Joshua Wood remembers the days of the COVID-19 lockdown, when the streets of New York City were virtually empty for staff like him.
That experience convinced the 25-year-old Brooklyn, who makes deliveries for Uber Eats and a package delivery service, that the gig economy needed a change.
According to a 2021 report from the Pew Research Center, about one in six American adults has worked for platforms like Uber, Lyft, and DoorDash. But while those jobs promise flexibility and low barriers to entry, they are paid by the hour at the prevailing minimum wage and lack fundamental protections like overtime, poor health wages and unemployment insurance.
“Coming out of the pandemic, staff felt like anything really had to be done,” said Wood, a member of the union group The United Deliverists, which fights for staff benefits in New York. “A lot of the city depends on the work we do, but if we need situations for ourselves, we have to be the ones to do it. “
Since then, New York City has passed a set of laws guaranteeing a minimum wage and other app-based benefits for food delivery workers, and communities across the country are doing the same. Over the past five years, lawmakers in at least 10 jurisdictions, adding cities like Chicago and Seattle, and states like Colorado, Connecticut and Minnesota, have proposed new protections for rideshare drivers and food delivery drivers.
At least 10 states also have systems that would make it easier for workers to access traditional benefits, such as retirement or paid family leave. Meanwhile, regulatory agencies and courts in states like Massachusetts, New Jersey and Pennsylvania have tried to force Uber, GoPuff and other tech platforms to give their drivers the same benefits as regular employees.
This development comes amid a resurgence of the personnel rights movement in the United States and a global reconsideration of hard labor rights in the era of the informal economy. Since early summer, Australia and the European Union have made a decision on protections. for staff in the workplace, while the U. S. Department of Labor is expected to be able to do so. The U. S. government is finalizing a new rule that could reclassify some staff as staff starting in October.
But concert companies vehemently oppose any effort to reclassify concert staff, a substitution that would give staff new rights and protections under state and federal law. In public statements, legal briefs and elaborate marketing campaigns, concert platforms have argued that any significant adjustment to their current ongoing situations would jeopardize staff flexibility and independence and increase prices for the consumer.
In a statement, Uber spokeswoman Alix Anfang told Stateline that the company “supports a comprehensive law that protects the flexibility drivers tell us we need while offering benefits and protections. “
“They don’t need to pay drivers,” said James Parrott, an economist at the New School, whose analyses of drivers’ wages informed New York’s new wage standard. “But their wallets are infinitely full when it comes to fighting regulations they don’t agree with. “
Tech corporations and their critics can at least agree that concert platforms have replaced work, for better or worse.
Since their launch in the late 2000s, platforms like Uber and Airbnb have spawned a vast ecosystem of on-demand virtual marketplaces, ranging from food delivery and processing to child care and education.
For consumers, those markets offer flexibility and convenience and can fill gaps in existing transportation, logistics or social systems. Workers flock to paint rigs for similar reasons: In a 2016 Pew Research survey of concert staff whose families depended on income from their rig, 45% said they needed to control their schedules and 25% said they lacked other task options.
At the same time, contract work carries a point of precariousness, said Daniel Ocampo, a lawyer with the National Employment Law Project. Workers sometimes have no job security, no classic benefits, no solid income, and few opportunities to organize or defend themselves. Your name.
But that last component is changing in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, Ocampo said. Encouraged by falling wages and developing safety concerns, new advocacy organizations have sprung up in cities from New York to Los Angeles to push for legislation establishing a minimum wage. and requiring paid leave in case of ill health, among other protections.
“There’s been a real wave of legislative action, especially last year,” Ocampo said. “It’s a very difficult staff organization to organize. . . But other people are tired of the conditions. “
In addition to New York City, which passed a minimum wage for rideshare drivers in 2018 and for food delivery drivers in 2021, concert staff also scored a number of significant victories in Seattle. The city unanimously approved a minimum wage for rideshare drivers in 2020 and app-based delivery drivers in 2022. Earlier this year, Seattle imposed paid leave for ill health and normal procedures for more concert staff if they are suspended from work.
Chicago lawmakers also hope to pass a minimum wage ordinance for rideshare drivers in the coming months, said City Councilman Michael Rodriguez, a Democrat who introduced the bill with 25 co-sponsors. In 2021, the city’s Uber and Lyft drivers earned an hourly average. salary of $12. 72 after expenses, according to research of 22 million trips by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the Illinois Economic Policy Institute.
