Seattle Considers Measure to Let Uber and Lyft Drivers Unionize
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
My dad was driving for a European logistics company. The drivers were contractors and had to deal with all the expenses themselves just like Uber drivers.
My dad and another guy were spokespeople for all these drivers and when they tried to organize voluntarily to get better conditions the company simply released my dad and the other guy from their contracts.
Long story short my dad only recently got out of his personal bankruptcy after more than 20 years of dealing with the consequences of him trying to stand up for his co-contractors.
So if you ask why do we sometimes need protect this right by the law. This is why.
If so, it sounds as though it was his own actions that led to his financial predicament.
The other question that crossed my mind is, was he unable to find another job as a driver anywhere in Europe or the U.S. (wherever he was based)? It seems as though there has been a continuing shortage of long haul drivers in the U.S. at least. As far back as I can remember, about every other 18-wheeler I see has had a "drivers needed" sign prominently displayed.
Yes which is the very essence of the discussion here and why it makes sense to protect people trying to organize in some situations. Unless you think it's fair that he got released from his contract from trying to do that. In that case it just means we are politically in disagreement about what is fair and what isn't.
These weren't long haul drives, these where day to day deliveries very hard to do physically and got harder and harder as the company asked them to cover more and more on less and less time and for less and less pay.
And sure he found other work it just never paid enough to cover the expenses of having a family and a house to pay. He worked at times 3 different jobs a day just to cover.
Look at the Longshoremen. They basically closed off ports in the U.S. to any workers but their chosen elite few. How is that in line with "labor rights"?
What about theatrical unions? I have been in theater, and the guys running the lights and curtains charged a fortune by the hour. They made it prohibitive for small nonprofit theatrical companies of which I was a member to put on shows in the big city. They wouldn't even raise the curtain a second time to standing ovation. Bastards.
What about the drivers' unions in New York City? My grandfather had to close down his shoe jobber business back in the Sixties because of them and their onerous rules. It basically killed him.
Sorry but I have no sympathy for unions or union organizing. For all their songs and high flying rhetoric, they have caused untold damage to our economy and our society.
That metric (number of people employed) does not really mean anything by itself.
Here are more ideas that could lead to "more people being employed":
* make child labor legal again
* get rid of work safety regulations
* remove minimum wage
* make indentured servitude legal
I think this tactic was used before in other historically disrupted industries...the incumbents would push for unionization to keep inefficient players on life support, at the cost of the upstarts.
Note I'm not opposed to people's freedom to unionize. In fact, it should not take an act of government to "permit it", and people should do it if they want. It's just the unintended consequences and manipulation of the move to unionize that are interesting.
Which is caused by the wage levels of Uber drivers to be tantamount to indentured servitude.
EDIT: A very small percentage of Uber drivers are coming out ahead after you account for their time, the wear and tear on their vehicle, and required commercial vehicle insurance (unless they're operating illegally on their own car insurance).
Uber is by definition a side gig. Nobody is doing Uber on the side in their 1989 LeBaron. You need a nice car, and you can't get a nice car if you only income is from Uber.
And that's just UberX. UberBlack and UberXL have higher revenues, but require higher upfront investments as well.
If you value their time at $0/hour, they're all coming out ahead over a long enough time horizon barring some freakishly bad luck with car repairs.
At $1000/hour, none of them are coming out ahead.
OTOH, for consumers seeking less expensive rides, it makes the services more expensive. It also means that workers who are satisfied with offering their services at a lower wage (because it means they have a higher chance of actually finding work) are not allowed to offer their services at that lower wage.
Everyone has the right to organize a voluntary union. What requires special legislated privilege are things like collective bargaining, which is not a normal component or outcome of voluntary negotiations.
Modern unions in the United States enjoy many legal privileges that were specifically lobbied for. It's this type of privileged union which is being argued for, not a mere voluntary association under an impartial legal regime.
