Uber, Lyft drivers in Massachusetts form first US ride-share union

standardUser

The end of driving as a profession is going to hit the economy hard. Teamsters may have the organizational strength and political influence to protect themselves. But they only represent ~20% of US truck drivers and none of the other ~3 million people who drive for a living in this country. I don't see either American labor or American government being anywhere near strong enough or capable enough to facilitate a soft landing.

devindotcom

Good for them. These companies appear exploitative and rent-seeking far beyond what the infrastructure they provide suggests is reasonable. If you're interested, next time you take a car, ask the driver what their end is - you may be surprised how little of the fare they actually take home. That share will only decrease unless they all get on one side of a table.

missedthecue

Given that Uber isn't their W-2 employer, what happens if they just ignores them? My guess is Uber invites them to walk off the job.

NickC25

Good on 'em, but autonomous cars are on their way and it might displace the union. In my city, Zoox are already rolling out driverless taxi services, and the vehicles they are using are completely autonomous.

e63f67dd-065b

The original impetus was more about banning robotaxis in Boston/MA than it is about the actual bargaining, from what I've heard. Just as the teamsters tried to ban cars to protect horse carriage drivers (that's what teamsters were, that's why they're called teamsters), they're back to ban the next mode of transportation. If you were at any of the city council meetings where this topic was brought up it was a circus show with people repeating 'boston is a union town' and grilling waymo execs.

yogthos

amazing news, good for them

satvikpendem

I'm going to shout out Empower, it's a service like Uber that charges a flat fee to the driver every month, around 50 bucks, without taking any percentage fees, meaning both the riders save much more and drivers make much more, especially if they drive a lot. Their rationale is that it should be more like hiring a contractor for your house, a platform wouldn't get a cut of the cost of your grass cutter so why should drivers be any different? So far I haven't had any issues, although I did hear of some problems and controversies they have.

nerdjon

No doubt good for them, but I am curious how this is realistically going to work. The barrier of entry to get new non-union drivers for Lyft and Uber is very low. If a strike does happen I can't imagine it would be hard for them to fairly quickly get new drivers, especially with the possibility of higher fairs due to high demand while it is sorted out. I have to imagine they would be able to get drivers far faster than most other situations with strikes. I wonder if Uber and Lyft would even try to partner with gocurb or another app to funnel riders directly to taxies. Not saying a union is a bad thing, I just wonder in this particular case how well it is realistically going to work out. Guess we will see.

jedberg

Unions are great when they are fighting for worker's rights by demanding things like businesses sharing their profits with the workers who make it for them, more vacation time, required investments in safety, and protecting workers from getting fired for having the wrong skin color. But when they get into the business of slowing down technology adoption to protect workers, that's when they get into the territory of giving unions a bad name. Getting together to lobby the government to make systemic changes to help displaced workers would be great, but it seems in this case they are trying to get government to just ban technology that replaces them.

tomaspiaggio12

i'm so ready for fully self driving to take over

rootsudo

Good. All I can say is good. I wonder if Illinois or California would be next.

cs702

Over the past two years, I have found Uber and Lyft rides getting more expensive than taxis in several large US cities, including Boston, Chicago, NY, and LA. Taxis are now 10-50% cheaper in my experience. When I do take Uber and Lyft rides, I ask the drivers how much they're getting paid, and the amounts they tell me are often 30% to 60% less than what I paid, which is a bit shocking to me. At some point, Uber and Lyft stopped being service providers that charged riders a fee for value provided. They have become market makers that squeeze as much trading profit as possible by arbitraging the prices riders are willing to pay and the rates drivers are willing to accept. I imagine they are capturing most of the value in each ride today. It's perfectly legal, but let's call what it is. I'm not surprised about the ride-share driver union.

arjie

It will be interesting to see what happens. One thing I really like about the US federal system is how each jurisdiction applies massive economic interventions. We get to run many experiments and see what happens. I recall that I was curious about the Seattle driver minimum wage law and the results were so interesting to me[0]: > We find that the minimum pay law raised delivery pay per task, though the increases in base pay per task were partially offset by a substantial reduction in average tips, a major component of delivery pay. At the same time, the policy led to a reduction in the number of tasks completed by highly attached incumbent drivers (but not an increase in exit from delivery work), completely offsetting increased pay per task and leading to zero effect on monthly earnings. We find evidence that drivers experienced more unpaid idle time and longer distances driven between tasks, but find no evidence that drivers reduced their total time working on delivery apps and only limited evidence of switching from delivery to ride-hailing work. Using a simple model of the labor market for platform delivery drivers, we show that our evidence is consistent with free entry of drivers into the delivery market driving down the task-finding rate until expected earnings return to their pre-reform level. These findings highlight the challenges of raising pay in spot markets for tasks where there is free entry of workers. 0: https://www.nber.org/papers/w34545

nickvec

It's about time -- I hope rideshare drivers unionize in California as well. A UC Berkeley Labor Center study (2024) found rideshare drivers take home $7.12 per hour in median net hourly earnings before tips, which is less than half of California's $16 minimum wage at the time. https://inequality.org/article/exposing-the-rideshare-indust...

BrandoElFollito

I am not sure how unions work in the US. In Europe, generally speaking, you have unions that are formed within the company, usually as a representative of a national one (but you can also have local ones). They get elected to represent the employees and whatever they bargain is for all employees. Maybe 1% of employees are actually part of a union. In the US it seems that you have to be a member of a union to get what they bargain? And they companies can block the creation of a union?