Assembly Bill 5 has no redeeming value and has caused innumerable headaches and hassles. By outlawing independent contract work, the 2019 law destroyed livelihoods and caused many to reroute their lives. A flood of complaints forced lawmakers to create exemptions for some professions and trades.
One of those carve-outs, for manicurists, expired on the first day of 2025. An effort was made to extend the exemption, but the bill was killed by a legislative committee, leaving nail technicians, 82% of whom are American-Vietnamese (and 85% are women), with little choice but to sue the state.
The lawsuit claims the damage done to the manicurists “will be severe and irreparable.” At the same time, the salons where the manicurists work “will be forced out of business and will be forced to close their doors.” They will also “be subject to significant assessments and financial penalties that will be impossible to pay.”
Republican Assemblyman Tri Ta, whose Orange County district is at least 40% Asian-American and Pacific Islander, said the nail technicians had their lives “turned upside down overnight when the independent contractor status expired on Jan. 1.” What has happened to them is “not just unfair, it is discrimination.”
Meanwhile, says the Los Angeles Times, those who perform similar services – licensed barbers, cosmetologists, estheticians and electrologists – are still working as independent contractors.
Vietnamese refugees fleeing communism pioneered the nail salon industry in California 50 years ago. Today they are surely puzzled that the government in the ostensibly free land they fled to is choking their source of income. They couldn’t know it at the time, but they were trading one type of oppression for another with a half-century reprieve in between. The burdens of AB 5 cannot be what they envisioned as the fled, nor what they told their children and grandchildren to expect in America.
“The damage to the Vietnamese community is even more disheartening as the Vietnamese refugees came to America with little or no money or possessions,” says the suit. As outsiders, they “faced an almost insurmountable challenge to make it in American society.”
Yet somehow they managed come upon “an industry and a business model that allowed them to meet this challenge and have now prospered in their individual businesses they worked tirelessly to build.”
They didn’t ask for Assembly Bill 5. Neither did most of the workers whose jobs have been threatened and eliminated by the law. There was no uproar insisting that policymakers write and pass Assembly Bill 5, no grassroots campaign attempting to right a wrong and to protect the vulnerable. It was a top-down gift to unions dreamed up by the lawmaker who is now president of the California Federation of Labor Unions, Lorena Gonzalez. As the rideshare industry rapidly expanded, union bosses were lusting after dues they figured would be paid by organized rideshare drivers, which hasn’t happened.
But it might soon. Lawmakers have agreed to a deal with Uber and Lyft that will allow rideshare drivers to unionize.
It will be interesting to see how many will organize and what affect their decisions will have on the industry, because in the union mindset, customers never come first. The agreement should also make everyone wonder: Why didn’t legislators do this rather than ram through AB 5? There would have been much less damage.
Kerry Jackson is the William Clement Fellow in California Reform at the Pacific Research Institute and co-author of The California Left Coast Survivor’s Guide.
