Uber and Lyft Say They Will Likely Suspend Service in California Because of Suffocating Labor Order

Global rideshare giant Uber has said they will most likely have to suspend their service throughout California now that the state has ordered them to hire all of their drivers, rather than allow them to drive as independent contractors.

The order comes after the state has been engulfed in controversy following the enactment of Assembly Bill 5 in January, legislation that completely upended employment laws in California. The bill totally redefined the parameters of independent contract work, which specifically skewered the gig economy and freelance work.

Under AB5, gig workers such as rideshare drivers, delivery drivers, and other on-demand service workers for an industry that has surged in the past few years, contract work is limited severely. The law requires that the company hires the workers rather than allow them to work their own hours at their own pace, a restriction that completely undermines the business model for the gig economy.

Democratic lawmakers helmed by California Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez introduced the bill to ostensibly help workers in the state receive state-mandated employer benefits that they would be eligible for if they were forced onto the staff.

In practice, however, AB5 has cost thousands of Californians work as freelancers and gig workers are no longer legally allowed to earn money unless they are a normal member of staff. Freelance writers, for example, must be taken on as full-time staff if they produce more than 35 pieces of writing per publication per year. In the digital age, that threshold has been crippling for writers who have depended on being able to contribute to multiple outlets simultaneously.

Both Presumed Democratic Presidential nominee Joe Biden and his VP pick Sen. Kamala Harris fully support AB5, despite the fact that even far-left Californians have spoken out against its stranglehold on earning potential in the state.

They also support the PRO Act, a federal measure that would apply the same job-killing laws to the entire nation. The Democratic-led House of Representatives passed the measure earlier this year. It is not expected to come up for a vote in the Republican-held Senate, but will likely resurface in another form should Democrats gain more control in Congress after November. 

The business model for Uber works for riders because of the low overhead made possible by the independent contracting relationship with the drivers. The corporation works for drivers who often contract with multiple companies and get to pick their own hours. As full-time employees of just one company with mandatory set schedules and costly benefits, the ride rates would be exorbitant and the employment freedom for the drivers would evaporate.

The fate of rideshare driving and business in the state has been held up in litigation for months as Uber, Lyft, and Postmates have taken California to court over the devastating impact of AB5 on their business. Now, out of options, Uber has said they will probably not be able to continue service in the nation's most populous state.

A San Francisco court ordered this week that Uber and Lyft would not be exempt from the restrictions of AB5 and would be required to classify their drivers as employees, not independent contractors, an order they had resisted until now.

A ballot measure for Californians in November, Proposition 22, would exempt app-based on-demand ride and delivery services from the draconian demands of AB5. That measure was largely funded by the companies to the tune of $30 million.

Lyft President John Zimmer encouraged voters to take the matter seriously when they head to the polls this fall.

"If our efforts here are not successful it would force us to suspend operations in California," Zimmer said. Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi echoed Zimmer's sentiment.

"If the court doesn’t reconsider, then in California, it’s hard to believe we’ll be able to switch our model to full-time employment quickly," Khosrowshahi told MSNBC. Both companies intend to appeal the court ruling, which has given them 10 days to do so. Should they fail, Uber and Lyft both stated they will be required to suspend service pending the results of the election and success of Prop. 22.

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Poland and the tyranny of human-rights law

Ignore the outrage – Poland has good reasons to leave the Istanbul Convention on Violence against Women.

Poland, the bad boy of Europe, recently got another big black mark. The trouble this time had to do with an institution you might be forgiven for not having heard of, the Council of Europe’s Istanbul Convention on Violence against Women. Under pressure, Poland ratified this convention in 2015. Now, however, following Andrzej Duda’s election victory a few weeks ago – with Duda having run on an unashamedly traditionalist and Catholic ticket – Poland has announced that it intends to give the required six months’ notice to pull out of it.

The outrage has been predictable. Women in Poland have been demonstrating clad in Handmaid’s Tale costumes. The Council of Europe and a number of MEPs have slated the decision as ‘alarming’ and ‘disgraceful’. Guy Verhofstadt, not to be outdone, has called the affair ‘scandalous’. He went on to tell us, didactically as ever, that ‘violence is not a traditional value. The EU and all of its members signed because Europe stands for human rights, equality and decency.’

This whole debacle is worth a closer look. One reason is that it is both novel and very significant for the future of Europe.The other is that Poland is right.

To see why, you have to look carefully at the convention text. True, its headline purpose is to require that any state party to it outlaw violence against women (including such matters as forced abortion and FGM), prosecute it effectively and provide remedies for the victims of it. But this hardly necessitates a treaty at all. All European states already do this anyway, Poland included. Whatever the Euro-establishment might try to insinuate, no one is looking to turn Poland into some kind of male supremacist, wife-beating theocratic dystopia.

What is making the Poles unhappy (and ought to give pause to any liberal administration) is the small print elsewhere in the convention. Take Article 12, for instance. Since 2015, this has required the Polish state to:

‘Take the necessary measures to promote changes in the social and cultural patterns of behaviour of women and men with a view to eradicating prejudices, customs, traditions and all other practices which are based on the idea of the inferiority of women or on stereotyped roles for women and men.’

