The original impetus was more about banning robotaxis in Boston/MA than it is about the actual bargaining, from what I've heard. Just as the teamsters tried to ban cars to protect horse carriage drivers (that's what teamsters were, that's why they're called teamsters), they're back to ban the next mode of transportation.
If you were at any of the city council meetings where this topic was brought up it was a circus show with people repeating 'boston is a union town' and grilling waymo execs.
Do you have a citation for the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (today's "Teamsters") ever trying to ban automobiles? That doesn't really make sense to me chronologically.
Same for the longshoremen union, much is still done by hand whereas in other countries the shipping infrastructure is largely automated and much more efficient.
Doesn’t appear they were successful, seems self driving taxis are still allowed. From my understanding, they have better bargaining rights for companies intending to switch to automation, but nothing preventing a scrappy upstart with only driverless taxis from coming in and eating their lunch.
Unions are great and all, but they cannot solve all problems purely by maximizing their demands. If the resulting business (with the unions and the costs of satisfying them) is no longer able to offer a compelling marketplace offering then all the unions accomplish is destroy their own jobs. This is actually nuanced (meaning there is probably an ideal balance where both parties can enjoy benefits, but too far in either direction is either toxic to the workers or kills the business) but unfortunately the discussion is generally conducted with this kind of flippant emotional appeal. I think that’s why unions are in massive decline. A ton of unionized jobs died because the businesses couldn’t compete, and businesses work to avoid unions at all costs because of that reputation. A lose-lose for workers.
When owners try to lock down industries with government restrictions, we also oppose that. In this case, society as a whole is harmed by what the unions are demanding. It means everybody, including other workers, get less affordable goods and services. Greater affordability through automation is the sole means by which wages and purchasing power increase over time.
No doubt good for them, but I am curious how this is realistically going to work.
The barrier of entry to get new non-union drivers for Lyft and Uber is very low. If a strike does happen I can't imagine it would be hard for them to fairly quickly get new drivers, especially with the possibility of higher fairs due to high demand while it is sorted out. I have to imagine they would be able to get drivers far faster than most other situations with strikes.
I wonder if Uber and Lyft would even try to partner with gocurb or another app to funnel riders directly to taxies.
Not saying a union is a bad thing, I just wonder in this particular case how well it is realistically going to work out. Guess we will see.
What are you basing these guesses on? Workforce is pretty difficult to find on basically anything as far as I know.
You might have people that want to drive taxis but they would still have to get used to the streets, how the app works etc. etc. which can significantly degrade service quality.
Good for them. These companies appear exploitative and rent-seeking far beyond what the infrastructure they provide suggests is reasonable.
If you're interested, next time you take a car, ask the driver what their end is - you may be surprised how little of the fare they actually take home. That share will only decrease unless they all get on one side of a table.
Why are children mining rare minerals in Africa? Why are workers handling toxic waste in the name of recycling in Bangladesh? Surely they can all work from home and leave their jobs if it’s that exploitative
Not sure why you're being downvoted, this is what I've heard as well. It gets a person cash while they are in transitionary periods of time. There are not a lot of jobs you can get paid for almost immediately- most require startup time, training, applications, etc.
Why do people that need money to live often work for companies that exploit them? Were you born in a vat yesterday or are you unaware that this is the entire modus operandi of capitalism?
I think truth is that tech companies are really bad at business unless they can scale with free unit economies. Even the unit costs with per seat subscriptions seem insane when you stop and think of the numbers in isolation. Ofc, compared to amount they pay their employees they are cheap, but in other places and industries it looks way overpriced.
R&D is not cheap and similarly executive comp is not cheap. They appear to have made a net income of 1.5 B last year (2025), but if. you look at exec comp, the top 5 execs took in 100 M. If you check all their creamy layer, it is likely they spent a quarter billion in stuff that did not need to be paid if all you had were private taxies :) with an open source app // I exaggerate of course since you need some servers to coordinate this, just pointing out where money goes. If someone could run and popularize an open ride platform, that quarter billion would go somewhere else, maybe to the drivers, maybe to the riders.
