Employment is the primary legal and political means to address economic inequality in the United States. With the evisceration of the welfare state, employment is also key to democratic outcomes. Despite this, self-employed work deployed by labour platforms like Uber has grown in recent years. What can we learn from worker demands and recent regulatory attempts to clarify and extend who is covered by employment protections? Based on a decade of legal and ethnographic research in the state of California, I situate the legal and regulatory history of labour platform work in the context of platform workers’ experiences and responses to the insecurities and poverty promulgated by their putative status as independent contractors. In highlighting this history, I argue that self-organised labour platform workers were critical to the passage of a state law (AB5) that would have forced companies to treat them as employees—with access to predictable living wages, unemployment insurance, workers’ compensation, and health insurance, among other safety net protections. Finally, I show how, leveraging tremendous structural and instrumental power, the major labour platform companies, in the middle of the global Coronavirus pandemic, sponsored a successful referendum on AB5, and lay out the anti-democratic implications of the referendum's passage.

就业是解决美国经济不平等的主要法律和政治手段。随着福利国家的废除，就业也是民主成果的关键。尽管如此，由优步等劳动力平台部署的自雇工作近年来有所增长。我们可以从工人的要求和最近的监管尝试中学到什么，以澄清和扩大就业保护的覆盖范围？基于在加利福尼亚州十年的法律和人种学研究，我将劳动平台工作的法律和监管历史置于平台工人的经历以及对他们作为独立承包商的假定地位所带来的不安全感和贫困的反应的背景下。在强调这段历史时，我认为，自组织的劳动平台工人对于州法律 (AB5) 的通过至关重要，该法律将迫使公司将他们视为雇员——可以获得可预测的生活工资、失业保险、工人补偿和健康保险，除其他安全网保护外。最后，我展示了在全球冠状病毒大流行期间，主要的劳工平台公司如何利用巨大的结构性和工具性力量，赞助了关于 AB5 的成功公投，并阐述了公投通过的反民主影响。