U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria, Northern District of California. Photo: Jason Doiy/ALM

A federal judge denied an emergency motion for a preliminary injunction on behalf of Lyft drivers asking the court to reclassify them as employees to qualify for California's emergency sick leave.

In an order chastising both plaintiffs and the ridesharing company, U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria of the Northern District of California on Tuesday affirmed his tentative ruling issued prior to a hearing last week finding the question of whether Lyft drivers should qualify for California sick pay is less of an emergency than the plaintiffs' counsel at Lichten & Liss-Riordan suggested. 

Chhabria granted Lyft's motion to compel arbitration on plaintiffs' claims for individualized relief, struck the class allegations and remanded the public injunction to the San Francisco Superior Court.

The judge said that the injunction motion crumbles since California's limited three-day paid sick leave would face drivers with the possibility of losing "thousands of dollars" of federal coronavirus relief if they were reclassified as employees under state law. 

In the ruling, the judge also pointed to a Lyft driver's declaration, which noted he would continue driving "fever or no fever" to feed his children.

"The upshot of his position, then, is as follows: He currently has little chance of making more than a few dollars a week by giving a ride or two, but if he has an opportunity to make those few dollars, he will not allow coronavirus symptoms to prevent him from doing so, even at risk of killing his passengers, even though that money will be a drop in the bucket compared to the assistance he could get from the emergency legislation, and even though obtaining that drop could shrink the overall size of the bucket," Chhabria wrote.

However, Lyft and its Keker, Van Nest & Peters counsel did not get off the hook in Chhabria's order.

"While there's no justification for the tone-deafness of the position advanced by the plaintiffs and their lawyer as this crisis unfolds, perhaps there's an explanation for how they got here," the judge wrote. 

Chhabria noted that firms such as Lichten & Liss Riordan have been working to reclassify Lyft and other gig economy independent contractors as employees for years and have been thwarted by "widespread use of forced arbitration by these companies and by the previous lack of clarity in the law." 

Since the passage of Assembly Bill 5, which codified the worker classification test developed in Dynamex Operations West v. Superior Court, Chhabria wrote that Lyft drivers meet the requirements for employee status and the company's arguments to the contrary are "frivolous."

"But rather than comply with a clear legal obligation, companies like Lyft are thumbing their noses at the California Legislature, not to mention the public officials who have primary responsibility for enforcing A.B. 5.," he said.

"In short, there are no heroes in the story of this case." 

Read more:

Judge Reluctant to Designate Lyft Drivers as Employees Amid Pandemic, Despite 'Obvious' Worker Misclassification