Intermediation and Uber style network effects aren't long for this world.
Personal agents will search every app for the lowest fare, when in the past the apps had a moat due to the economic frictions involved in sampling more than one app. Uber is also ripe for vibe coding.
Won't be much consolation to drivers as they'll get automated soon after probably.
I don't think all software companies are in imminent danger but Uber does seem particularly vulnerable.
They would make plenty of money if they went in to maintenance mode and just kept the lights on development-wise instead of pouring billions into R&D each year.
There's probably a big opportunity in the startup world for building businesses that have an end goal. Like a TV show that has a whole story to tell and then stops... a business that has an entire development plan which finishes and at the end you have a stable business that stops adding features, cuts development costs to maintenance, and just exists.
Like I don't need my taxi app to change, we're good, you can just be done making new stuff.
It hurts so much that our system makes that concept as impossible at scale as landing a ship on Venus with 10,000 people and starting a space colony complete with all the amenities of home.
Yours is a pretty normal idea for nearly any business before 100 years ago, plus still the way all small businesses with 1 owner generally work (they call it a “Lifestyle business” today). But any public company that just said “Yeah we basically just print $400 million in profit every year, and have no plans to grow that, nor to change anything besides doing maintenance” gets the kind of treatment Southwest just did: taken over by the enshittification engineers and destroyed. Everything must have infinite growth!!
I think it's going to take a act of Congress to make this happen. We could literally legislate our way out of enshitification but where's the huge amount of money in that?
Some forms of enshitification already feel a lot like dumping to me. I wonder why existing consumer protection laws don’t cover it already in some cases.
I'm going to shout out Empower, it's a service like Uber that charges a flat fee to the driver every month, around 50 bucks, without taking any percentage fees, meaning both the riders save much more and drivers make much more, especially if they drive a lot.
Their rationale is that it should be more like hiring a contractor for your house, a platform wouldn't get a cut of the cost of your grass cutter so why should drivers be any different?
So far I haven't had any issues, although I did hear of some problems and controversies they have.
Unions are great when they are fighting for worker's rights by demanding things like businesses sharing their profits with the workers who make it for them, more vacation time, required investments in safety, and protecting workers from getting fired for having the wrong skin color.
But when they get into the business of slowing down technology adoption to protect workers, that's when they get into the territory of giving unions a bad name. Getting together to lobby the government to make systemic changes to help displaced workers would be great, but it seems in this case they are trying to get government to just ban technology that replaces them.
> But when they get into the business of slowing down technology adoption to protect workers, that's when they get into the territory of giving unions a bad name.
I would consider the emputus more on companies to not roll out new technology in a way that harms workers.
It's close and it will happen. In my Tesla it already drives itself nearly 100% of the time through city streets, highways, rush hour traffic, complex situations (hardware 4 Teslas are amazing). I also have a Toyota truck and it feels like such a downgrade to drive without self driving anymore. It's only a matter of time before Tesla and others perfect self driving (as Waymo nearly has done) and we no longer have human driven taxis/ubers/lyfts and regular drivers are also on self driving. It will save time, lives and reduce road rage.
Yeah, and that would disrupt Uber badly in the area.
In the article it mentions that this is a union of 70,000 independent contractors. I imagine that it would be very bad for Uber if they all decided not to drive simultaneously.
With collective organization, the union has a better chance to coordinate strikes and other collective action, as well as bargain for pay collectively rather than in a one to many relationship.
I wonder how much Uber/Lyft actually loses when nobody drives vs loses opportunity. A big part of union negotiating strength is how large the costs of doing nothing (like leases or contract delivery terms) is but I honestly have no clue how that works for Uber/Lyft (and it may vary a lot by region depending what Uber/Lyft are required to do in each area).
> Yeah, and that would disrupt Uber badly in the area.
So what? Uber operates all over the world, losing some revenue (maybe not even profit) in one region is a loss they can eat. A Taxi company couldn't eat this kind of loss and would be forced to negotiate. Uber though? They can tough it out if it's advantageous to them.
This is the inevitable result of replacing local taxi monopolies or cartels with a multinational "tech" duopoly.
