- How did this law get enacted?
- Why wasn't I, a resident of California, asked to vote on it?
- Was the law buried under some legalese and just slipped past the eyes of 39 million Californians? And nobody made any noise about it?
the same way all other laws do, passed by the legislature and signed by the governor
>>> Why wasn't I, a resident of California, asked to vote on it?
because neither the US nor the State of California is a Direct Democracy, it is a Representative Constitutional Republic
>>> Was the law buried under some legalese and just slipped past the eyes of 39 million Californians? And nobody made any noise about it?
No there have been several thousands of News reports about it, even I as a Midwestern knew about this law months ago (I think I first heard about it mid 2019), if you did not then I would recommend you update your news sources you are in some kind of Bubble or echo chamber
The poster didn't claim to be an American and even if they are American, there are lots of different opinions on what things are important to spend time on and not everyone agrees that it's following the news or reading up on various ways places structure their government.
they claim to live in the state of California, and are concerned about voting so that would imply they are at minimum a Naturalized Citizen of the US...
>> there are lots of different opinions on what things are important to spend time on
True, however they are the one acting shocked about a new law being passed, if they do not believe new laws in their state is something important to spend time on, they should then not be shocked when a law passes they were no aware of.
In CA, there are also a fair number of propositions that are voted on by the general public. It would be interesting if there were some sort of mechanism through which a pending law could be put on hold until after a popular vote, say, if enough voter signatures were gathered within a certain timeframe.
If what you’re asking is for an “emergency proposition” where everyone votes now, that’ll never happen.
AB5 supposedly just clarifies what the law already said: that workers should be classified as employees except in narrow circumstances when they're clearly independent. As employees, they're entitled to minimum wage, sick leave, etc.
It's a plausible interpretation of some old laws designed for a different world, but it doesn't seem like good policy for today.