My personal experience has been that when I've been the so-called "beneficiary" of one, it has not actually benefited me and has often made for awkward scenarios where there is me and the counterparty ("employer") and this weird semi-interested third-party regulating how we can interact, regardless of what is actually in my self-interest.
Just to be clear, I am all for collective bargaining in the sense of a bunch of (small) actors choosing to work together against an adversary. I would do this myself if I deemed it beneficial. I don't understand why we would mandate that individuals had to be bound by the agreement whether they want to participate or not. I recognize that this is a common structure though.
If you want to dodge the free ride then have the dues go to a non political spending charity of your choice provided it is local, may I suggest children's healthcare hospitals
This isn't true.
"far too many unions spend inordinate amounts of money on political activities instead of their own membership"
If you believe that, then start getting involved in your union's leadership and change it.
" then top it off with all the bureaucratic bloat and high paid leadership"
As opposed to the leanness and crappily paid leadership of the company?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Workers_of_Amer...
To balance this, involuntary unionization usually requires a majority vote from the employees to unionize.
"Want to receive a bonus at the end of the year, don't join the union".
Any argument you make will always come back to, "The company will threaten and fire people who don't go along with what they want."
The whole point of a union is that employees have more power collectively than individually. A company can just tell an individual "no". If all or almost all employees get together and say "the situation is so bad that we're willing to quit (and make a lot of noise and bad PR for you) rather than let this go on", then that's harder to ignore. If the company is willing to fire everyone and deal with the bad PR, and that's cheaper than the union's demands, then the union doesn't actually have the power to effect change even as a collective.
I don't see any reason that either the company or the union should be artificially given more power in that scenario.
How would the union know what the boss tells his new hires? Unions don't get to monitor the hiring process of every communication between a worker and his employee.
As for how they'd know it was going on: it only takes one person to "leak" that information to the union. And if the union and company are large enough that new people get hired regularly, they might occasionally find someone who fits the profile and send them through the hiring process specifically to find out how a new employee gets treated.
So people started organizing by trade. It made sense because workers of a common trade share experiences and grievances. If one particular employer treated its workers bad, that trade guild had more leverage by threatening work stoppage against other employers who could put pressure on the first employer.
Over time employers started to converge and grow in power. Now you have a company who employs thousands of people in multiple locations. To keep the balance in power, the unions converged and grew in power. You cant threaten to replace a union worker if everyone who does that job is in the union(1).
Now the unions are big enough to disrupt economies, sway elections, etc. They are large professional entities of lawyers, financial managers. They want everyone in the union for maximal leverage (ie fewer scabs, more dues) so they lobbied to affect the policies we have today.
The small voluntary no-admin-overhead organization you are describing is ideal, but its really unlikely to work. It would depend on the employer allowing it to happen.
I could say more here about the growing wealth gap, criminalization of poverty, and the quiet ongoing class war, and end with a Malcom X quote, "Anytime you depend on your enemy for a job you're in bad shape." But I dont feel like saying all that. ;)
1. robots
If an employer did something like that, the FTC would go after them for abusing a monopoly to dictate pricing, for anti-competitive practices (e.g. contracts that prevent doing business with competitors), etc. But somehow it's OK for unions to do that?
A very short answer is that there are many differences between capital and labor. (It is even right there on the tin - we don't call our system "laborism", and a few actual words related to that meaning are popularly demonized in the U.S.)
Sure, sure, corporations are people ("my friend"), but most humans still see a difference between John calling in sick because he didn't like seeing his pal Bob fired and things like redlining, oligopoly partitioning, etc.
It has to do with power dynamics, and this is well recognized in law. (One example is that contracts between parties of disparate power are generally interpreted in the light most beneficial to the least powerful. For more extreme cases, look up the legal sense of the word "adhesion".)
And recall that capital always has options.
- Happy employees tend not to unionize. Many places normally considered to be natural homes for unions don't have them because management doesn't give them a reason to need one.