The end of driving as a profession is going to hit the economy hard. Teamsters may have the organizational strength and political influence to protect themselves. But they only represent ~20% of US truck drivers and none of the other ~3 million people who drive for a living in this country.
I don't see either American labor or American government being anywhere near strong enough or capable enough to facilitate a soft landing.
> The end of driving as a profession is going to hit the economy hard.
They should just learn to code! /s
> I don't see either American labor or American government being anywhere near strong enough or capable enough to facilitate a soft landing.
More seriously, I agree with this, but the problems are going to extend way beyond just transportation workers.
These are problems we could theoretically find solutions for, but we're headed into it at warp speed with an already absolutely broken political system and massive levels of wealth inequality.
I find it far more likely that the solution to this all ends up being chaos and bloodshed rather than properly managed preventive policy changes.
Society is fragile and operates in tension, a shared delusion like a currency. If workers burn down every autonomous truck on the road, there simply is not enough law enforcement to prevent them from doing so. There are only 1 million US soliders on US soil [1], there are 100 million workers. If they can't solve cargo theft incurring ~$35B/year in losses, how would they solve this? There are millions of trucks on US roads at any one time.
> I don't see either American labor or American government being anywhere near strong enough or capable enough to facilitate a soft landing.
Certainly not yet, but a resolution will present itself. The quality of which is to be determined of course.
(not advocating either way, simply enumerating the risk model; I am privileged that my day job is to get paid to think like a threat actor across various verticals and model accordingly)
This is of course a dangerous suggestion, but also, never in the history of the world has the destruction of a technology that was replacing workers ever turned out well for the workers. At best it briefly delayed adoption.
When has it worked out for workers? Genuine question. If its not offshoring manufacturing (China before, South East Asia today) and services (India primarily), its importing labor to depress wages and keep workers in peril (there are approximately 720,000 to 750,000 foreign-born truck drivers in the United States, representing about 18% to 20% of the total commercial driving workforce, as of this comment) to encourage compliance with the status quo [1] [2].
If you work with workers so that they will have a safe landing through a just transition, such that longshoreman experienced when the cargo container revolutionized shipping [3] [4], you might get worker buy in. If you say you will with no evidence you will follow through, you will not get buy in, and whatever is the downstream impact of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of workers becoming redundant rapidly without a safety net.
Despite hope not being a strategy, as only an observer, I hope that policymakers make a choice that leads to a net favorable outcome. If they do not, that is a choice.
The original impetus was more about banning robotaxis in Boston/MA than it is about the actual bargaining, from what I've heard. Just as the teamsters tried to ban cars to protect horse carriage drivers (that's what teamsters were, that's why they're called teamsters), they're back to ban the next mode of transportation.
If you were at any of the city council meetings where this topic was brought up it was a circus show with people repeating 'boston is a union town' and grilling waymo execs.
Do you have a citation for the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (today's "Teamsters") ever trying to ban automobiles? That doesn't really make sense to me chronologically.
Same for the longshoremen union, much is still done by hand whereas in other countries the shipping infrastructure is largely automated and much more efficient.
Just dropping here because it's an excellent read on US port automation
https://www.construction-physics.com/p/do-us-ports-need-more...
Doesn’t appear they were successful, seems self driving taxis are still allowed. From my understanding, they have better bargaining rights for companies intending to switch to automation, but nothing preventing a scrappy upstart with only driverless taxis from coming in and eating their lunch.
Exactly, there's an episode covering it on Freakonomics Radio: https://freakonomics.com/podcast/in-a-driverless-world-who-l...
Search Engine covered it too: https://www.searchengine.show/the-trial-of-the-driverless-ca...
> Just as the teamsters tried to ban cars to protect horse carriage drivers
Is that true?
Well yeah they're presenting an irrational argument to benefit the few.
> Well yeah they're presenting an irrational argument to benefit the few.
The only few that should benefit are the owners. If a few workers try to benefit, they're greedy bastards who would be pounded down.