“Many of those staff have had disruptions with their salaries and with deactivation,” Rodriguez said. “We’re looking for new protections for people who work hard day in and day out to provide transportation in a city that desperately needs better transportation. “
But while minimum wages and similar policies seem like apparent tactics for workers, concert corporations and their allies say they will also have unintended consequences.
In addition to raising prices to customers, pay policies threaten to slain staff income as higher pay rates attract more employees to apps, said Adam Kovacevich, founder and chief executive of the Chamber of Progress, a generational policy organization whose partner corporations come with Uber and Lyft. If there are more staff, Kovacevich said, the driving force could get fewer overall orders, which would reduce its overall profits even if individual orders paid more.
Service platforms can also restrict their prices under those policies, Kovacevich said, by reducing the number of drivers or delivering to other people in a certain area, or by reducing the number of spaces they serve. Uber, DoorDash and Grubhub filed arguments in lawsuits in July challenging protections for New York City delivery drivers, who have been suspended pending the court’s decision.
Parrott, the New School economist, said there’s little evidence to support the corporations’ arguments: His studies found that New York City’s 2018 pay ground for rideshare drivers didn’t particularly raise prices for riders, as Uber and Lyft predicted. Corporations have “a lot of freedom to pay their staff more,” he said. They also remained in Seattle after minimum wage provisions were passed.
However, the concert companies’ arguments have proved convincing in many respects, bolstered, in part, through well-funded lobbying campaigns and direct appeals to users of their apps. Bills to rideshare drivers died this year in Colorado and Connecticut after concert platforms recovered. opposite to them.
In May, Minnesota’s Democratic governor, Tim Walz, also vetoed a pay zone for rideshare drivers in his state after Uber said it would force the company to scale back its operations there. Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey vetoed a local law three months later, raising a preference for continuing studies on the law’s most likely impacts. Three councillors said they plan to start the procedure of reintroducing new paid land by the end of September.
“Concert corporations have done a wonderful job of organizing and spreading a strong message,” said LiJia Gong, political and legal director of Local Progress, an organization of progressive lawmakers who advocate for on-demand workers’ bills. Large corporations: they have the budget and the ability to get their message across to a lot of people. “
Increasingly, this message includes new advantages and protections, even if industry-supported plans do not meet the demands of assembly staff. Several concert corporations have supported state and federal efforts to create so-called “portable” perk programs, in which staff earn perks like vacation days or retirement savings over time and keep them even after changing employers.
In 2022, Uber and Lyft subsidized a law creating a wearable benefits program in Washington that could serve as a model for a compromise law in other states. The law, which went into effect in January, makes rideshare drivers eligible for paid leave for health and workers’ compensation issues and establishes a wage base that will accrue in line with the state minimum wage.
Controversially, the law also classified concerts as independent contractors and prevented local governments from adopting their own additional ride-sharing regulations. That made him unpopular with progressive advocates and hard-working groups, adding the regional branch of the Seattle Teamsters Union that helped negotiate the legislation. .
“There are some smart things in this bill, but you don’t want to trade workers’ prestige for any of those benefits,” said Ocampo, of the National Labor Law Project. “I understand why corporations find this technique interesting. This allows them the misclassification on which their business models have been based from the beginning.
But as more options embrace the rights of the self-employed and take on tough tech corporations, lawmakers will have to make tough concessions, said Washington state Rep. Liz Berry, a Seattle Democrat and sponsor of the portable legislation.
Berry believes staff deserve to be classified as employees, he said, and first thought his bill would more closely resemble minimum wage and benefits legislation passed in Seattle. But when Berry won a Zoom call with representatives from Lyft, Uber and Yet he remembers that some realities have become apparent: There were spaces in which both sides could compromise a little. And if they didn’t, the concert corporations had the money and political will to fund an election measure that complicated their position. , as they did in 2020 in California.
“It’s an act of intimidation; in fact, I didn’t need that to happen,” Berry said. “But you have to look beyond that and focus on your end goal. “
Unlike most options in the country, he said, “these drivers now have fundamental protections here in Washington, which makes the bill we developed a wonderful model. “
This article was originally published through Stateline, which, like the New Hampshire Bulletin, is part of States Newsroom, a grant-funded nonprofit news network and a coalition of donors as a 501c public charity (3).
by Caitlin Dewey, New Hampshire Newsletter September 19, 2023
Joshua Wood remembers the days of the COVID-19 lockdown, when the streets of New York City were virtually empty for staff like him.
That experience convinced the 25-year-old Brooklyn, who makes deliveries for Uber Eats and a package delivery service, that the gig economy needed a change.
