State's highest court tosses gig economy ballot question

The ballot question involving the status and benefits for app-based drivers will not go before voters this fall and Attorney General Maura Healey was wrong to certify it for the ballot, the Supreme Judicial Court said Tuesday in a ruling that abruptly put the brakes on an expensive and contentious campaign.

The state's highest court determined that the proposed ballot question (there were technically two slightly different versions) contained "at least two substantively distinct policy decisions," putting the proposal at odds with the state Constitution's requirement that initiative petitions contain only related or mutually dependent subjects.

Writing for the SJC, Justice Scott Kafker said that most parts of the initiatives are devoted to defining a new contract-based relationship and benefits between drivers and the "network companies" that they connect consumers to. But, he said, "in vaguely worded provisions placed in a separate section near the end of the laws they propose, the petitions move beyond defining the relationship between app-based drivers and network companies and the associated statutory wages and benefits."

Beyond the relationship between drivers and platforms, the proposed question would have also altered the relationship between platforms like Uber, Lyft, Instacart and DoorDash and the general public by changing the potential liability a transportation network company would have to someone injured by a driver. Whether the petitions would create a "liability shield" for the platforms was at the center of the oral arguments in the case last month.

Read more: https://www.wgbh.org/news/politics/2022/06/14/states-highest-court-tosses-gig-economy-ballot-question