They also bamboozled the voters. In 2019 the CA legislature passed AB5 in reaction to Uber being independent contractors. AB5 applies to tons of other industries too, including software development. It's extremely difficult to write software on contract in California now. Uber then created Proposition 22 and managed to get it passed, which exempted the original target of AB5, themselves, but left all sorts of other independent contractors still covered by AB5.
AB5 codified in statute and created exceptions to the existing case-law rule on classification, from the 2018 Dynamex v. Operations West ruling of the Supreme Court of California. It is more accurately a response to that ruling, not Uber’s status prior to the ruling.
