The U.S. National Labor Relations Board on Tuesday made it more difficult for companies to treat workers as independent contractors rather than employees, handing workers in the gig economy and other industries a potential path to join unions.
It’s a few months old now but there was also a bit of related news out of California recently. While the appeals court ruled that most of California Prop 22 was constitutional (overruling a lower court’s decision that the entire thing was unconstitutional) they did throw out one bit of the law that made it all but impossible for the law to be amended. While the case will almost certainly be appealed once again to the State Supreme Court, the appeals court ruling does open up the possibility for legislation to be passed that’ll allow CA gig workers to unionize.
Of course, if that actually did happen, I’m guessing that companies like Uber would either sue to get any unionization law overturned or spend another $200 million+ on another ballot initiative that undoes the law.
Here in Minnesota we had a bill that would have set a minimum wage for rideshare drivers. Uber threatened to stop operating in greater Minnesota (outside the Twin Cities metro area) and to hike rates in the metro if the bill passed. There’s a lot of disabled people who rely on rideshare apps, and greater Minnesota already feels ignored and if they can’t get an Uber that’s going to make things worse. So Governor Walz vetoed the bill. Uber is going to make whatever threats it has to in order to stop bills that help their workers, CA is a much larger market though so that kind of restricts what threats are financially reasonable for them to follow through on.
It’s a few months old now but there was also a bit of related news out of California recently. While the appeals court ruled that most of California Prop 22 was constitutional (overruling a lower court’s decision that the entire thing was unconstitutional) they did throw out one bit of the law that made it all but impossible for the law to be amended. While the case will almost certainly be appealed once again to the State Supreme Court, the appeals court ruling does open up the possibility for legislation to be passed that’ll allow CA gig workers to unionize.
Of course, if that actually did happen, I’m guessing that companies like Uber would either sue to get any unionization law overturned or spend another $200 million+ on another ballot initiative that undoes the law.
Here in Minnesota we had a bill that would have set a minimum wage for rideshare drivers. Uber threatened to stop operating in greater Minnesota (outside the Twin Cities metro area) and to hike rates in the metro if the bill passed. There’s a lot of disabled people who rely on rideshare apps, and greater Minnesota already feels ignored and if they can’t get an Uber that’s going to make things worse. So Governor Walz vetoed the bill. Uber is going to make whatever threats it has to in order to stop bills that help their workers, CA is a much larger market though so that kind of restricts what threats are financially reasonable for them to follow through on.