The Nationwide Affiliation of Social Employees (NASW) together with the Nationwide Ladies’s Legislation Middle and 24 different teams on April 12, 2022 filed an amicus brief within the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court docket within the matter of El Koussa v Massachusetts, difficult the constitutionality of a Massachusetts poll initiative filed with the state legal professional basic by Uber, Lyft, Doordash, and Insta-Cart.
The poll initiative, which is similar to Proposition 22 in California, sought to considerably slender who’s an “worker” beneath Massachusetts legislation, thereby excluding tons of of 1000’s of staff from the employment rights and protections offered by state legislation. The initiative would get rid of all Massachusetts employment legislation protections for the businesses’ drivers, together with however not restricted to wage and hour, anti-discrimination protections, unemployment insurance coverage, staff’ compensation, entry to employer-sponsored medical insurance, paid household and medical depart, and paid sick depart. The initiative would additionally preclude tort claims in opposition to the businesses by third events, e.g., from a site visitors accident the place the app-based driver was at fault.
The underlying lawsuit claimed that the petition violates the state structure’s necessities that petition summaries don’t confuse or mislead voters and that the problems inside a petition be carefully associated. The amicus transient supported these claims and highlighted the harms that app-based gig staff—and ladies staff specifically—would expertise ought to the proposals go into impact, and the variety of rights that hung within the stability. The transient supported the problem to the Massachusetts poll initiative and defended Massachusetts’s protecting employment legal guidelines.
Consequence
On June 14, 2022, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court docket released its decision, stating unequivocally that the petitions failed to fulfill the necessities of the Massachusetts structure, and couldn’t be positioned on the poll.
In blocking the petitions, the Court docket discovered that the petitions contained unrelated topics, obscured by the language of the petitions. As such, the courtroom didn’t attain the query of whether or not the Legal professional Normal had offered a good abstract, however did notice that, “the failure to even talk about the provisions narrowing third events’ tort restoration right here would have rendered the summaries unfair.”
Here’s a copy of the El Koussa v Massachusetts amicus transient.
