While a crowd of ride-hailing service drivers rallied outside the California Supreme Court in San Francisco, the seven members of the high court opened oral arguments Tuesday in a lawsuit that will decide the constitutionality of the state’s Proposition 22.

The 2020 ballot measure sponsored by Uber, Lyft, Instacart and DoorDash, Prop. 22 allowed the companies to classify gig drivers as independent contractors rather than employees with more benefits. Boosted with a $200 million campaign, it was approved by nearly 60 percent of voters in California. It was the industry’s response to Assembly Bill 5, which would have required the companies to classify the workers as employees.

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Ruth Dusseault is an investigative reporter and multimedia journalist focused on environment and energy. Her position is supported by the California local news fellowship, a statewide initiative spearheaded by UC Berkeley aimed at supporting local news platforms. While a student at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism (c’23), Ruth developed stories about the social and environmental circumstances of contaminated watersheds around the Great Lakes, Mississippi River and Florida’s Lake Okeechobee. Her thesis explored rights of nature laws in small rural communities. She is a former assistant professor and artist in residence at Georgia Tech’s School of Architecture, and uses photography, film and digital storytelling to report on the engineered systems that undergird modern life.