- If capital or management decides those proles are too uppity, it can close shop. (Labor also has this option, but that's called 'suicide' and considered in a rather different light.) Walmart did this a while back when (IIRC) their butchers successfully beat them and unionized; Walmart got out of the meat cutting business.
- Outsource. Amazon has a pile of circuit-breaker corporations that supply them backs and hands. Those corporations (really, binders on a Delaware shelf and bank accounts) take the heat from lawsuits when the backs break and the hands are smashed by robots. This use of non-human shields works surprisingly well in some circumstances, but the tight coupling with the mothership needed by app-driven job direction would make it look pretty strange if they set up shell companies to supply "workers", so that one may not work for Uber.
(update: fixed my goofy formatting.)
They drastically increase employee leverage and lead to much higher wages and benefits for labor.
I do believe there are some protections against companies firing everyone when they attempt to collectively bargain. Which is nice I guess. But not a requirement to form an effective union.
Part of the theory of a union is that the workers aren't easily replaceable as a group. Doubly so in that a company that is willing to fire N thousand people and hire replacements will likely have a harder time finding people willing to work for them. That seems sufficient to have enough bargaining clout, even with at-will employment.
And as someone else said, the company can fire the person who brought the demands to them and tell the rest of them to fuck off and get back to work, or they're next.
Not seeing anything here that requires legislative intervention.
Collective bargaining can absolutely be a component of a voluntary union, if everyone agrees to it.
Why should a union have the ability to force people to not show up to work and get a paycheck, though? If people agree with the union, they'll go along with it; if people don't agree, then clearly the union does not represent their interests.
That "everyone" has to include the leadership of the company. All they have to do is say "no", and the whole thing goes up in smoke.
"If people agree with the union, they'll go along with it"
Unless they're afraid of getting fired.
That "no" means they have to be willing to replace a substantial amount of their employees (including those who might not be part of the union but are willing to go along anyway when they see the terms of the negotiation), deal with the bad PR the union can bring to bear (strikes at large companies are major national news), find replacement employees who can look at that PR and still say "I'm willing to work for this company", deal with falling stock prices, deal with the public or partners potentially choosing to not do business with them, and do all that while continuing to fulfill existing contracts and orders that don't care what troubles they're having. That's a pretty massive "All they have to do". The wrong call there can put a company out of business.
If they're still willing to go through all of that, and the cost of doing so is still cheaper than granting the union's requirements, then they'll say "no", and the union's attempt to bargain will fail.
> Unless they're afraid of getting fired.
Yes, that's the risk you take. You have to actually be willing to quit and stand with the union if you want the union to fight on your behalf. You have to be willing to be out of work and not get a paycheck. The situation needs to be serious enough to put that on the line.
Unions are an incredible tool, and I'm in favor of them. That doesn't mean I'm in favor of laws enshrining them into disproportionately more power than they already wield.
Not if many of them are afraid of being fired by speaking up. You know, the very people who need a union.
"Unions are an incredible tool, and I'm in favor of them. That doesn't mean I'm in favor of laws enshrining them into disproportionately more power than they already wield."
But without those laws, they have no power. So you've just admitted you are not in favor of unions.
The point of a union is that if you fire some of them, you'd have to fire all of them.
> But without those laws, they have no power.
Collective bargaining still works just fine; that gives them more power than individual employees acting individually.
It entails government enforcement of a set of rules on a labor marketplace for all participants.
Collective bargaining arrangements are why, for example, one cannot be a teacher at a Los Angeles public school without paying union dues. You must operate under the same employment rules as all other teachers.
You certainly are not allowed to undercut them by working at a lower wage level.
You can't just go to the Los Angeles Unified School District and negotiate your own separate contract as a teacher. Neither you nor the school district are free to make such an arrangement.
Is this not just an indication that the pendulum (in terms of control) has tilted to far in one direction (Uber's)?
It's difficult for me to imagine how warped someone's thinking can get. The people doing the work are the cab drivers who have been driving in Seattle for decades in some instances. The rent seekers are the VC LPs of Uber - parasite heirs sitting on their asses, making money off the labor of cab drivers. The "disrupting" "successful upstart" had a simple innovation - break the law. Now they're looking to the law to protect their expropriation and parasitism on those doing all the work and creating their wealth for them.
Their business model works. That's why they're bigger than GM now. And that's why suddenly they're being perceived as unfair and exploitative.
In the Western social democratic system that more or less pervades the old industrial nations of Western Europe and the U.S., financial success is an invitation to lawsuits, unionization, and government fines.
The unionization is couched as a class warfare thing -- the management/owners are making big bucks and we workers are making peanuts -- but in reality, it's all about fighting for a piece of the pie.
The Teamsters rep in Oakland summed it all up: even though Uber's buying a big building there and employing 2,000 to 3,000 people, it's time to unionize and make them "give back".
I just hope that Seattle and California don't set a national trend, or this may be the beginning of the end for the sharing economy, just as manufacturing ended, and just as outsourcing has hollowed out the computer programming field and other domestic professions. What will there be left for Americans to do, if we keep shooting down every innovative business model like this?
I personally don't think that Uber is that much worse than the old taxi companies, and it should continue making a steady profit despite losing its luxury of unilaterally dictating their terms and wages to the drivers.
How could Uber be outsourced?
Without looking at the facts of wages and cost of living, could we not make the same case about the opposers (some investors) of unionization? They are just after $$ right?
Because that's all a union is: it's a business. Laws are only required because, as history shows, wealthy business owners want/wanted a completely, and in many cases, illegally, tilted playing field.
Unions are a significant part of the reason that there's a middle class at all.
I'd be much more sympathetic to a group of drivers who say, we've had it with these low Uber/Lyft rates. Let's form our own ride company, pay ourselves more, and compete with Uber. Get someone to write apps, create websites, do advertising, etc., and then get out there and compete.
That's what makes the wheels of the economy turn around, my friend: competition. Unionizing is like hermetically sealing a container so that nothing gets in, and nothing gets out. A static system that cannot change.
But competition opens new doors, admits new ideas, and who knows? Maybe higher rates for drivers proves to be a competitive advantage and their new company will do very well, forcing Uber and others to raise their own rates.
If higher driver rates are a good thing, then the smart businesses will do it, and succeed. Right?
If the driver is too busy serving other (higher-paying) customers acquired via other channels, they can sign off from Uber/Lyft with no repercussions.
In that sense they don't differ much from lead generators for other businesses (plumbers, roofers, landmowers).
Do you have any examples?
Franchise owners are independent businesses, which doesn't prevent McDonald's and KFC from advertising $5 special and requiring franchisees to accept that rate.
Large trucking companies are attracting independent owners/operators at advertised mileage rates with a "take-it-or-leave-it" implication. The owner/operator stays independent while accepting a truck load at a pre-determined rate.
On a broader scale though, nothing prevents me from posting a Craigslist ad "Looking for a ride to the airport this Saturday, my budget is $40". It does not constitute an employer-employee relationship, and an argument could be had that Uber/Lyft are just proxies for posting and fulfilling such requests. Extend that to moving, plumbing, etc.
Or am I completely off?
There is significant difference. I'm not privy to their requirements, but as I understand it drivers have to commit to a certain amount of rides in a month, availability at certain times (peak periods), and must meet certain criteria in execution of rides. IIRC, it's the dictation of how a job is performed, time schedules, etc. that have caused the courts to consider whether or not drivers are employees.
All contractor relationships include meeting certain criteria in the execution of the work. If you "contact" with someone in a way that doesn't give them any obligations, it's just a gift.
There are also rumors of required percentage of accepted requests (i.e. they don't want the drivers to be logging in and sitting idly), but I can't find a link handy.
Both of these practices, if continued, are likely to land Uber in hot water, so my (uneducated) guess is that it's no longer happening in US jurisdiction.
Is there something I'm missing here?
