When California’s Proposition 22 passed late last year, its immediate dangers were already widely understood. The measure, which effectively allows companies like Uber and Lyft to create a new employment category that is neither employee nor independent contractor, seems certain to make gig-economy work even more precarious than it already is — the state’s rideshare workers being stripped of basic rights and benefits like overtime pay, sick leave, and eligibility for unemployment insurance (not to mention the ability to form a union). Their wages, meanwhile, are also destined to drop: one estimate from the UC Berkeley Labor Center suggesting that hourly pay for gig drivers may sink as low as $5.64 an hour, a sum more or less equivalent in real terms to the minimum wage when Harry Truman was president.

The circumstances surrounding the initiative itself were also pretty Orwellian, the companies including a proviso in the measure’s fine print that will make it practically impossible to undo — its repeal requiring no less than seven-eighths of all votes in the state legislature. Between this, a misleading ad campaign, and a marketing offensive upward of $200 million, it’s no exaggeration to say that multibillion dollar corporations are now just buying laws and rewriting the labor code to suit their own bottom lines.

Certainly, California’s particular rules around ballot initiatives helped make Prop 22’s coup against representative democracy a whole lot easier than it might have been elsewhere. Nonetheless, Big Tech has been quite explicit about its intention to export the state’s newly feudal labor model nationwide. “We feel strongly that this is the right approach,” said Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi in the immediate aftermath of the vote, ominously adding it was his company’s intention to “work with governments across the US and the world to make this a reality.” “We’re looking ahead and across the country,” added DoorDash’s Tony Xu, “[we’re] ready to champion new benefits structures that are portable, proportional, and flexible.”