Last week, the California Senate passed a new bill that will cause somewhere between one million to two million workers, perhaps even more, to lose their status as independent contractors. If California governor Gavin Newsom signs the bill, an independent contractor will have to satisfy the following legally binding criteria:

1. Be free from the “control and direction” of their employer
2. Be performing work that is “outside the course” of the company’s usual business
3. Have their own independently established trade, occupation, or business

As the final week of the legislative session was winding down, the Senate and Assembly in party-line votes approved Assembly Bill 5, which will codify the state Supreme Court’s Dynamex ruling, leaving as many as 2 million freelance workers with an unsure future.

In a recent article titled “Is property inheritance widening the wealth gap?” author James Gordon points out that people in Britain who own houses will often leave them to their adult children and, thus, adult children of Brits with no houses will see a large gap between their wealth and those of their housing-endowed peers.

As Americans celebrate Labor Day 2019, robots are stealing their jobs, as are immigrants, as are cheap imports from China. The first puzzle is: if all of these nefarious forces of free markets are stealing jobs, how is it that there are more Americans employed than ever before?