According to a 2021 report from the Pew Research Center, about one in six American adults has worked for platforms like Uber, Lyft, and DoorDash. But while those jobs promise flexibility and low barriers to entry, they are paid by the hour at the prevailing minimum wage and lack fundamental protections like overtime, poor health wages and unemployment insurance.
“Coming out of the pandemic, staff felt like anything really had to be done,” said Wood, a member of the union group The United Deliverists, which fights for staff benefits in New York. “A lot of the city depends on the work we do, but if we need situations for ourselves, we have to be the ones to do it. “
Since then, New York City has passed a set of laws guaranteeing a minimum wage and other app-based benefits for food delivery workers, and communities across the country are doing the same. Over the past five years, lawmakers in at least 10 jurisdictions, adding cities like Chicago and Seattle, and states like Colorado, Connecticut and Minnesota, have proposed new protections for rideshare drivers and food delivery drivers.
At least 10 states also have systems that would make it easier for workers to access traditional benefits, such as retirement or paid family leave. Meanwhile, regulatory agencies and courts in states like Massachusetts, New Jersey and Pennsylvania have tried to force Uber, GoPuff and other tech platforms to give their drivers the same benefits as regular employees.
This development comes amid a resurgence of the personnel rights movement in the United States and a global reconsideration of hard labor rights in the era of the informal economy. Since the beginning of the summer, Australia and the European Union have made the decision to protect for staff in the workplace, while the U. S. Department of Labor is expected to protect staff in the workplace. The U. S. government is finalizing a new rule that could reclassify some staff as staff starting in October.
But concert companies vehemently oppose any effort to reclassify concert staff, a substitution that would give staff new rights and protections under state and federal law. In public statements, legal briefs and elaborate marketing campaigns, concert platforms have argued that any significant adjustment to their current ongoing situations would jeopardize staff flexibility and independence and increase prices for the consumer.
In a statement, Uber spokeswoman Alix Anfang told Stateline that the company “supports a comprehensive law that protects the flexibility drivers tell us we need while offering benefits and protections. “
“They don’t need to pay drivers,” said James Parrott, an economist at the New School, whose analyses of drivers’ wages informed New York’s new wage standard. “But their wallets are infinitely full when it comes to fighting regulations they don’t agree with. “
Tech corporations and their critics can at least agree that concert platforms have replaced work, for better or worse.
Since their launch in the late 2000s, platforms like Uber and Airbnb have spawned a vast ecosystem of on-demand virtual marketplaces, ranging from food delivery and processing to child care and education.
For consumers, those markets offer flexibility and convenience and can fill gaps in existing transportation, logistics or social systems. Workers flock to paint rigs for similar reasons: In a 2016 Pew Research survey of concert staff whose families depended on income from their rig, 45% said they needed to control their schedules and 25% said they lacked other task options.
At the same time, contract work carries a point of precariousness, said Daniel Ocampo, a lawyer with the National Employment Law Project. Workers sometimes have no job security, no classic benefits, no solid income, and few opportunities to organize or defend themselves. Your name.
But that last component is changing in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, Ocampo said. Encouraged by falling wages and developing safety concerns, new advocacy organizations have sprung up in cities from New York to Los Angeles to push for legislation establishing a minimum wage. and requiring paid leave in case of ill health, among other protections.
“There’s been a real wave of legislative action, especially last year,” Ocampo said. “It’s a very difficult staff organization to organize. . . But other people are tired of the conditions. “
In addition to New York City, which passed a minimum wage for rideshare drivers in 2018 and for food delivery drivers in 2021, concert staff also scored a number of significant victories in Seattle. The city unanimously approved a minimum wage for rideshare drivers in 2020 and app-based delivery drivers in 2022. Earlier this year, Seattle imposed paid leave for ill health and normal procedures for more concert staff if they are suspended from work.
Chicago lawmakers also hope to pass a minimum wage ordinance for rideshare drivers in the coming months, said City Councilman Michael Rodriguez, a Democrat who introduced the bill with 25 co-sponsors. In 2021, the city’s Uber and Lyft drivers earned an hourly average. salary of $12. 72 after expenses, according to research of 22 million trips by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the Illinois Economic Policy Institute.
“A lot of those employees have had problems with their pay and with deactivation,” Rodriguez said. “We are looking for new protections for others who work hard day in and day out to provide in a city that desperately needs more transportation. “
But while minimum wages and similar policies seem like apparent tactics for workers, concert corporations and their allies say they will also have unintended consequences.
