US health care workers are in a crisis. Nearly one in five have left the field entirely since the start of the pandemic, with more than 500,000 health care workers quitting just in December of 2021. One recent study found that around 40 percent of nurses are thinking of leaving the profession. Long overworked and understaffed, the people who care for the rest of us cannot take it any longer.

But for capital, where there is crisis, there is opportunity. With the explosion of contract work, particularly that of traveling nurses who move from one facility to the next on limited-term contracts — the pandemic has seen travelers’ pay skyrocket — employers see a chance to reconfigure health care work into a gig model. Venture capitalist–backed startups have long advanced the transformation of stable employment into precarious independent contracting — Uber and Lyft are only the most well-known examples. Now, the push is coming to the country’s fastest-growing industry: health care.

A measure filed late last month with the California attorney general’s office aims to ask the state’s voters for approval to reclassify nurses, dental hygienists, and other health care workers who find employment through apps as independent contractors — a shift long sought by app-based employers. Funding for such apps has increased exponentially as health care facilities look further afield to temporarily plug holes in their existing labor force (another solution for such employers is to import health care workers from other countries, an arrangement that some workers allege amounts to human trafficking).