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.
> 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.”
https://www.lamag.com/citythinkblog/ab-5-freelancers-bill/
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.