Uber and Lyft owe California $413 million in state unemployment insurance taxes, which they avoided paying by misclassifying drivers as independent contractors between 2014 and 2019, suggests a new report by the UC Berkeley Labor Center. According to Ken Jacobs, chair of UC Berkeley's Center for Labor Research and Education and a co-author of the study: "The companies have argued historically that because of the nature of the business -- 'anyone can drive when they want' -- that workers don't need access to unemployment insurance. This crisis has made it very clear that, in fact, they do. ... We have federal pandemic unemployment assistance, which does apply for independent contractors, but very few rideshare drivers will qualify for that assistance. If you qualify for regular unemployment, you cannot get the pandemic unemployment insurance -- 76 percent of labor platform workers have other W-2 work. That means for most drivers, their driving income won't count towards their unemployment and they will get much lower unemployment benefits if they continue to be considered independent contractors." A Link to the report is available here. Another story on this topic appeared in Law 360.