Posts tagged RIDESHARE
Commentary: To Harvard and Back with Julie Su
August 18, 2025 // This year, Julie Su, Joe Biden’s pick for secretary of labor, became a resident fellow with Harvard’s Kennedy School, Institute of Politics. The Century Foundation also brought Su on board as a full-time senior fellow. These prestigious institutions seem to have overlooked key events in Su’s long career. Harvard, where Su, a Stanford grad, earned her law degree, hails the Biden nominee as “a nationally recognized workers’ rights and civil rights expert.” As California’s labor commissioner, Su was “widely credited with a renaissance in enforcement and creative approaches to combating wage theft and protecting immigrant workers.” In reality, her experience was a bit more extensive.
California Tries Another Tack to Crush Ridesharing
August 4, 2025 // The latest legislative effort is Assembly Bill 1340, which passed the full Assembly in June and was approved by the Senate Transportation Committee in early July. It would allow drivers to unionize and “promote collective bargaining rights for transportation network drivers and state intent that the state action antitrust exemption apply to … drivers and their representatives.” Democrats couldn’t kill the industry quickly, so they’ll try to destroy it slowly via collective bargaining.
Editorial: Unionizing Uber and Lyft drivers may speed up their robotic replacement
July 2, 2025 // Here’s the issue for drivers. Labor talks are playing out as Uber and its competitors are investing heavily in driverless vehicles, just like Tesla. Uber isn’t hiding that future. Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi even told The Wall Street Journal this year he expects AVs to gradually overtake human drivers.
Commentary: The 2025 Battle of Trenton; Video
June 25, 2025 // The opposition to independent contractors was frustratingly predictable. Most of it, as usual, came from unions—including the AFL-CIO, Teamsters and IBEW. Others who testified against us were a representative of the union-affiliated National Employment Law Project (you may recall us crushing them in Congress last month), a couple of union-side lawyers, and a guy from the Workplace Justice Lab at Rutgers University, whose stated mission includes building unions.
California: The Lost Report
April 1, 2025 // On December 3, 2020, almost a year after California’s freelance-busting law, Assembly Bill 5, went into effect, the California Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights was created to study AB5’s civil rights implications. The committee’s officially designated term ended December 4, 2024. There were hours and hours of testimony, much of it recorded on video. But the committee never issued a report based on all this testimony its members heard. Members of the committee say they were told that if they issued individual statements in the absence of any committee report, they would be failing to comply with the Federal Advisory Committee Act and the rules of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.
Commentary: Plan B is Activated
November 19, 2024 // They are now turning to Plan B, which is sectoral organizing. And they notched a big win in the recent election with a ballot proposition in Massachusetts—a win that the mainstream media is heralding as a good thing. In fact, the same pro-union media bias that we saw with reclassification attempts such as Assembly Bill 5 and the PRO Act is simply resetting and restarting anew. Now, it’s being used to promote this other way of trying to limit self-employment.
Massachusetts Ballot Measure Would Shove Rideshare Workers Into the Arms of Unions
October 12, 2024 // Even as independent contractors, however, unions still threaten drivers’ flexibility. Unions might negotiate standardized rates, mandatory breaks, or limits on working hours, which, while beneficial in some industries, could restrict a driver’s ability to capitalize on peak demand periods or adjust their work hours to fit personal schedule. The risk of such changes only magnifies when one considers that the Ballot Measure only requires a 25% vote from drivers to form a union that would represent them as a whole. This means that the 30% of drivers working full-time, who would benefit most from being treated like employees, might be able to dictate policy for all rideshare drivers.
COMMENTARY: Californians Can Still Be Their Own Boss in the ‘Gig Economy,’ Also Known as the Free Market
August 6, 2024 // “Furloughed Californians stand on the verge of being wiped out financially because the law prevents them from working part time in a variety of indispensable positions,” read a letter from more than 150 of California’s leading economists and political scientists. “Blocking work that is needed and impoverishing workers laid-off from other jobs are not the intentions of AB-5, but the law is having these unintended consequences and needs to be suspended. Gov. Gavin Newsom declined to suspend the measure, but went on to violate his own rules on masks and impose a rigid lockdown on the people.
Op-ed: I’m an Instacart driver: California Supreme Court must protect my job
April 18, 2024 // Hundreds of thousands of drivers like me are counting on the California Supreme Court to respect the will of the millions of Californians who voted for Prop 22 and continue to allow us to earn on our own terms. I hope that the court does the right thing and upholds Prop 22.
Rachel Greszler: 64 million Americans risk losing work under Biden administration rule
January 30, 2024 // The group Freelancers Against AB 5 compiled a list of more than 600 professions that have been negatively affected by independent contracting restrictions, and Americans for Tax Reform documents more than 600 personal testimonials of workers who’ve been harmed. Karen Anderson, the founder of Freelancers Against AB5, testified to federal lawmakers about children’s theaters and nonprofit youth sports clubs closing their doors; sign language interpreters unable to provide ADA-mandated services to the deaf; and professionals having to move out of state to maintain their livelihoods.