They're not carving out high-skill professions. You'll notice that doctors aren't on that list. They're carving out professions that are already under special regulatory regimes that affect how they're able to sell their work. In part because people/businesses are required by law to contract with people who hold these licenses. Like you cannot build a building without a licensed architect and civil engineer.
There would be an uproar if you couldn't renovate your office without hiring an architect an an employee.
Edit: Looks like the final version is way different than this quote. The final list of exemptions are:
- physicians and surgeons
- insurance brokers
- securities brokers
- direct sales under specific (previously existing) conditions.
So looks like they didn't really care about professional services after all but carved out industries where you look like an employee but operate a tiny little business inside another one.
It is actually pretty difficult to find the final text of the bill, and the list of exemptions seems to change a lot between versions, so let's look at a quote from one of the authors:
> Lorena González, the San Diego Assembly member who authored AB 5, says she’s working to make sure that is not the case. The point, she says, is to protect workers from exploitation and to classify them as real employees with the power to unionize, not to stifle their independence. “We don’t want to deny somebody the opportunity to, say, submit a story to The New York Times,” she says. “So we are looking at freelancers and working with some of the associations and unions to come up with a definition for what a ‘real’ freelancer is.”
She acknowledges the fact that this will cause a lot of problems for a lot of people who have nothing to do with the gig economy, and that they are working on a lot of carve-outs because of this. But I guess the software dev's union didn't make it in time to do the proper lobbying, so we're out of luck.
Some laws lay out elegant general principles that can be applied in many scenarios, and some laws fail at this and require people to contort themselves into the limited categories thought of by the politicians and their lobbyists at the time they wrote the law.
I stand corrected except that your quote doesn't seem to be from the law as it was passed.
Looks like the final changes to the code exempt doctors, insurance brokers, securities brokers, and sales people under certain conditions. Far less of a carve-out than I was expecting.
There would be an uproar if you couldn't renovate your office without hiring an architect an an employee.
Edit: Looks like the final version is way different than this quote. The final list of exemptions are:
- physicians and surgeons
- insurance brokers
- securities brokers
- direct sales under specific (previously existing) conditions.
So looks like they didn't really care about professional services after all but carved out industries where you look like an employee but operate a tiny little business inside another one.