SACRAMENTO (KRON) — This week the California Trucking Association filed a lawsuit in federal court to try to keep state law AB5 from applying to their industry, claiming it clashes with federal law.
“This really is a situation where people want to operate their own business and they just do not want that opportunity taken away,” said CEO of the California Trucking Association Shawn Yadon.
The law set to take effect in January aims to extend minimum wage and benefit protections to workers by redefining many independent contractors as employees.
The trucking industry was one of the most outspoken groups as the bill made its way through the legislature.
“These are folks who in many, many, many cases have been employees in the past, but they’ve decided they really do want to own and operate their own business, so they’ve invested in their own truck, many times putting their life savings into the truck.”
In a statement, the lawmaker who wrote AB5, Assemblymember Lorena Gonzalez, said in part: “We expect big corporate interests – especially those who have misclassified their workers for years – to take this fight back to the place they know they can delay justice for workers: the courts”
This latest attack on the new law comes as rideshare companies like uber and lyft take their fight against it to the ballot box.
Uber, Lyft, Postmates, Doordash and Instacart have already put up $110 million for a 2020 ballot initiative to ask voters to exclude them from the law.
It’s now up to a federal judge to decide if truckers should be excluded, too.