Unions are great and all, but they cannot solve all problems purely by maximizing their demands. If the resulting business (with the unions and the costs of satisfying them) is no longer able to offer a compelling marketplace offering then all the unions accomplish is destroy their own jobs. This is actually nuanced (meaning there is probably an ideal balance where both parties can enjoy benefits, but too far in either direction is either toxic to the workers or kills the business) but unfortunately the discussion is generally conducted with this kind of flippant emotional appeal. I think that’s why unions are in massive decline. A ton of unionized jobs died because the businesses couldn’t compete, and businesses work to avoid unions at all costs because of that reputation. A lose-lose for workers.
I would also be opposed to laws making it illegal for anyone to compete with the owners.
When owners try to lock down industries with government restrictions, we also oppose that. In this case, society as a whole is harmed by what the unions are demanding. It means everybody, including other workers, get less affordable goods and services. Greater affordability through automation is the sole means by which wages and purchasing power increase over time.
ok hope you stick to this stance when ai comes for your job
No doubt good for them, but I am curious how this is realistically going to work.
The barrier of entry to get new non-union drivers for Lyft and Uber is very low. If a strike does happen I can't imagine it would be hard for them to fairly quickly get new drivers, especially with the possibility of higher fairs due to high demand while it is sorted out. I have to imagine they would be able to get drivers far faster than most other situations with strikes.
I wonder if Uber and Lyft would even try to partner with gocurb or another app to funnel riders directly to taxies.
Not saying a union is a bad thing, I just wonder in this particular case how well it is realistically going to work out. Guess we will see.
What are you basing these guesses on? Workforce is pretty difficult to find on basically anything as far as I know.
You might have people that want to drive taxis but they would still have to get used to the streets, how the app works etc. etc. which can significantly degrade service quality.
Good. All I can say is good. I wonder if Illinois or California would be next.
Good for them. These companies appear exploitative and rent-seeking far beyond what the infrastructure they provide suggests is reasonable.
If you're interested, next time you take a car, ask the driver what their end is - you may be surprised how little of the fare they actually take home. That share will only decrease unless they all get on one side of a table.
if all these drivers are getting horribly exploited why are they doing it?
All because you’re being exploited doesn’t mean you can’t voice your want to change things.
Some of these workers might find that the only gig that they can rely on is ride share for various reasons.
Various reasons necessarily include the successful business model of the ride share companies.
Why are children mining rare minerals in Africa? Why are workers handling toxic waste in the name of recycling in Bangladesh? Surely they can all work from home and leave their jobs if it’s that exploitative
I’d guess because most don’t correctly account for wear and tear and depreciation of their car when they do their mental profit calculation.
It's definitely not because of this. They are not stupid.
what a revealing question. why don't you ask one next time you're in a car?
It's a bit like a payday loan — the drivers need money _today_ and effectively borrow against the depreciation of their vehicle.
https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/jle/vol59/iss1/8/
Banning payday loans tends to shift borrowers to worse forms of credit.
One imagines worsening the economics of ride share jobs will do the same.
Not sure why you're being downvoted, this is what I've heard as well. It gets a person cash while they are in transitionary periods of time. There are not a lot of jobs you can get paid for almost immediately- most require startup time, training, applications, etc.
Food and shelter?
Why do people that need money to live often work for companies that exploit them? Were you born in a vat yesterday or are you unaware that this is the entire modus operandi of capitalism?
it’s very confusing why uber makes so little profit given hire big their cut of every ride seemingly is.
I think truth is that tech companies are really bad at business unless they can scale with free unit economies. Even the unit costs with per seat subscriptions seem insane when you stop and think of the numbers in isolation. Ofc, compared to amount they pay their employees they are cheap, but in other places and industries it looks way overpriced.
R&D is not cheap and similarly executive comp is not cheap. They appear to have made a net income of 1.5 B last year (2025), but if. you look at exec comp, the top 5 execs took in 100 M. If you check all their creamy layer, it is likely they spent a quarter billion in stuff that did not need to be paid if all you had were private taxies :) with an open source app // I exaggerate of course since you need some servers to coordinate this, just pointing out where money goes. If someone could run and popularize an open ride platform, that quarter billion would go somewhere else, maybe to the drivers, maybe to the riders.
