The state’s highest court docket Tuesday threw off the poll a controversial query relating to app-based staff and their employment standing, ruling it handled too many issues for voters to contemplate.
“The petitions thus violate the related subjects requirement because they present voters with two substantively distinct policy decisions: one confined for the most part to the contract-based and voluntary relationship between app-based drivers and network companies; the other — couched in confusingly vague and open-ended provisions — apparently seeking to limit the network companies’ liability to third parties injured by app-based drivers’ tortious conduct,” Justice Scott Kafker wrote within the Supreme Judicial Court’s resolution.
Voters in November would have been requested whether or not to codify into regulation the contract-based relationship between app staff like Lyft and Uber drivers and the firms that paid them. The points have been framed in two poll questions that promised perks like a healthcare stipend, a assured minimal wage and defined the businesses’ legal responsibility within the occasion of accidents.
State regulation limits the variety of coverage choices being made in an initiative petition to only a single subject material. Attorney General Maura Healey licensed the questions for the poll final September, regardless of the very fact she had sued Lyft and different firms the earlier July.
Healey argued in her lawsuit that rideshare drivers and different gig based mostly staff are workers underneath state regulation, entitled to the authorized protections that associate with that. The firms have lengthy handled the employees as unbiased contractors and proposed the poll measures, modeled after related efforts in California, to guard that designation.
Opponents of the measures hailed the court docket’s resolution.
“Millions of Massachusetts drivers, passengers, and taxpayers can rest easier knowing that this unconstitutional bid by Big Tech CEOs to manipulate Massachusetts law has been struck down,” Wes McEnany, Campaign Director for Massachusetts shouldn’t be on the market, the plaintiffs within the case, mentioned in an announcement.
Supporters of the poll questions say the initiative would have handed if the SJC allowed voters to determine.
“A clear majority of Massachusetts voters and rideshare and delivery drivers both supported and would have passed this ballot question into law,” a spokesperson for Flexibility and Benefits for Massachusetts Drivers, the poll query committee, mentioned.
“That’s exactly why opponents resorted to litigation to subvert the democratic process and deny voters the right to make their own decision. The future of these services and the drivers who earn on them is now in jeopardy, and we hope the legislature will stand with the 80% of drivers who want flexibility,” the spokesperson mentioned.
Source: www.bostonherald.com”