The labor movement is heavily invested in the ongoing battle over the rights of roughly 200,000 drivers for Uber, Lyft, and other app-based gig companies in Massachusetts. But, with the fight coming to a head in the next few months, unions have been deeply divided over the best way to protect them.
One faction is adamant that drivers be legally recognized as employees, with the full slate of protections and benefits mandated by state law, including paid sick time, unemployment insurance, and overtime pay. The other insists that giving drivers the right to organize a union and negotiate contracts should be the priority, regardless of how they’re classified.
It’s a nuanced, hard-to-parse dispute with potentially significant ramifications as labor squares off against deep-pocketed tech companies that have joined forces across the country. Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, and Instacart insist drivers must be independent contractors to preserve their flexibility, and have offered to throw in some benefits to keep classifying them that way. The labor movement knows it needs to present a united front in this high-stakes political battle — or risk confusing the public with mixed messages about the best way forward.
“We need a comprehensive response to this growing, unregulated economy,” said state Senator Lydia Edwards, who is sponsoring a bill to formally give drivers full employment rights. “We’re all an app away from being independent contractors: carpenters by app, lawyers by app, nurses by app.”
The ranks of the “digital working class” using online platforms grew rapidly in the years before the pandemic, and the numbers of app-based transportation and food delivery workers shot up even more after COVID hit. Worker advocates say companies use this technology, and the flexibility it offers, to shield themselves from the legal responsibility of being full employers. App-based companies maintain they’re not employers and are simply giving drivers a way to make money whenever they want. And, they say, many drivers prefer the current arrangement as independent contractors.
With numerous bills on Beacon Hill, multiple initiatives heading for the ballot in November, and a fast-approaching court case, Massachusetts has emerged as the epicenter of the debate over how to regulate all this. If gig workers can’t win protections here, in a state with some of the strongest labor laws in the country, the safety net that jobs traditionally provide could further unravel, warns Chrissy Lynch, president of the Massachusetts AFL-CIO.
“I see this as an existential threat not just to the labor movement but to society,” said Lynch whose group backs Edwards’s bill. “The rest of the country is watching.”
The companies maintain that drivers will lose flexibility if they become employees — a claim labor groups dispute — and point to a recent survey that found 85 percent of drivers want to remain independent contractors with limited benefits.
“They do not want to be employees,” spokesman Conor Yunits said in an email. “If there is a divide within labor, it means there are those more concerned with their own political agenda than listening to drivers.”
Ultimately, both labor camps want the same thing: gig drivers with employee status and the right to unionize. But getting there is tricky.
Worker advocates have long maintained that gig drivers — many of them immigrants and people of color — are employees under state law, due in part to the control the companies have over them and the fact that the drivers are essential to their business.
Even if they were to be formally deemed employees under state law, they wouldn’t be allowed to organize under the National Labor Relations Act, like most private-sector workers, because they haven’t been considered employees under federal law — although a newly tightened independent contractor rule could change that.
And giving drivers collective bargaining rights without employee status could set a dangerous precedent, some say, creating a hybrid category of workers with fewer legal protections that could spread to other industries. Those who support the unionization effort, on the other hand, say giving drivers a voice — and a way to protect themselves from “mobile sweatshop conditions” — is more attainable and should be the priority, even without full employment rights.
The division leaves even worker-friendly lawmakers unsure of what to do, said Thomas A. Kochan, a faculty member of the MIT Institute for Work and Employment Research.
“If we can’t get the labor movement on board in support of a single bill, it’s going to be very hard to see something passed by the Legislature,” he said.
The tech companies, meanwhile, are geared up for a fight. Collectively, they’ve spent hundreds of millions of dollars around the country — including nearly $50 million over two election cycles in Massachusetts, according to a new report coauthored by the worker advocacy nonprofit National Employment Law Project — and worked to successfully pass laws in 34 states between 2015 and 2022 with language defining gig workers as non-employees, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
Drivers themselves also seem divided.
Coalition member Prisell Polanco of Newton, who drives full time for Uber and Lyft, said his wages at Uber have been “cut to pieces,” and he had little recourse when he was kicked off the platform until labor union SEIU 32BJ stepped in to help. That’s why he supports the Drivers Demand Justice coalition, led by 32BJ and the International Association of Machinists. They argue that giving drivers collective bargaining rights would provide protections even if the companies prevail in formalizing drivers as independent contractors.
“Whether we become employees or not, it’s not going to fix our problem,” Polanco said. “Getting a union is our main goal.”
Forming a union doesn’t circumvent the fight for full employment rights, according to the coalition, which has been organizing drivers for years and has held numerous protests, including one in which coalition leaders sat outside the Uber corporate office in Saugus until the company agreed to a meeting.
“Only a union will fix those issues that plague this industry,” Roxana Rivera, head of the local SEIU 32BJ division, said at a legislative hearing in March.
But others argue that anything short of full employment rights provides a “carveout” for the companies. A Teamsters local in Washington state in 2022 reached an agreement with Uber and Lyft to give drivers some rights but keep them as independent contractors, a partnership denounced by Teamsters international president Sean O’Brien as a “charade to skirt their obligations under the employee relationship.”
Now O’Brien’s Teamsters, the Massachusetts AFL-CIO, and others warn that union contracts without full employment rights could further the “gigification” of work.
“We see that as a dangerous stepping stone, however well intentioned,” John Mataya, the Teamsters’ state legislative director, said at the legislative hearing, warning that the unionization proposal would create a “third way” of employment that “tacitly legitimizes” the tech companies’ independent contractor model.
Driver misclassification is also costing the state money, Edwards said.
If Uber and Lyft drivers were classified as employees, their earnings would have generated estimated payments of more than $266 million into state unemployment insurance, workers comp, and paid family and medical leave funds between 2013 and 2023, she said, citing an upcoming state auditor’s report.
Many drivers are confused by the different approaches, said Ryan Francis, a Lyft driver in Fall River who is part of the Massachusetts Drivers United coalition pushing for full employment status.
“I don’t think anyone knows exactly which story to follow,” he said.
In recent months, the labor movement has been trying to find a way to come together. Edwards also proposed adding an amendment to the full employment bill that would give drivers a different way to unionize, though the union-bill proponents have said it’s not viable.
Yet both camps are still campaigning hard for their respective causes. Teamsters Local 25 recently held an event to endorse Edwards’s bill, while the Drivers Demand Justice coalition rallied with national labor leaders Wednesday at the State House to promote its effort.
“The democratic nature of our coalitions and of our unions is a core strength,” the two labor coalitions said in a joint statement to the Globe. “Any and all deliberations to date have been in the spirit of unity and of making sure that the regulatory frameworks put into place in Massachusetts are ones that truly prioritize the interests of Massachusetts workers, not Silicon Valley executives.”
And as app-based work grows, particularly for those on the bottom rung of the labor market, worker advocates around the country are paying close attention.
“This is a place to draw a line in the sand,” said Rebecca Dixon, president of the National Employment Law Project. “I’m on the edge of my seat.”
Katie Johnston can be reached at katie.johnston@globe.com. Follow her @ktkjohnston.