Article from Reason by Elizabeth Nolan Brown.

Vox Media is laying off hundreds of freelance writers and editors due to a new California law that was sold as a way to protect the state’s contingent workforce. That law, AB5, was adopted in September. To comply, New York-based Vox Media would have had to reclassify many of the freelancers it uses for sports platform SB Nation as full-time staff.

Instead, the company decided to cancel the contracts of some 200 or so freelancers that now work for SB Nation. It will “replace them with 20 new part-time and full-time staffers,” a “source familiar with the decision” told the Los Angeles Times.

…

A lot of folks are now describing freelancer firings as an “unintended consequence” of AB5. But this facet of the bill was well-known and discussed beforehand.

It’s not an “unintended consequence” so much as one that folks who wanted to stick it to Uber and Lyft (or at least get press for pretending to stick it to Uber and Lyft) deemed an acceptable consequence.

Read the entire article at Reason.

Image Credit: By Henri Sivonen from Helsinki, Finland (flickr: California State Capitol) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons