California reached a union deal with tech giants
politico.com
politico.com
Title is misleading: no company has made any deal with any union. This is legislation to reduce insurance coverage in exchange for limited rights to unionize.
This is per-sector negotiation, affecting all rideshare companies, with qualified unions (that seem to only include SEIU) over wages, leaves, dismissals, and health insurance but not fares, that reduces uninsured insurance coverage from $1M to 300K (thus shifting the burden to drivers and passsengers).
Uber sought the deal after recent court rulings showed prop 22 (costing $100M's) wasn't the complete bar they'd hoped against the unions. SEIU may have gotten the deal in exchange for supporting prop 50 (redistricting to counter Texas). Governor Newsom is eager to play middleman-advocate for both business and labor.
Unlike other states, the SEIU is the most powerful unions and political players in California.
Senator Laphonza Butler used to be SEIU leadership [0], and SEIU endorsements can make or break political careers, like endorsing Kamala Harris for CA AG back in 2010 [1]. They are also one of the largest lobbyists in CA state politics [2][3]
You cannot hold public office in California without SEIU backing.
I've had mixed experiences with them. Back in HS during the Obama 1 years, one teacher was notoriously grabby with girls and another ended up shacking up with one of their students right when she turned 18 and she spent a significant amount of time with him during her younger years despite her not being an AP Calc BC student like the rest of us and only in Algebra 2 by senior year.
Both teachers had an open history of sexual predation amongst us students, but when it came to a head, our teacher's union (an SEIU local who's leadership alumni are now very prominent in CA and national DNC politics) transferred the former to another HS and ended the latters contract but didn't touch his pension. Our local Safeway was an SEIU shop too, and they made all the students working there part-time students pay union dues but wouldn't given them union benefits or say in union matters, and the SEIU leadership at that Safeway would always prioritize the longer lasting members of the union, and would segregate the agreements and spaces.
As such, I'm not hopeful about this compromise.
[0] - https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2023-10-16/laphonza-b...
[1] - https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-ca-laphonza-butler-2...
[2] - https://calmatters.org/data/2025/04/california-lobbying-spen...
[3] - https://calmatters.org/politics/2024/11/california-lobbying-...
This wouldn't have happened before Waymo's demonstrable successes.
That seems to me an attempt to discredit union movements. Will you be explaining where are you getting this information from?
Uber, and I would assume the competition, have been chasing self driving fleets for years. This is well documented. Despite the market hype some years back, I think most sane executives understood how far off this technology was when the initial investment and subsequent divestment were made.
As you may remember, there were plenty of questions during this tumultuous period regarding the viability of self-driving tech. People wondered if it could even function at all within the foreseeable future.
Since the technology was so questionable, rideshares understandably wanted to increase earnings and lock in their competitive advantage. This required, among other things, fighting unionization tooth and nail.
Now that Waymo has done the hard part and proven that self driving tech actually works as a day-to-day service rideshares can start to rebuild some social capital before the creeping tide of automated taxi services makes any concessions moot. After all, they didn't build the automation and have always believed in a system that puts fairly compensated human drivers first.
But... I wouldn't want to be an outlier i.e. serious injuries. That would require suing the driver that has few/no assets.
Uber/Lyft sure as hell ain't going to let you sue them for a dime.
What did the insurance cover? (Also, were AV insurance standards also reduced for Uber and Lyft?)
Excess liability from drivers with insufficient insurance (the driver’s themselves would still be liable here, but unlikely able to pay; the ridesharing firms having overlapping liability and an insurance mandate means that there is a stronger guarantee of some ability to pay where damage occurs.)
> (Also, were AV insurance standards also reduced for Uber and Lyft?)
California’s separate AV insurance mandate is on the manufacturer, and is not impacted.
Zero chance. What we may see is the legacy rideshare providers ceding the market to autonomously native providers.
But even then, this is ringfenced to California. If the unions go Luddite, one can contain the problem the way California’s home insurance market is segregated.
California lawmakers announced the agreement in late August, paving a path for ride-hailing drivers to unionize as labor wanted, in exchange for the state drastically reducing expensive insurance coverage mandates protested by the companies. It earned rare public support from Gov. Gavin Newsom and received final approval from state lawmakers this week.
"How do you collectively bargain around stock options?"
Same as collectively bargaining over base comp?
"remote work policies"
My union contract guarantees me and all other software devs in my shop remote work for the life of the contract.