In addition to raising prices to customers, pay policies threaten to slain staff income as higher pay rates attract more employees to apps, said Adam Kovacevich, founder and chief executive of the Chamber of Progress, a generational policy organization whose partner corporations come with Uber and Lyft. If there are more staff, Kovacevich said, the driving force could get fewer overall orders, which would reduce its overall profits even if individual orders paid more.
Service platforms can also restrict their prices under those policies, Kovacevich said, by reducing the number of drivers or delivering to other people in a certain area, or by reducing the number of spaces they serve. Uber, DoorDash and Grubhub filed arguments in lawsuits in July challenging protections for New York City delivery drivers, who have been suspended pending the court’s decision.
Parrott, the New School economist, said there was little evidence for the corporations’ arguments: His studies found that New York City’s paid land in 2018 for rideshare drivers was not priced particularly higher for users, as Uber and Lyft predicted. Both corporations have “a lot of leeway to pay their staff more,” he said. They also remained in Seattle after minimum wage provisions were passed.
However, the concert companies’ arguments have proved convincing in many respects, bolstered, in part, through well-funded lobbying campaigns and direct appeals to users of their apps. Bills to rideshare drivers died this year in Colorado and Connecticut after concert platforms recovered. opposite to them.
In May, Minnesota’s Democratic governor, Tim Walz, also vetoed a pay zone for rideshare drivers in his state after Uber said it would force the company to scale back its operations there. Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey vetoed a local law three months later, raising a preference for continuing studies on the law’s most likely impacts. Three councillors said they plan to start the procedure of reintroducing new paid land by the end of September.
“Concert corporations have done a wonderful job of organizing and spreading a strong message,” said LiJia Gong, political and legal director of Local Progress, an organization of progressive lawmakers who advocate for on-demand workers’ bills. Large corporations: they have the budget and the ability to get their message across to a lot of people. “
Increasingly, this message includes new advantages and protections, even if industry-supported plans do not meet the demands of assembly staff. Several concert corporations have supported state and federal efforts to create so-called “portable” perk programs, in which staff earn perks like vacation days or retirement savings over time and keep them even after changing employers.
In 2022, Uber and Lyft subsidized a law creating a wearable benefits program in Washington that could serve as a model for a compromise law in other states. The law, which went into effect in January, makes rideshare drivers eligible for paid leave for health and workers’ compensation issues and establishes a wage base that will accrue in line with the state minimum wage.
Controversially, the law also classified concerts as independent contractors and prevented local governments from adopting their own additional ride-sharing regulations. That made him unpopular with progressive advocates and hard-working groups, adding the regional branch of the Seattle Teamsters Union that helped negotiate the legislation. .
“There are some smart things in this bill, but you don’t want to trade workers’ prestige for any of those benefits,” said Ocampo, of the National Labor Law Project. “I understand why corporations find this technique interesting. This allows them the misclassification on which their business models have been based from the beginning.
But as more options embrace the rights of the self-employed and take on tough tech corporations, lawmakers will have to make tough concessions, said Washington state Rep. Liz Berry, a Seattle Democrat and sponsor of the portable legislation.
Berry believes staff deserve to be classified as employees, he said, and first thought his bill would more closely resemble minimum wage and benefits legislation passed in Seattle. But when Berry won a Zoom call with representatives from Lyft, Uber and the union, he recalls, some realities have become apparent: There were spaces where both sides could compromise a little. And if they didn’t, the concert corporations had the money and political will to fund an election measure that complicated their position. , as they did in 2020 in California.
“It’s an act of intimidation; in fact, I didn’t need that to happen,” Berry said. “But you have to look beyond that and focus on your end goal. “
Unlike most options in the country, he said, “these drivers now have fundamental protections here in Washington, which makes the bill we developed a wonderful model. “
This article was originally published through Stateline, which, like the New Hampshire Bulletin, is part of States Newsroom, a grant-funded nonprofit news network and a coalition of donors as a 501c public charity (3).
The New Hampshire Bulletin belongs to States Newsroom, a network of grant-funded news bureaus and a coalition of donors as a 501c public charity (3). The New Hampshire Bulletin maintains its editorial independence. Please contact Editor Dana Wormald if you have any questions: info@newhampshirebulletin. com. Follow the New Hampshire Bulletin on Facebook and Twitter.
Caitlin Dewey is a Stateline correspondent in Buffalo, New York, and has worked for outlets such as The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Guardian, Slate, Elle and Cosmopolitan.
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