Truckers urge Newsom to amend AB 5 labor law

The Port of Oakland has been brought to a grinding halt this week as hundreds of protesting truckers hold a key commerce hub captive. The action — following a similar one at Southern California ports last week — has dealt another blow to supply chains already reeling from pandemic delays.

The self-employed truckers are calling on Gov. Gavin Newsom to amend Assembly Bill 5, a controversial labor law that could end their business model. Some say they will continue the port shutdown until they get action. But it is unclear what, if anything, the governor could or will do to end the blockade at one of the West Coast’s busiest ports.

“When Newsom first signed this bill, no one really thought much about supply-chain demand,” said Dan Schnur, a California political strategist. “But that was before COVID. And before the war in Ukraine. Now it’s gotten a lot more complicated for him.”

The protest is the latest turn in the winding saga of AB 5, which will require tens of thousands of truckers, along with other independent contractors, to register as employees. The 2019 legislation — commonly known as the “gig worker law” — is best known for forcing Uber and Lyft to treat their drivers as employees and sparking a pricey political battle by the ride-hailing giants hoping to skirt the regulation.

For California truckers, key provisions of the law have been on hold since 2020 amid legal wrangling. But in June the Supreme Court declined to review a case opposing AB 5, leaving the state free to start enforcing the new system of employee classifications and sparking the current protest.

But unlike Uber and Lyft’s efforts, pumping more than $200 million into a successful ballot measure to exempt their drivers from AB 5, the port protest is an ad-hoc action organized largely on a 500-person WhatsApp group by a loose coalition of independent truck drivers and smallfreight business owners.

The band of truckers also lacks the ridesharing giants’ political savvy. At the start of the protest on Monday, many truckers, including Navdeep Gill, one of the central organizers, said they were unsure how to contact the governor’s office to lay out their demands, which include abolishing the law or providing drivers an exemption to AB 5.

Both requests would require Newsom to rally his Democratic supermajority in the Legislature and buck the stance of major unions that back the legislation.

Newsom’s office has said they have no plans to exempt truck drivers. In a statement Friday, the governor’s office said, “no one should be caught by surprise by the law’s requirements at this time.”