"pace of AI automation"
My union contract requires bargaining over any mandatory use of of AI. So far, there haven't been any major disagreements with management over this. At other workplaces in my union, management has had worse ideas.
Tell that to any movie star, director, writer, NFL starting quarterback, soccer star...
Otherwise, the people you list are very well-represented by private agencies. Unions like the SAG can benefit the lower-level people in some respects, but they mostly serve to gatekeep their industry and encourage films to be made outside their jurisdiction.
On the other hand you have retail workers and food service workers, who are largely not unionized. So what can we blame their low pay and status on?
Talent and genius and innovative ideas being rewarded (or not) is largely orthogonal to union membership. It is a factor of demand and supply, and prevailing profit margins in that industry. That is all.
Detroit declined because factory workers are more fungible than movie stars. Their unions didn't pay attention to the threat of foreign labor or competition by superior foreign firms. Their management also became complacent about competition and chose to blame it on unions.
Germany is very famously pro-union and boasts a strong auto industry. What did they do differently?
Mostly mine seem to innovate new ways to fail at hiding that they've been smoking in the car...
The German auto industry is in a world of shit, actually, but I don't think they can blame the unions for that. Their "works council" model is very different from a typical UAW stronghold in the US. The unions (and in many cases the state itself) are active partners in corporate ownership and management, so they have a stronger incentive not to kill the golden goose.
Like the American auto industry, and also the Japanese, they've been asleep at the wheel as EVs eat their lunch. For a long time it was quite strong though.
> It has been steadily laying off employees and cutting wages. Unionization has done nothing to prevent this
It can't. Unionization can't raise wages and it can't lower wages. It can provide job and wage stability. It can ensure non-union workers are laid off first. But if there's no money or the industry is doing poorly it's a management or international trade issue.
Speaking with a friend around me who worked in automotive, the unions are a double edged sword. They provide security for you, but they also provide security for a bunch of folks who realized they won't get fired if they put in the bare minimum. My friend found this incredibly frustrating.
Many unions here put large amounts of money toward political goals I don't support. If I want a job at such a company, under Michigan state law I can be compelled to pay the dues, even if the union is working against me politically. Until I can work somewhere without being forced to pay union dues, I am not interested in those jobs, even if they pay more.
Why should anyone, union or not, be fired for that? Not promoted, not given raises, sure that's fine. The "bare minimum" is by definition the least acceptable level of productivity from a worker.
> I can be compelled to pay the dues, even if the union is working against me politically
Depends on what that means. Politically its job is to get you the most pay and job security possible.
You can ask any economist what happened. They won't blame unions, they'll blame the proliferation of industrialized economies. America cannot compete in a world where poverty-labor outperforms America's standard-of-living.
Cities do not fall from grace like that for no reason; Detroit and Flint fell from grace because they made it impossible to invest in the cities future. It's easy to say who cares about rideshare drivers, but if you can't operate companies in CA then people will stop founding them there, and then good engineering jobs will leave. Everyone once thought MI would be prosperous forever too
I just told you the most commonly cited reason, and instead of arguing that I'm wrong, you're arguing orthogonal to my point. Detroit became less special as time went on and there was nothing that Americans could do about it - the culprit was neoliberalism. Unions or not, that is the reason why the economy could not persist.
So let me rephrase my question: barring unions or state-subsidized housing, how was the US supposed to prop-up a manufacturing economy in the 1980s?
The best thing the US government probably could have done to prop up the manufacturing economy in general would have been to spread knowledge of modern best practices, like those promoted by W. Edwards Deming. Plenty of people were willing to improve but simply hadn't been trained in how to do it. For auto manufacturing specifically, legislators and regulators could have phased in emissions and fuel economy rules more slowly to give manufacturers a few more years to react instead of forcing them to hastily modify old powertrain designs in ways that drove up costs and ruined reliability.
It such an anachronistic song.
Nobody wants to go back to the bad old days of 16 hour days in the factory just to live with 16 other people a tenament and then die broke in a gutter when the machine takes your hand off.
US trade, fleet environmental standards and yes, the unions turning into an insular political force each destroyed Detroit.
Also unions didn't get rid of 16 hour days, market competition and regulation did that. Private industry unions have been consistently behind the private market in terms of benefits. The past you're talking about never existed.
Yeah they could be better, but people are overjoyed when they are able to get into UAW work because it means they won't have to struggle to survive anymore.