Making it illegal is the the whole point of AB5. Contractor status was once for a very specific kind of worker: independent professionals who were basically solo businesses. It has turned into a giant loophole, where worker have the downsides of employment along with the downsides of being a contractor. AB5 aims to return to the status quo, where if you want to hire a bunch of employees, you really have to treat them like employees.

Except they aren’t employees. They are something else. Make a new classification for them.

They were arguably employees before (and outside of CA) and unarguably employees under AB5. That’s why Uber is making this ridiculous claim that it’s not a transportation company: otherwise, its drivers are employees.

If the law says they're employees, they're employees until the law changes. In the same vein as my earlier post, the fact that a corporation wants to "employ" (in the basic dictionary sense) workers under certain arbitrary terms doesn't make said arbitrary terms legal, nor does it create a mandate to make them legal.

I made a general statement about illegality. Do you disagree with it?

If you can't figure out why the general statement I made is relevant in this context, no amount of explanation from me is going to solve that problem.