Read that carefully again. What it amounts to is a demand for the state suppression of wrongthink: an insistence that whatever the electorate might think, the state must take administrative measures to eradicate its existing customs, traditions and practices in so far as they do not conform to an official left-liberal ideology.

And there is more. By Article 14, the Polish government stands committed to major intervention in education and the media. So at all levels from kindergarten to university, it must impose, whatever parents might want, ‘teaching material on issues such as equality between women and men, non-stereotyped gender roles, mutual respect, non-violent conflict resolution in interpersonal relationships [and] gender-based violence against women’. Nor does such compulsory ideological direction end with education: all these matters must also be promoted by the government in, among other places, the media. It is deliciously ironic that the same Euro-elite that increasingly castigates Poland for its restricted press freedom also demands that the country continue to be signed up to a treaty that not only allows but requires intervention in the media.

But by all accounts, the final straw was the Istanbul line on gender. The treaty requires far more than teaching children that gender roles are bad. More importantly, Article 3 states baldly, without room for argument, that gender means ‘the socially constructed roles, behaviours, activities and attributes that a given society considers appropriate for women and men’. In other words, whatever opinions Poles might have on the gender debate, their government is committed in international law to dictating to them what the correct line is to take.

In view of all this, it is not all that surprising that Poland has made up its mind that it has had enough and wishes to cut and run. Whatever you may think of the values contained in this authoritarian instrument, surely the decision to adopt them must rest with the people of Poland, whose will must prevail over that of a cadre of international quangocrats who are largely insulated from public opinion.

But these developments in Poland may also have a bigger destabilising potential. Disquiet over the Istanbul convention are more widespread than might appear. Turkey, for example, is also mulling withdrawal for much the same reasons as Poland, and the Polish move must strengthen the hand of those promoting a Turkish exit.

Since the convention was signed in Istanbul and Turkey was an early ratifier (in 2012), the political fallout from such an event would be big. There could also be effects closer to home. The UK government is under severe pressure to ratify (indeed, an act of parliament quietly slipped through in 2017 requires annual reports on progress towards ratification). But those behind the pressure may well find their job a good deal harder once it becomes public knowledge that there is so much to dislike about the treaty they are pushing.

More generally, Poland’s announcement also threatens a major upset to the comfortable liberal balance in Europe on the subject of human rights. The Istanbul Convention, which looks like motherhood-and-apple-pie on the surface but underneath is actually rather sinister, is in no way unique. On the contrary: it is part of a suite of fairly similar agreements which have been ratified by all, or virtually all, European countries.

Similar in conception are the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC); the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW); and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESR). Each of these also contains prescriptive clauses on matters of social policy which could well impinge on democratic decision-making (think corporal punishment against children, which the UNCRC might be read as banning, or the rewriting of school textbooks, which on one reading the CEDAW actually demands).

So far there has been an unspoken assumption that human-rights treaties of this type operate on a ratchet principle: countries can be heavily leant on to ratify convention after convention, and once they have ratified, it is not the done thing ever to withdraw, even if a treaty technically allows it. But Poland has now dared to do the unthinkable, and as Turkey shows, where it has gone others may well follow.

There is also one other thing to put in the balance. As far as European countries are concerned, the apex of the entire human-rights consensus is formed by the European Convention on Human Rights itself. But this, too, has serious shortcomings which people are increasingly willing to publicise. And this too, it is all too easy to forget, has a provision for withdrawal (all a country has to do is give six months’ notice). No wonder, perhaps, that the international liberal human-rights establishment is suddenly beginning to look uncomfortably over its shoulder, in case the whole edifice it has painstakingly built up since 1950 starts to come crashing down about its ears.

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Why Blockading Would Have Been Better than Bombing Japan

On the 75th anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bombs—“Little Boy” and “Fat Man”—on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, a debate still rages about whether the United States should have used the weapons. That’s because the 129,000 to 226,000 dead were overwhelmingly civilians.

International law clearly denotes the disproportionate killing of civilians as a war crime. Yet, the winners of war write history, so American school history books usually either blandly report the bombings or put them in the broader context of battling the evil Japanese Empire, along with its Nazi German and Italian fascist allies, in the most gargantuan clash of good and evil in human history—the great World War II.

And while it is true that by their aggression and their own war crimes, the Japanese, Germans, and Italians killed millions more noncombatants than the United States and its Western allies, some troubling questions linger about the allied use of the intentional bombing of cities. From even a morally superior position in a democracy on the winning side, we can (and should) critique our own government’s actions without being attacked as “unpatriotic.”

After all, defending debate and dissent in a free society, against the forces of genuine evil, is what we were fighting for in this war. And we should have had higher standards than those evil enemies, right?

