AB5 an awful law that needs to be repealed

A panel of the Ninth United States Circuit Court of Appeals has rejected a First Amendment challenge to Assembly Bill 5 brought by the American Society of Journalists and Authors and the National Press Photographers Association.

The groups argued that AB 5’s restrictions on freelance writers and journalists constituted a violation of the impacted freelancers’ First Amendment rights because the law effectively put many writers who worked as independent contractors out of business and rendered them incapable of finding work as writers and journalists.

“But the 9th Circuit panel said those kinds of indirect impacts on speech do not rise to the level of violating the

1st Amendment of the U.S. Constitution,” reported Reuters.

The ruling follows other setbacks for legal challenges to the law. The Ninth Circuit previously rejected a challenge to AB 5 brought by independent truckers.

Whether these legal challenges to AB 5 are legally valid or not, the fact remains that AB 5 is simply one of the worst laws to come out of Sacramento in recent years, which is saying a lot.

The law, proposed by former union leader and now Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez, D-San Diego, codified a California Supreme Court ruling rigidly defining the conditions under which a worker could work as an independent contractor.

But, as seemingly with all terrible laws, Gonzalez and her colleagues made sure to exempt various sectors of the economy from the law. Namely, those with the most effective lobbying teams.

For writers and journalists, AB 5 as initially passed capped the number of articles an independent contractor could produce for a publication in a given year at

35, a completely arbitrary number.

Though this was later amended in subsequent legislation, the damage for many writers had already been done, as countless numbers of writers perfectly content to work as independent contractors were put out of work because publications simply couldn’t hire them all as full-fledged employees.

Gov. Gavin Newsom hailed this disastrous and antiworker law, so there’s precious little chance he’d sign legislation repealing it.

But that’s exactly what needs to happen to AB 5.