1) Low-rated passengers.
2) Requests that require significant travel for pickups that are likely to result in short rides (pickup request comes from a downtown bar with next destination likely to be another downtown bar, the driver himself is not very close to downtown). Happens under low driver supply. https://www.reddit.com/r/uberdrivers/comments/2mykji/my_repl...
3) Requests happening while the driver is "chasing the surge" and heading towards high-surge area while driving in non-surge vicinity and receiving a non-surge request just by being nearby.
This thread has more links towards the nature of concerns http://uberpeople.net/threads/ride-skipping-deactivation.365...
Might not be true in every town.
Why can they then decide which car you should buy? Why aren't you allowed to hire sub-contractors? Why can't the driver just set their own price?
If they where just lead generators then uber would take a cut of whatever price the drivers decided to take for their ride but the actual price negotiation would be between the driver and the customer.
So not it's unfortunately not that simple.
Any lead generator can choose who they deliver leads to, right? Uber can't literally force any individual to buy a certain type car, but they can choose to not do business with people unless they have a certain type of car.
Have a reasonably decent car, do the job yourself, maintain a certain level of customer satisfaction. These all seem like relatively reasonable terms under which to offer contract work.
You guys seem to be redefining what it means to defend what uber is doing.
How many lead generators do you know that would hinder a private contractor to hire other people?
It could. In the US, there's no hard/fast definition that gets down to that level of detail.
The IRS says: "In determining whether the person providing service is an employee or an independent contractor, all information that provides evidence of the degree of control and independence must be considered"
Certainly "who sets the rates" would be a consideration.
By itself, no, but it is one of the larger pieces of it.
"In that sense they don't differ much from lead generators for other businesses (plumbers, roofers, landmowers)."
Except lead generators for those other businesses don't have any say in how much you charge.
Not at all. Companies often put out contract proposals to a variety of contractors saying "we'll pay X for this work, take it or leave it". That doesn't suddenly make those contractors into employees.
On a less theoretical note, looking at stagnant wages over the last couple decades, it seems clear that between capital and labor, capital seems to hold more bargaining power. So something is needed to tip the power balance towards labor. Whether that's unions or something else, I have no idea.
The entire structure of government and law is about a group of people asserting their rules over others, to maintain a balance of power.
I don't think that, at least not in all cases. I've worked in some pretty crappy places that thankfully had unions in place to protect the workers' rights and safety.
Also: it'll be interesting to see how insurance companies start coping with drivers who earn from Uber / Lyft.
I don't have anywhere near the expertise to guess at how long the legislative meat-grinder for self-driving cars will take to hammer out, but an amoral minimax might be to just double down on firing all the drivers, and let them have a few more shekels for a couple years. But they have the money to walk and chew worker-bees, so we'll probably see both.
( This is getting further afield, but. Do we even have a semi-reasonable comparison for a bundle of legal and societal changes involved in self-driving transport? I can't think of one outside of the original introduction of cars. And on the legal side, that was mostly new law, not revising the assumption of human action across criminal, tort, insurance and whatever other categories. The analogous social changes - at first, demonizing pedestrians to get them off streets; later, suburbs, the propaganda tying the car to U.S. American notions of freedom, towns becoming dependent on violations for income, etc. - are somewhat harder to make bets about, but more interesting.
There certainly have been bigger changes (I'm guessing, of course, but I don't see auto-autos as a bigger deal than agriculture), but I don't know that legal codes were as complex then, and I know we don't have extensive records on the changes. The social upheaval of ag was worthy of the name 'singularity', which I really don't see self-driving cars as matching.)
I'm not commenting about the ethics of doing so, of course, but it reminds me of Walmart closing stores (apparently) because of labor unions. It's brutal, but effective.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/union-walmart-shut-5-stores-over...
Really. I cannot help but laugh when the upstart flashing new company finds itself as the new oppressor fighting to protect their employees from the evil that is collective bargaining.