Intermediation and Uber style network effects aren't long for this world.
Personal agents will search every app for the lowest fare, when in the past the apps had a moat due to the economic frictions involved in sampling more than one app. Uber is also ripe for vibe coding.
Won't be much consolation to drivers as they'll get automated soon after probably.
I don't think all software companies are in imminent danger but Uber does seem particularly vulnerable.
They would make plenty of money if they went in to maintenance mode and just kept the lights on development-wise instead of pouring billions into R&D each year.
There's probably a big opportunity in the startup world for building businesses that have an end goal. Like a TV show that has a whole story to tell and then stops... a business that has an entire development plan which finishes and at the end you have a stable business that stops adding features, cuts development costs to maintenance, and just exists.
Like I don't need my taxi app to change, we're good, you can just be done making new stuff.
It hurts so much that our system makes that concept as impossible at scale as landing a ship on Venus with 10,000 people and starting a space colony complete with all the amenities of home.
Yours is a pretty normal idea for nearly any business before 100 years ago, plus still the way all small businesses with 1 owner generally work (they call it a “Lifestyle business” today). But any public company that just said “Yeah we basically just print $400 million in profit every year, and have no plans to grow that, nor to change anything besides doing maintenance” gets the kind of treatment Southwest just did: taken over by the enshittification engineers and destroyed. Everything must have infinite growth!!
There's even more money to be made selling a false promise of infinite growth, dumping your bags, and riding off into the sunset.
I think it's going to take a act of Congress to make this happen. We could literally legislate our way out of enshitification but where's the huge amount of money in that?
Some forms of enshitification already feel a lot like dumping to me. I wonder why existing consumer protection laws don’t cover it already in some cases.
We replaced small, local businesses (taxi companies) with a large multinational duopoly. Another example of tech "democratizing" something.
I'm going to shout out Empower, it's a service like Uber that charges a flat fee to the driver every month, around 50 bucks, without taking any percentage fees, meaning both the riders save much more and drivers make much more, especially if they drive a lot.
Their rationale is that it should be more like hiring a contractor for your house, a platform wouldn't get a cut of the cost of your grass cutter so why should drivers be any different?
So far I haven't had any issues, although I did hear of some problems and controversies they have.
Unions are great when they are fighting for worker's rights by demanding things like businesses sharing their profits with the workers who make it for them, more vacation time, required investments in safety, and protecting workers from getting fired for having the wrong skin color.
But when they get into the business of slowing down technology adoption to protect workers, that's when they get into the territory of giving unions a bad name. Getting together to lobby the government to make systemic changes to help displaced workers would be great, but it seems in this case they are trying to get government to just ban technology that replaces them.
> But when they get into the business of slowing down technology adoption to protect workers, that's when they get into the territory of giving unions a bad name.
I would consider the emputus more on companies to not roll out new technology in a way that harms workers.
i'm so ready for fully self driving to take over
It's close and it will happen. In my Tesla it already drives itself nearly 100% of the time through city streets, highways, rush hour traffic, complex situations (hardware 4 Teslas are amazing). I also have a Toyota truck and it feels like such a downgrade to drive without self driving anymore. It's only a matter of time before Tesla and others perfect self driving (as Waymo nearly has done) and we no longer have human driven taxis/ubers/lyfts and regular drivers are also on self driving. It will save time, lives and reduce road rage.
Given that Uber isn't their W-2 employer, what happens if they just ignores them? My guess is Uber invites them to walk off the job.
Yeah, and that would disrupt Uber badly in the area.
In the article it mentions that this is a union of 70,000 independent contractors. I imagine that it would be very bad for Uber if they all decided not to drive simultaneously.
With collective organization, the union has a better chance to coordinate strikes and other collective action, as well as bargain for pay collectively rather than in a one to many relationship.
I wonder how much Uber/Lyft actually loses when nobody drives vs loses opportunity. A big part of union negotiating strength is how large the costs of doing nothing (like leases or contract delivery terms) is but I honestly have no clue how that works for Uber/Lyft (and it may vary a lot by region depending what Uber/Lyft are required to do in each area).
