Because the tech business strikes more and more into alignment with the far proper, the difficulty of employee energy has by no means been extra vital. The Chicago marketing campaign gives some key classes.
Chicago—Final month, a coalition of rideshare drivers, grassroots organizations, and unions announced an agreement with Uber declaring that the corporate would assist Illinois state laws enabling drivers to unionize after which cut price round pay and dealing situations within the rideshare business. This settlement was a results of Chicago drivers’ organizing for greater than six years—a narrative that reveals each the potential and the challenges of employee organizing within the tech business as that business takes a pointy flip in the direction of the far proper.
When Uber and Lyft had been based, drivers and passengers alike had been excited by the know-how and its promise of low costs for passengers and first rate pay and versatile work schedules for drivers. For a time, these benefits overshadowed an business enterprise mannequin that relied on a workforce of impartial contractors with no employee protections and an organization tradition that prioritized progress in any respect prices. Over the previous decade, it has grow to be clear that this early honeymoon interval was solely momentary and had been subsidized by venture capital to undercut competitors and nook the market. Starting in 2017, each firms gradually decreased pay for drivers, who went from making over a greenback a mile in 2015 to $.64 a mile in 2022—at the same time as the price of car possession and upkeep skyrocketed and the price the businesses charged passengers increased by 83 percent from the start of 2018 to the third quarter of 2022. Though at one level Lyft had a reputation as a friendlier, extra socially accountable firm, drivers have constantly skilled broad similarities within the pay and dealing situations between the 2 firms. As we speak, neither firm supplies any sort of normal time or distance-based pay price to drivers in Chicago, and the price of each experience in addition to how a lot of the full fare the motive force receives are decided in an unpredictable method by a mysterious algorithm. What has grow to be clear is that these app firms depend on employee exploitation and paying employees below the minimum wage so as to be worthwhile.
Drivers in Chicago began organizing in 2017, immediately following Uber’s announcement that employees would not obtain the majority 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 “know-how” firm moderately than a transportation firm—and each firms have frequently tried to divest from the workforce they begrudgingly depend on till the time they hope to interchange drivers with self-driving automobiles. Driver organizing started via a casual self-organized group after which, beginning in 2019, grew to become a undertaking of The Individuals’s Foyer known as Chicago Gig Alliance. Drivers lobbied at Metropolis Corridor and held rallies, protests, acts of civil disobedience, and vigils for employees killed on the job. We shared harrowing tales of assaults on the job, arbitrary firings by algorithm, and pay rates that left drivers in poverty and even generally homeless.
In 2022, Chicago Gig Alliance labored with allies within the Chicago Metropolis Council to draft and introduce an ordinance to raise pay and enhance working situations. Drivers held conferences with their council members to ask them to assist this ordinance and held rallies and direct actions to name consideration to the dramatically worsening pay and situations within the business— a marketing campaign which earned dozens of media hits that reached hundreds of thousands of Chicagoans.
The Individuals’s Foyer included assist for that ordinance as a situation of the group’s 2023 endorsement course of, which led then–gubernatorial candidate Brandon Johnson and a dozen members of the Metropolis Council to decide to supporting the rideshare living-wage ordinance earlier than drivers and different Individuals’s Foyer members knocked hundreds of doorways to assist them win their elections. In response to ongoing driver organizing in addition to the progressive momentum coming from the 2023 election, Alderman Mike Rodriguez reintroduced the ordinance within the first assembly of the brand new council in Might 2023. Over the following 18 months, drivers and Alderman Rodriguez constructed the cosponsor listing as much as 29 alders.
All through this course of, Chicago drivers had been in fixed communication with drivers in different cities preventing related campaigns. PowerSwitch Motion and Motion Heart on Race and the Financial system introduced collectively driver organizations from a number of states to study from successes and failures and supply analysis and authorized assist. Drivers from locations like California, Colorado, and Seattle had been quickly touring to Chicago to take part in rallies for our rideshare living-wage ordinance, and drivers from Chicago marched on Uber’s HQ in San Francisco to ship calls for for honest pay and protected jobs.
Present Concern
Whereas drivers targeted initially on the necessity for a metropolis ordinance to control pay, we additionally acknowledged that organizing a union may empower employees to barter immediately with the businesses whereas additionally leveraging employee energy to push for rules such because the wage ordinance we had been preventing for. Towards that finish, we labored to construct relationships with unions that could be each in supporting the ordinance—and doubtlessly organizing a union of drivers over the long term. In early 2025, Chicago Gig Alliance came together with the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 1 and the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM) to push the ordinance over the end line after which work collectively to prepare a statewide union of rideshare drivers.
In March 2025, a competing union joined the fray on the alternative aspect when Worldwide Union of Working Engineers Native 150 (who had given $1 million to Brandon Johnson’s opponent within the 2023 mayoral runoff, Paul Vallas, and has opposed affordable housing and environmental measures over time) introduced a “labor peace” settlement with Uber and promptly started denigrating the wage ordinance as pointless. IUOE is likely one of the largest contributors to Metropolis Council campaigns within the metropolis and had shut sufficient relationships with a key handful of council members who had cosponsored the ordinance that they had been capable of persuade them to reverse course. In the meantime, the businesses threatened to put off 10,000 drivers and lift costs by 50 % if the ordinance handed.
As we moved in the direction of a summer season deadline for shifting laws earlier than the council shifted its focus to an escalating finances disaster within the fall, drivers and Alderman Rodriguez labored furiously to shore up the votes we wanted. After dozens of drivers, non secular leaders, and different allies packed a four-hour Metropolis Council committee listening to—and some key council members who had beforehand dedicated to assist the ordinance continued to waver—it grew to become clear that there have been actual questions on our getting the invoice over the end line. On the identical time, the escalating marketing campaign by Chicago Gig alliance, the SEIU, and IAM represented a credible enough threat that Uber apprehensive we’d be capable of move the ordinance, or at the very least that we’d be capable of proceed to do injury to their pursuits in our metropolis and state. In response, the corporate got here to the negotiating desk and agreed to a deal that gives a path to statewide bargaining rights for the greater than 100,000 rideshare drivers throughout our state—however which additionally required dropping town ordinance.
It was a bittersweet second for the drivers—who had been organizing for years whereas working for lower than minimal wage, and who urgently wanted a elevate. As a result of impartial contractors are legally prohibited from partaking in conventional collective bargaining, state laws is required to allow unionization and bargaining by rideshare drivers round pay and dealing situations. That course of may take one to 2 years to get employees the raises which can be lengthy overdue. On the identical time, this course of gives the potential for larger-scale employee energy and transformation of the business.
The query of employee energy within the tech business is very vital because the tech business strikes increasingly into alignment with the far right. Rideshare drivers are on the entrance traces of holding the tech business accountable to prioritizing the wants of employees, group, and democracy moderately than maximizing earnings and fueling the rise of white nationalist authoritarianism. Whereas this Illinois rideshare marketing campaign milestone is bittersweet, it’s a reminder that employee organizing has the potential to remodel the industries which can be more and more vital to the present second in our financial system and politics.
