Liberal Vox Fires Hundreds After 'Workers' Bill It Supported Ends Up Passing
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Female executive reading a layoff notice from her employer. (Stephen VanHorn / Shutterstock)
By Cade Almond
Published December 24, 2019 at 12:11am
Notoriously liberal Vox Media has laid off hundreds of freelance employees shortly before a law that it previously praised goes into effect in January.
The contractors who were let go were all based in California, and that was no coincidence. The company’s sports website SB Nation cited a very specific piece of legislation that made it difficult to keep them on.
“In 2020, we will move California’s team blogs from our established system with hundreds of contractors to a new one run by a team of new SB Nation employees,” the company wrote.
“This shift is part of a business and staffing strategy that we have been exploring over the past two years, but one that is also necessary in light of California’s new independent contractor law, which goes into effect January 1, 2020.”
California is at it again. The state that feels the need to pass virtue-signaling legislation that ends up hurting the very people it was meant to help did just that.
One may even feel a twinge of sympathy for Vox Media. It can be hard to do business in California and it’s unlikely that the administrators were giddy about the chance to revoke a source of income from so many people.
Of course, that sympathy would dissolve pretty quickly when one remembers that Vox championed that very same law as it was passed by the California legislature.
Back in September, Vox ran the soon-to-be-ironic headline “Gig Workers’ Win in California is a Victory for Workers Everywhere” in a piece celebrating the passage of the bill.
Well, every worker except Vox workers, apparently.
Vox was beaming back when it claimed that “hundreds of thousands of workers — possibly millions — will see an immediate impact on their working conditions after the switch.”
As we see now, those working conditions were definitely impacted.
According to the new law, nonemployees are forbidden from submitting more than 35 pieces per year, CNBC reported.
John Ness, the executive director of SB Nation, told CNBC that contractors were welcome to apply for full- or part-time positions and they can continue contributing to the publication but they “need to understand they will not be paid for future contributions.”
“We know this may be a difficult decision, so we’re giving everyone affected 30 days to decide what works for them,” Ness said.
These California contractors fell victim to yet another example of unintended consequences from “look at how progressive we are” legislation.
The law itself was meant to make it difficult for companies to classify employees as contractors, which in turn would make said employees eligible for higher earnings and benefits in many cases.
Poster Comment:
Trump could not do a thing to help these people. They sunk themselves by promoting legislation the hurt them in the end.