During a pro-Elizabeth Warren event in San Diego, California Assemblymember Lorena Gonzalez stopped in mid-sentence while delivering her speech as someone in the audience shouted “F* Donald Trump.” Gonzalez, then took the opportunity to echo the same sentiment, screaming in a booming voice “F* Donald Trump!”

On the other hand, protesters responded by saying phrases such as “Repeal AB5,” and “we need a job” as the lawmaker’s supporters boo them. Currently, Gonzalez is the author of the AB5, a labor law that had laid off hundreds of freelance writers and which continued to impose a looming threat over the so-called “gig economy.”

In a report by the San Diego Union-Tribune, Gonzales continued to belittle the protesters by saying that “we don’t need anti-worker Trump supporters here.”

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Basically, AB5 is a labor law that requires freelance workers to take a three-pronged test proving that they are not working within the company’s usual course of business. Moreover, based on the law, companies should only accept freelance workers who had passed the test and can prove that their gig is semi-autonomous.

Originally, the law was made to benefit ride-sharing companies like Uber and Lyft. However, Gonzales made a sweeping generalization and included another freelance gig including artists and musicians. In a column for the San Diego Reader entitled “Lorena Gonzalez law damages local workers” Marty Graham expressed the number of lives and industries that would be affected by the AB5. “Artists and musicians, Uber and Lyft drivers, and freelance journalists are among the 600,000 to 3.5 million California independent contractors across a broad spectrum of industries trying to figure out how to earn a living in a state that will no longer allow them to control their own work. Also affected by the new law: graphic designers, golf professionals, event planners, contract teachers, virtual assistants, interpreters, translators, travel nurses, and many more,” Graham wrote.

Even Gonzalez’s fellow Assemblymember Kevin Kiley wrote a distressing letter to the California Assembly Members to fully repeal the AB5. The letter read “so far this year, legislators have introduced 33 bills amending, narrowing, or overhauling AB 5. Everyone at the Capitol recognizes the law is causing widespread hardship. Even the author is proposing major changes. But none of these bills has an urgency clause. That means relief will be delayed until at least next year. For Californians whose professional relationships are severed or businesses shuttered in the meantime, that’s too late.”

  • Most alarmingly, when asked to respond about Vox laying off 300 writers because of the AB5 Law, Gonzales said in an interview that freelance positions are not considered as “jobs.” “First of all, it wasn’t a job. These aren’t jobs. These are freelance positions that may be three hours a month, and it may be three-hundred hours a month,” said Gonzalez. “I’ll tell you, there are two-hundred folks who were writing for [them], but they weren’t writing full-time, they weren’t writing part-time. These are folks who run the gamut.”