NELP filed an amicus brief in El Koussa et al. v. Campbell, a case challenging corporate-backed ballot initiatives in Massachusetts. The ballot initiatives are modeled on California’s Prop. 22—a law that carves out app-based workers from bedrock employment protections.
We argue that the ballot initiatives violate the “relatedness” requirement in Article 48 of the Massachusetts Constitution because they contain multiple subjects, failing to give voters the opportunity to enact a “uniform statement of public policy.”
We write to draw particular attention to Massachusetts’s Independent Contractor Law (ICL), a uniquely strong law that embodies the state’s commitment to ending misclassification and guaranteeing access to wage and hour protections. In our view, carveouts for ridehail and delivery workers from the ICL and related wage protections cannot be lawfully bundled together with other policy changes and put to a “yes or no” vote. We urge the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court to find the proposed petitions unconstitutional and to withhold them from the state ballot in November 2024.
This brief is a follow-up to an amicus brief NELP filed alongside partners in 2022, challenging an earlier version of the corporate-backed ballot initiatives, which were held to be invalid by the Supreme Judicial Court.
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Dan Ocampo
