BY HANK REICHMAN

UC Hastings Law Professor Veena Dubal

While most attention these days is focused on the presidential and congressional elections, here in California a major battle is shaping up over Proposition 22, an initiative that would repeal a law, Assembly Bill 5, requiring most so-called gig workers to be provided the rights of employees as opposed to being treated as “independent contractors.”  The legislation codified a prior unanimous decision by the California Supreme Court.  Although the law as initially passed may have unintentionally covered some categories of contract work, including freelance writing, in which workers would not really benefit from its provisions, the state Legislature this week approved a bill correcting that problem, which Gov. Gavin Newsom is expected to sign.  Opposition to AB5 is led by Uber and Lyft, the online taxi services that would be compelled at long last to provide to their fleets of drivers the legally mandated employment protections to which all other full- and part-time employees are entitled.  The two companies are largely bankrolling the repeal effort and have threatened to terminate their operations in California should the law stand.  Opposition to Proposition 22 is led by labor groups and Democratic politicians.

Now a law professor who studies the gig economy and was instrumental in arguing on behalf of the law has been subjected to ugly online harassment and threats — and it appears that Uber and Lyft are going along with it, if not directly instigating it.  Los Angeles Times op-ed columnist Michael Hiltzik has the story:

Veena Dubal has spent much of her professional career examining and writing about the rise of the gig economy and the loss of employment rights by workers in that sector.

An associate professor at UC Hastings law school, Dubal has been an outspoken supporter of AB5, the California law designed to rein in those employment abuses, including those by the ride-hailing services Uber and Lyft.

She’s also a critic of Proposition 22, the initiative funded chiefly by Uber and Lyft aimed at overturning AB5.

As a result of her criticism of Uber, Lyft and the gig economy business model, Dubal has become the target of harassment on Twitter, some of it obscene and some of it overtly encouraged by the Yes on Proposition 22 campaign, which is heavily funded by Uber and Lyft.

Her home address has been published online, which prompted her local police department to start regular patrols around her home.  She has been falsely accused of having written AB5 and having had a “hand” in the 2018 California Supreme Court decision that led to AB5.

A Sacramento opposition research consultant working for Yes on 22 recently filed a public records act request seeking nine months of emails, text messages or “other writings” related to AB5, Proposition 22 and the gig economy between Dubal and roughly 160 organizations and individuals.

The request resembles a technique of intimidation often employed by fossil fuel, tobacco, anti-labor and other interests against researchers, scientists, activists and other critics. . . .

Dubal tries to laugh off all this activity.  “I hope they have a wonderful time wading through my thousands of emails and text messages,” she told me.

But it’s also plain that it has taken an emotional toll.  The posting of her home address left her “really freaked out,” she says, since it happened in the teeth of the pandemic lockdown and she has three children at home.  “I kept the doors locked and the kids’ windows closed and I slept in their rooms.”

She has changed all her online passwords, hired a security consultant to scrub her personal information from the internet, even removed wedding photos that had been turned into offensive memes online.  Although the initial tweet disclosing her home address has been taken offline, she’s aware that her address is still circulating on the internet.

“Sometimes it’s really overwhelming,” she says.

Some of the attacks on Dubal have come from, let us say, right field.  These include a series of articles appearing on the right-wing website Communities Digital News.

They label Dubal, without evidence, the “true author” of AB5 (Dubal says that’s untrue), call her the law’s “puppet master,” and say she had a “hand” in the 2018 state Supreme Court decision.

That implies that Dubal helped to write the decision, but that’s also untrue: The 7-0 decision, which appeared over the name of Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye [an appointee of Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger], mentions Dubal once, citing an article by her in a single footnote.

I asked the articles’ author, Jennifer Oliver O’Connell, what these assertions are based on.  She told me by email that she had “documented” the claims, but didn’t reply when I asked her to provide specific documentation. . . .

The Yes on 22 ballot committee has collected more than $110 million in contributions, of which more than $70 million has come from the two ride-hailing firms.  (That includes $10 million contributed by Postmates, a gig company that Uber acquired in July.)

We asked Uber, Lyft and DoorDash, a gig company that has contributed $10 million to the Proposition 22 campaign, for their comments.

Lyft didn’t respond.  Uber and DoorDash referred me to the Yes on 22 campaign, but that won’t do.  The question isn’t what the initiative campaign thinks about the harassment, but what Uber, Lyft and DoorDash, in whose name the campaign operates and whose money is its lifeblood, think about it.  On that, they’re silent. . . .

After her home address was posted online, Dubal — at the suggestion of her digital security consultant — started blocking Twitter accounts that had targeted her, sometimes with vile and obscene language and imagery.  Yes on 22 then issued a tweet urging anyone she blocked to post a screenshot of the blocking notice.

Almost anyone familiar with Twitter knows that publicizing blockings is like waving a lunch bucket in front of Twitter trolls — it often feeds more trolling.  In its tweet, Yes on 22 accused Dubal of silencing “those who try to engage her.”

Yes on 22 spokesman Geoff Vetter told me that the post was designed to ensure that “drivers who do not want to be employees and remain independent … are not erased or silenced.”

This is absurd: Dubal hasn’t “erased or silenced” anyone.  Blocking just means the blocked user can’t access her tweets or respond directly to her; no one has been prevented from saying anything they wish on Twitter or anywhere else. . .

Hiiltzik points out the dangers posed for academic freedom by the Yes on 22 committee’s public records requests for Dubal’s emails, texts, and “other writings”:

Public records act requests are effective tools for journalists and consumer advocates — we’ve used them to obtain records that public officials would rather keep under wraps.  But voluminous requests like this have been used by entrenched interests to discourage public discourse by saddling their critics with time-consuming busywork.

Maria Shanle of [the University of California’s] general counsel’s office says that public records requests have mushroomed over the years to some 20,000 annually, systemwide.  (Hastings manages its requests separately.)

As for requests related to faculty, “Activists across the country have seen significant impacts using public records requests as an effective strategy to undermine the work of researchers in controversial fields,” Shanle says.  “In my view, this is part of a larger political trend toward discrediting the cultural authority of scientific experts, and undermining science in general.” . . .

The consultant who issued the request for Dubal’s material, Mark Bogetich of MB Public Affairs — whose firm has been paid $240,000 thus far this year by Yes on 22 — staged a similar onslaught of public records demands related to the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy (LAANE), a progressive public policy group, in 2011.

Among his previous clients are Altria, the owner of the tobacco manufacturer Philip Morris; and Republican politicians including Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas, and Arnold Schwarzenegger.