Uber & Lyft Drivers Create 1st US Ridesharing Union In Massachusetts

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Uber and Lyft drivers in Massachusetts are tired of being taken advantage of, and are thus diverging from the long-term trend in the USA away from worker unions. Drivers for Uber and Lyft in The Baked Bean State have decided to combine forces for better pay and conditions by unionizing, the first to do so in the United States.

The App Drivers Union just received official certification from the Massachusetts Department of Labor Relations on Friday, and it already represents almost 70,000 ridesharing drivers in the state.

“It changes the ​game for rideshare workers across this country,” Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey, Democrat, said during a driver and labor activist rally in Boston yesterday.

Notably, this is not just a result of drivers coming together to cooperatively advocate for themselves. This was enabled by Massachusetts voters. “The certification occurred after voters in ⁠November 2024 approved a ballot measure that created a novel framework to allow drivers for companies like Uber and ​Lyft to organize and bargain collectively over pay and benefits,” Reuters reports. “That vote followed a years-long, nationwide battle over whether ride-share ​drivers should be considered independent contractors or employees entitled to benefits and wage protections.

“Drivers for Uber and Lyft do not have the right to organize under the National Labor Relations Act, a federal law that covers only traditional employees.”

You may recall the much bigger, more widely covered battle on this matter in California. Ridesharing drivers in California gained the same kind of right to organize last year, in October, following Governor Gavin Newsom signing such legislation into law. Illinois also has such legislation pending. Notably, the California law also threw our kind of work — online media — into a whirlwind, as independent contractors from the state had to be brought onboard as employees or dropped. By and large, media companies simply dropped their California contractors. I do think the ridesharing business is a whole different kind of thing, but writing nuance into laws like this is difficult and these laws are broadly addressing the “gig economy” in what is probably too general a way as a result. It is important for industries such as ridesharing, though.

Naturally, this is probably going to hasten Uber’s and Lyft’s efforts to shift to robotaxis, but those are already major plans well underway anyway. Until robotaxis do replace human drivers, it is probably beneficial to give the human drivers collective bargaining rights.

“The workers who built these billion-dollar corporations deserve a union contract and a seat at the table,” IAM President Brian Bryant said on Tuesday at the aforementioned driver and activist rally.

Signatures from at least 25% of the state’s active ridesharing drivers had to be collected in order to form the union. The International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers as well as an affiliate of the Service Employees ‌International Union supported the unionization effort in Massachusetts.

While ridesharing companies have largely been opposed to unionization, they did find a way to work with unions in Europe, and in this case, they did not campaign against the effort. Uber did not comment on the news, but Lyft did. “Lyft does well ​when drivers ⁠do well, and we’ll stay focused on helping drivers succeed while keeping rideshare affordable and dependable for everyone who counts on it,” Lyft wrote in a statement. Overall, Lyft does seem to be a bit more supportive of workers and protective of riders. Or maybe it’s just better at PR in that regard.

That said, Massachusetts is a progressive state, and the ridesharing companies seemed to learn their lesson that they weren’t going to beat the progressive agenda there. “In the months before the ⁠2024 vote, ​Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell secured a settlement with Uber and ​Lyft requiring them to adopt a $32.50 hourly minimum pay standard for Massachusetts drivers and pay $175 million to resolve claims they had improperly treated ​drivers as independent contractors, rather than employees, under state law.” In other words, the state already decided that these drivers should be treated like employees, and trying to block them from unionizing was not going to fly.

Where the industry goes from here, we’ll see. Uber is clearly sprinting toward robotaxi use, partnering with a couple dozen robotaxi companies now. It has partnerships with Uber in several cities. That said, its drivers and business go well beyond where robotaxis currently roam, and they will surely do so for a long time still. So, unionization efforts probably do keep some of their highly paid staff up at night.