From today’s The Nation:
Last month, a coalition of rideshare drivers, grassroots organizations, and unions announced an agreement with Uber declaring that the company would support Illinois state legislation enabling drivers to unionize and then bargain around pay and working conditions in the rideshare industry. This agreement was a result of Chicago drivers’ organizing for more than six years—a story that shows both the potential and the challenges of worker organizing in the tech industry as that industry takes a sharp turn towards the far right.
When Uber and Lyft were founded, drivers and passengers alike were excited by the technology and its promise of low prices for passengers and decent pay and flexible work schedules for drivers. For a time, these advantages overshadowed an industry business model that relied on a workforce of independent contractors with no worker protections and a company culture that prioritized growth at all costs. Over the past decade, it has become clear that this early honeymoon period was only temporary and had been subsidized by venture capital to undercut competition and corner the market. Beginning in 2017, both companies gradually decreased pay for drivers, who went from making over a dollar a mile in 2015 to $.64 a mile in 2022—even as the cost of vehicle ownership and maintenance skyrocketed and the cost the companies charged passengers increased by 83 percent from the beginning of 2018 to the third quarter of 2022. Although at one point Lyft had a reputation as a friendlier, more socially responsible company, drivers have consistently experienced broad similarities in the pay and working conditions between the two companies. Today, neither company provides any kind of standard time or distance-based pay rate to drivers in Chicago, and the cost of every ride as well as how much of the total fare the driver receives are determined in an unpredictable way by a mysterious algorithm. What has become clear is that these app companies rely on worker exploitation and paying workers below the minimum wage in order to be profitable.
Drivers in Chicago started organizing in 2017, directly following Uber’s announcement that workers would no longer receive the bulk of their “surge” pay (the upcharge passengers pay when the platforms are busy). Even then, the writing was on the wall, as Uber described itself explicitly as a “technology” company rather than a transportation company—and both companies have continually tried to divest from the workforce they begrudgingly rely on until the time they hope to replace drivers with self-driving vehicles. Driver organizing began through an informal self-organized group and then, starting in 2019, became a project of The People’s Lobby called Chicago Gig Alliance. Drivers lobbied at City Hall and held rallies, protests, acts of civil disobedience, and vigils for workers killed on the job. We shared harrowing stories of assaults on the job, arbitrary firings by algorithm, and pay rates that left drivers in poverty and even sometimes homeless.
In 2022, Chicago Gig Alliance worked with allies in the Chicago City Council to draft and introduce an ordinance to raise pay and improve working conditions. Drivers held meetings with their council members to ask them to support this ordinance and held rallies and direct actions to call attention to the dramatically worsening pay and conditions in the industry— a campaign which earned dozens of media hits that reached millions of Chicagoans.
Read the complete story here.