Although the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were historically significant because they ushered in the nuclear age, which eventually brought forth the much more powerful thermonuclear H-bombs and a balance of nuclear terror, these first atomic weapons made the targeting of enemy cities more efficient. Instead of incinerating civilians with bombing runs of hundreds of planes—as was done in the firebombing of Dresden, Hamburg, Tokyo, and other Axis cities—the same mass destruction could be had with only two aircraft, one each over Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

In both Germany and Japan, such mass killing of civilians were done in 1945 as both enemies were on their last legs. War crimes are more often committed when combatants are exhausted and frustrated with the length or intensity of a conflict or the tenacity of enemy resistance.

In the Pacific theater of World War II, the Japanese resistance was fierce, the dropping of the atomic bombs was justified on the basis that an invasion of Japan’s home islands would have cost an estimated one million allied casualties.

When I was in junior high school in the early 1970s, I came home from school and told my father we had debated whether the bombs should have been dropped. He quickly confounded me with the argument that I might not have been in the world if the bombs hadn’t been dropped, because he was slated to be part of the U.S. forces that would have invaded Japan if the Japanese hadn’t surrendered.

As I grew older, I realized that there were several problems with this argument. First, did the atomic bombings of August 6 and 9 in 1945 trigger the Japanese surrender on August 15? Some analysts believe that the triggering event was actually the Soviet Union’s entrance into the war on August 9. Second, although Japanese resistance had been fierce, were the huge casualty estimates for an invasion plausible? In fact, the estimates were extremely soft. More troubling was the willingness to kill civilians to reduce combatant casualties based on those hazy estimates.

Third, the allies at the Potsdam Conference on July 26th, before the bombs were dropped, demanded “unconditional surrender” from Japan or that nation would face “prompt and utter destruction.” To Japan, this meant giving up their sacred emperor, which they would not do; they ignored the ultimatum. In most wars, a settlement with conditions are negotiated between the winners and losers. Unconditional surrender usually makes the enemy–fearing subjugation and humiliation–fight harder. In this case, the United States did not make unconditional surrender stick, because the Japanese eventually got to keep their emperor, even after the atomic bombings. Finally, and most important, dropping the A-bombs were not the only alternative to an all-out invasion of Japan.

Japan is an island, and by August 1945, the U.S. Navy had overwhelmingly crushed its Japanese counterpart. The U.S. Navy could have imposed a tight blockade around Japan’s home islands, allowed a minimum of food, medicine, etc. in for humanitarian purposes, and simply waited for Japan to capitulate. This option would have saved hundreds of thousands of civilian lives and allowed the United States to have avoided stooping to the low regard for civilian life that its enemies exhibited on so many occasions.

However, a naval blockade of Japan would not have fulfilled perhaps the real purpose of the atomic bombs: demonstrating the power of the new weapon to a then ally and likely future enemy—the Soviet Union. President Harry Truman delayed testing of the atomic bomb until the Potsdam Conference with Winston Churchill and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, and comments were made at the conference that Truman wore the bomb ostentatiously on his hip to intimidate Stalin. However, it was morally questionable to drop powerful bombs on Japanese civilians, killing hundreds of thousands, merely to impress a possible future enemy with U.S. technology and power.

Ironically, Stalin already knew the power of the bomb because his spies had thoroughly penetrated the Manhattan Project. In short, a slightly porous U.S. naval blockade of Japan would have been far superior to the atomic mass killing of civilians, which has remained a stain on the otherwise defensible allied defeat of the Axis powers; the only use of atomic weapons heretofore in history is still used in propaganda by U.S. nuclear adversaries and wannabes, such as China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and Iran.

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National Democrats Endorsed Congressional Candidate Who Referred to Women as 'Breeders'

A most unpleasant person

A Democratic congressional candidate in a nationally-watched race is facing scrutiny for a host of now-deleted blog posts in which he voiced creepy sexual fantasies about children and degrading comments toward women. A current state legislator in Michigan, Jon Hoadley earned the Democratic party’s nomination in Michigan’s 6th congressional district, and will take on GOP Rep. Fred Upton in November.

Hoadley’s now-deleted blog, “Rambling Politics,” featured posts where he bragged about “learning about crystal meth,” described various sexual partners as “victims,” and made reference to four-year-old children wearing thongs. Hoadley, an openly-gay man, went on to deem women as “breeders,” referring to reproductive ability.

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) threw their support behind Hoadley leading up to the primary election. A handful of other national Democrats also endorsed Hoadley’s bid, including Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D), Sens. Kamala Harris (D-CA) and Gary Peters (D-MI), and Reps. Pramila Jayapa (D-WA) and Haley Stevens (D-MI).

Since the deleted blog posts surfaced, national Democrats including the DCCC have yet to comment on Hoadley’s gross behavior. In a statement to New York Post, Hoadley’s campaign likened the posts to “bad college poetry.” Hoadley’s primary opponent did not offer her endorsement after he clinched the nomination, citing his misogyny, use of meth and sexual exploitation of children.

If Hoadley was a Republican seeking a seat in Congress, the GOP would be rightfully forced to denounce this creepy behavior.

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 
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