Congratulations Uber. You're now Macdonalds.
"Uber has two potential legal arguments against the measure if it passes. The first is that federal law reigns supreme when it comes to organizing, rendering a city ordinance on the subject essentially null and void. The second is that collective bargaining by independent contractors would amount to illegal price-fixing under antitrust law."
and "the only way organizing by Uber drivers could be legal is under a so-called state action exemption from antitrust law."
They're the Silicon Valley equivalent of Walmart.
2. Uber isn't the first company by any stretch of the imagination that employes a workforce of contractors. There is nothing "evil" about that. It's supply and demand. Everyone can drive, so why should Uber pay more wages than they have to? The law will dictate the minimums they can pay.
Nobody is forced to prostitute themselves, rob or steal, etc. But heh, fuck social safety nets ya know? If they existed, both Walmart and Uber would have to pay real wages.
> Uber isn't the first company by any stretch of the imagination that employes a workforce of contractors. There is nothing "evil" about that. It's supply and demand. Everyone can drive, so why should Uber pay more wages than they have to? The law will dictate the minimums they can pay.
That's right, the law will. Good luck Uber.
You want part-time workers to be paid full time. How is that fair for the employer? There is no good answer to the part-time work problem. If the supply of workers outpaces the demand for work, the employer will hire part time. It's simple economics.
None of which are sufficient compared to proper first world countries (ie anywhere developed outside of the US).
> You want part-time workers to be paid full time. How is that fair for the employer? There is no good answer to the part-time work problem.
A government doesn't exist for your business interests; it exists to take care of its citizens. If you can operate your business in such an environment, great. If you can't, tough.
Quality of life is a more important measure than your exit strategy or next quarter results.
Although there are some companies (HandUp, and a few others) started with the goal of treating the weakest members better.
Safety nets do exist, that's why Uber and Wal-Mart don't have to pay real wages. The tax payers subsidize Wal-Mart and McDonalds for $153b a year [0].
We ought to account for the government benefits required by employees of large corporations and tack that on to their yearly bill -- no deductions -- and see what that does to their wages.
[0]https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/04/15/...
Agree 100%. You either bill them directly, or you create a basic income, raise taxes to support it, thereby forcing companies to pay more to bring labor into the labor force.
Basically, the low prices you see at Wal Mart couldn't exist if the company paid their workers a wage that reflected the benefits given by the government. Additionally, Wal-Mart receives a significant amount of money in the form of the SNAP payments themselves from their customers. It's basically like the government food store, except the family that runs has a net worth of more than $100B.
I don't understand your second sentence. Costco has employees that they pay $0?
True, but how does that make Uber the bad guy here? If driving for Uber is unpleasant, and they don't force anyone to work there, then it must be less unpleasant than whatever these workers are doing it instead of.
To the extent that society fails to offer a minimum baseline that isn't itself pleasant, then that's where the blame lies, not with Uber.
You're probably going to post something about the lump of labor, but consider this: demand for jobs is inelastic. When have you ever seen a company prevented from doing business because their wages were too low? As long as there is a job opening, there will be people competing with each other to fill it since we have significantly more people than we do jobs, thanks to our capital-intensive economy.
Some people have invested themselves in Uber based on the pay, which has since dropped. This has happened to people such as Mr. Creery from the article.
Imagine you get hired for a job for some amount of money, pull up your roots and relocate. Then 3 months after you get there they drop your pay down by half. What a pain. Would you have taken the job if you knew that were going to happen? Probably not. And now you have a large switching cost to get away from this job if you have to move again.
Unionized workers can in theory negotiate to mitigate those kinds of scenarios.
It's even worse than that--people are taking out car loans to work for Uber.
2. If you are a big employer you have a big workforce that can, and should be able to wield some power as a collective. The idea here is that a company can't magically dodge having a powerful group of employees by not employing them. Paying as much as you have to means you pay the legal minimum wage, if the workforce as a collective thinks that is ok. Otherwise you pay more.
