation is the need to rewrite it immediately after it takes effect.”
The California journalists’ lawsuit is working its way through the courts and PLF is continuing to sound the alarm about the serious dangers of taking away people’s ability to earn a living. Ironically, if journalists and PLF are successful in killing the law that the self-proclaimed “champion of workers” forced on California, it could be the biggest victory for California workers in a long time.
As for Lorena Gonzalez, that all has to seem unfair, because it was never supposed to be this way. This is not how her story was supposed to go.
