A federal judge has temporarily shielded 70,000 independent truckers from an unusually restrictive and possibly unconstitutional California law that virtually outlaws independent contracting.
Layoffs blamed on the law, known as AB5, were announced in December 2019 at media outlets across the United States. AB5 makes it difficult for gig-economy companies to classify those who work for them as independent contractors instead of employees. The law was backed by labor organizations critical of hard-to-unionize gig-economy jobs such as ride-sharing companies Uber and Lyft.
