In May, workers secured the biggest single union organizing victory in decades: 70,000 Uber and Lyft drivers in Massachusetts won certification of their union and the right to bargain collectively with the largest rideshare companies in the country. By forming a unique labor partnership, creating a new state-level labor law, and organizing workers in unorthodox ways, the App Drivers Union (ADU) is demonstrating how unions can advance the struggle for worker organizing to a higher level. In this piece, we discuss the path to victory, the roadblocks workers faced, and how other states and industries can build on their wins.
In order to win, these drivers had to overcome a key barrier to the unionization of the contemporary workforce: their exclusion from federal labor law due to their independent contractor status. The latest Bureau of Labor Statistics figures count nearly 12 million people making a living as independent contractors. About two million of them are drivers working for Uber, Lyft, and a variety of smaller rideshare companies.
The National Labor Relations Act, enacted more than 90 years ago, has failed to adapt to the proliferation of this type of arrangement. As we have seen over the past several decades, the changing structure of work—often designed precisely to deny workers their rights—has resulted in legal barriers to people in all sorts of occupations who would otherwise organize a union. More and more workers have been disempowered, excluded, and left...
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