Not sure I agree. They have plenty of cash and can wait it out. The drivers don't.
I personally don't care about this as long as the costs aren't passed on to me.
> Yeah, and that would disrupt Uber badly in the area.
So what? Uber operates all over the world, losing some revenue (maybe not even profit) in one region is a loss they can eat. A Taxi company couldn't eat this kind of loss and would be forced to negotiate. Uber though? They can tough it out if it's advantageous to them.
This is the inevitable result of replacing local taxi monopolies or cartels with a multinational "tech" duopoly.
The end of driving as a profession is going to hit the economy hard. Teamsters may have the organizational strength and political influence to protect themselves. But they only represent ~20% of US truck drivers and none of the other ~3 million people who drive for a living in this country.
I don't see either American labor or American government being anywhere near strong enough or capable enough to facilitate a soft landing.
well fortunately the timing of the driverless future will seemingly align with figuring out nuclear fusion
> The end of driving as a profession is going to hit the economy hard.
They should just learn to code! /s
> I don't see either American labor or American government being anywhere near strong enough or capable enough to facilitate a soft landing.
More seriously, I agree with this, but the problems are going to extend way beyond just transportation workers.
These are problems we could theoretically find solutions for, but we're headed into it at warp speed with an already absolutely broken political system and massive levels of wealth inequality.
I find it far more likely that the solution to this all ends up being chaos and bloodshed rather than properly managed preventive policy changes.
Society is fragile and operates in tension, a shared delusion like a currency. If workers burn down every autonomous truck on the road, there simply is not enough law enforcement to prevent them from doing so. There are only 1 million US soliders on US soil [1], there are 100 million workers. If they can't solve cargo theft incurring ~$35B/year in losses, how would they solve this? There are millions of trucks on US roads at any one time.
> I don't see either American labor or American government being anywhere near strong enough or capable enough to facilitate a soft landing.
Certainly not yet, but a resolution will present itself. The quality of which is to be determined of course.
(not advocating either way, simply enumerating the risk model; I am privileged that my day job is to get paid to think like a threat actor across various verticals and model accordingly)
[1] https://usafacts.org/answers/how-many-troops-are-in-the-us-m...
This is of course a dangerous suggestion, but also, never in the history of the world has the destruction of a technology that was replacing workers ever turned out well for the workers. At best it briefly delayed adoption.
When has it worked out for workers? Genuine question. If its not offshoring manufacturing (China before, South East Asia today) and services (India primarily), its importing labor to depress wages and keep workers in peril (there are approximately 720,000 to 750,000 foreign-born truck drivers in the United States, representing about 18% to 20% of the total commercial driving workforce, as of this comment) to encourage compliance with the status quo [1] [2].
If you work with workers so that they will have a safe landing through a just transition, such that longshoreman experienced when the cargo container revolutionized shipping [3] [4], you might get worker buy in. If you say you will with no evidence you will follow through, you will not get buy in, and whatever is the downstream impact of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of workers becoming redundant rapidly without a safety net.
Despite hope not being a strategy, as only an observer, I hope that policymakers make a choice that leads to a net favorable outcome. If they do not, that is a choice.
[1] Is long-haul trucking really facing a driver shortage? - https://www.marketplace.org/story/2024/11/20/is-long-haul-tr... - November 20th, 2024
[2] Impacts of Alternative Compensation Methods on Truck Driver Retention and Safety Performance - https://www.nationalacademies.org/projects/TRB-CAAS-22-01 - 2024
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Box_(Levinson_book)
[4] Arthur Donovan (1999) Longshoremen and mechanization, Journal for Maritime Research, 1:1, 66-75, DOI: 10.1080/21533369.1999.9668300 https://doi.org/10.1080/21533369.1999.9668300
That's a great allegory.
[dead]
Good on 'em, but autonomous cars are on their way and it might displace the union.
In my city, Zoox are already rolling out driverless taxi services, and the vehicles they are using are completely autonomous.
amazing news, good for them