2. No but thats not really what they are. They are working as contractors but being treated as employees.
For example they can't set their own price, they aren't allow to choose their own car, they can't subcontract which is the conditions employees normally are subject to. On the other hand they don't get ex. healthcare and have to maintain all expenses themselves. Uber works because it's managed to disrupt legislation. Sometimes thats great or necessary and the taxi medallion system surely are broken. But to ignore some of the deeper issues with the kind of disruption Uber is doing is simply ignoring some of the deeper issues of technology.
And just as we are fine with companies being able to lobby for their legislated privileges so should the drivers be allowed to organize.
If anyone's evil, isn't it the government for not providing useful safety nets?
The companies are just going along with the market rates at which their employees/contractors are willing to work.
http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2013-08-27/why-walmart...
By that measure I heard that Thomas Keller pays its workers an excellent wage, while McDonald's not so much. Therefore we should shut down McDonald's outlets and replace them with Thomas Keller restaurants.
That's my understanding of the situation, which is tenuous. Someone please correct me if I'm wrong.
It's mind-blowing, the amount of words written about this, yet there is no clear explanation of what exactly is going on.
Sure flies against the idea of "Informed Consent".
"Else I'd not have done that procedure...."
Edit: From the downvotes, I assume that people have issues with knowing medical pricing? That seems really backwards.
Seattle seems to be using its authority to regulate transportation services to extend these protections to drivers regardless of whether they are employees or contractors.
The First Amendment just says that Congress can't do it, not that a private company you're not being forced to work for can't.
To that point, you can be fired for attempting to unionize in certain circumstances. Seattle is just trying to explicitly extend that protection to contractors.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Bill_of_Rights#F...
Government and industry will react in ways we understand to initiatives of our own. They'll be quick to allow any motions that will limit the growth and power of our new companies. We should maximize on this.
Sad to see that Plouffe has sold his soul to corporate America. I wonder what his former boss would think.
[0]http://www.cnbc.com/2015/10/09/ride-hailing-company-lyft-par...
Take farmers, for example. Maybe they could lobby for a waiver for collective price-fixing. Or hair stylists, or truck drivers, or gardeners...
I assume you've never heard of the Teamsters union?
My point is more about price-fixing though. Obviously a union that represents 100% of Seattle cabbies will have a lot more power to set prices than 5% of truck drivers.
I suppose it will come down to the language of the Seattle law -- the article isn't clear if this is an optional-membership union or not. I presume it's not optional, because otherwise it would be very easy for Uber and Lyft to sidestep.
Each "driver coordinator" (e.g. Uber and Lyft) will have one union entity that is certified to enter negotiations with the driver coordinator — as chosen by the majority of drivers who choose to participate in the process.
As far as I can tell, the law doesn't require drivers to enter the union but it doesn't prohibit such an agreement:
> 1. Nothing in this Section 6.310.735 shall preclude a driver coordinator from making an agreement with the EDR to require membership of for-hire drivers in the EDR’s entity/organization as a condition of being hired, contracted with, or partnered with by the driver coordinator to provide for-hire services to the public
The main thing the law does is prevent the driver coordinators from punishing specific individuals from participating in the process. This is a critical factor that is necessary for any real union to take off — otherwise Uber can simply fire anyone who expresses any desire to unionize and prevent the union entity from attaining any critical mass.
> A driver coordinator shall not retaliate against any for-hire driver for exercising the right to participate in the representative process provided by this Section 6.310.735. It shall be a violation for a driver coordinator or its agent, designee, employee, or any person or group of persons acting directly or indirectly in the interest of the driver coordinator in relation to the for-hire driver to:
> 1. Interfere with, restrain, or deny the exercise of, or the attempt to exercise, any right protected under this Section 6.310.735; or
> 2. Take adverse action, including but not limited to threatening, harassing, penalizing, or in any other manner discriminating or retaliating against a driver because the driver has exercised the rights protected under this Section 6.310.735.