This move could lead to one of the single largest increases in collective bargaining coverage in generations. Massachusetts passed similar changes in November, while drivers in Minnesota and Illinois are organizing to pressure legislators into introducing comparable bills in their states.
This is the kind of policy experiment more states need to adopt.
New collective bargaining agreements covering over 900,000 drivers across California and Massachusetts would effectively undo the past 20 years of slow decline in private-sector bargaining coverage across the country — though it still wouldn’t come close to making up for larger declines over the past half-century.
These new agreements would increase total private-sector bargaining coverage in the U.S. by 10 percent overall. Such an increase would stand in sharp contrast to President Donald Trump’s efforts to strip over 1 million federal workers of their collective bargaining rights — the single biggest union-busting effort in American history.
California’s new policy model could transform the lives of rideshare drivers and create a sorely needed path forward for workers in other sectors of the economy, too. This would have major implications for workers, unions, and the country.
Two principles underly the new rideshare policy model. The first principle enables workers to form a union and bargain collectively through an easier process than exists under the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), the federal law that controls most private-sector workers’ unionization efforts. For example, this model provides prompt access to fellow drivers’ contact information and offers the ability to start bargaining sooner.
Workers need an easier path to form unions and bargain collectively because corporations have too many ways to avoid negotiating and to bust unions — so much so that just 1 in 7 union organizing drives achieve a first contract within a year.
The second principle allows workers to bargain across an entire industry — often called sectoral bargaining— instead of being limited to a single worksite, as the NLRA encourages. Sectoral bargaining is particularly well suited for rideshare because it covers all drivers in the industry, from full time to casual, no matter how firms try to structure their work.
Indeed, as one academic study explained, workers in occupations that are “inherently hard to organize are more likely to be organized in unions” under sectoral bargaining systems. Sectoral bargaining also raises wages, benefits, and other standards for far more workers than the single worksite default of the NLRA — and does so in a way that enables companies to compete on a level playing field.
Potential for Change
Although the effectiveness of the policy change still needs to be proven, and there are important caveats to discuss, its potential is hard to overstate.
Improving working conditions within the rideshare industry is notoriously difficult, and traditional fixes have failed. For example, the median rideshare driver in California takes home just $7.63 per hour after paying for gas and other expenses, even though drivers are supposed to be guaranteed a much higher minimum wage.
Worse still, artificial intelligence and related technologies are being used to make rideshare jobs even less desirable. Obscure pay formulas and heavy surveillance violate privacy and provide companies with information that can be used to vary pay and further squeeze drivers. Algorithmic firings, known as “deactivations,” can prevent drivers from earning a living and are hard to challenge even when they seem arbitrary. Technology will also enable robotaxis to eliminate rideshare jobs.
Yet there is hope that this new policy experiment will deliver.
Collective bargaining has a proven record of addressing the challenges rideshare drivers currently face, including low wages and poor or nonexistent benefits, occupational injuries, technological change, and industry transitions.
What’s more, these union and bargaining reforms are based on strategies that have already improved other highly challenging industries in American history, such as garment manufacturing. The reforms also draw from what is currently working in other developed countries, including Australia, where recent and related policy changes have led to increased bargaining coverage, union membership and real wage gains.
States can adopt this new policy model because of an unfortunate legal situation that rideshare companies have fostered and exploited. Unless and until the Trump administration and the U.S. Supreme Court take actions to affirm that drivers are employees rather than independent contractors, which is unlikely, states have the legal authority to create labor policy for these workers unconstrained by the federal pre-emption of most state actions that affect unions and collective bargaining.
If this model can succeed in the rideshare industry, it could create a sorely needed path forward for workers in other industries to improve their jobs and push back against the growing influence of corporations and technology. In short, these policy experiments deserve close attention.
David Madland is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and the author of Re-Union: How Bold Labor Reforms Can Repair, Revitalize, and Reunite the United States.
Governing’s opinion columns reflect the views of their authors and not necessarily those of Governing’s editors or management.
