Drivers for Lyft and Uber are building a national movement, with the help of Chicago
On a muggy June morning, a handful of rideshare drivers descended on O’Hare Airport with stacks of red, white and blue leaflets, limp in the heat, that demanded to “end unfair deactivations.” A similar scene unfolded at Denver International Airport and at Uber’s Greenlight Hub in San Jose, California.
Together, drivers in three states launched Activate Respect, a national campaign against driver deactivations — what workers refer to as being “fired by an app.” The three-city action also marked an addition to the growing national movement to make rideshare jobs good jobs.
“It’s potentially very powerful for drivers to connect across cities,” said Mariah Montgomery, national campaigns director at PowerSwitch Action, an Oakland, California-based advocacy group. That connection, she said, lets workers “learn from both the wins and the losses people have experienced.”
While local campaigns have dominated efforts to improve rideshare jobs with companies such as Lyft and Uber, Activate Respect is part of an emerging trend to coordinate driver demands in different places.
Organized by PowerSwitch Action, the campaign against companies stripping drivers of access to their work accounts builds on multiple local efforts to improve rideshare jobs — and they all share enough common ground that building a national effort seemed a logical step.
“We can kind of see what’s happening across places and say to somebody that we’re hearing ... the same thing in two different places, and maybe you should talk,” Montgomery said.
The first inklings for PowerSwitch came in 2021, when the group discussed drivers’ problems with the Action Center on Race and the Economy and other groups. In 2023, PowerSwitch Action, ACRE and Gig Workers Rising released a national report about rideshare drivers who died on the job. They also organized a National Day of Action to educate the public about drivers’ safety concerns.
Activate Respect goes a step further, Montgomery said, by making the same demand — transparency and accountability around deactivations — in different places.
Activists hope the campaign can build on recent successes.
In May, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, now the Democratic candidate for vice president, signed a bill establishing a minimum pay rate for rideshare drivers. The law followed a nearly two-year effort by the Minnesota Uber/Lyft Drivers Association that made national headlines.
In June, Colorado legislators passed a law requiring companies to publicly disclose fares, driver wages and deactivation policies after a campaign by Colorado Independent Drivers United.
Uber said in an emailed statement that the Minnesota law “represents a new way officials are looking at the gig economy: a focus on benefits and protections, rather than on employment classification.” The company said it appreciated the "significant compromises" drivers made in Colorado but the law will “have unintended consequences for both drivers and riders.” Uber didn't specify what those consequences might be.
Uber and Lyft have fought efforts to establish protections. In California, for example, the companies worked with DoorDash, Instacart and Postmates to successfully push Proposition 22. Voters approved that initiative in November 2020, which allowed companies to continue classifying rideshare workers as independent contractors.
Uber said that it invested more than $1 billion into Prop 22 benefits for California workers as of April 2024, but offered no further comment about the law.
Rideshare companies have developed a playbook for fighting worker protections — and for responding to threats of regulation, Montgomery said.
For example, Uber and Lyft have suspended operations or threatened to leave areas where regulation is likely to expand, including cities such as Austin, Texas; Chicago and Minneapolis and states such as California and Arizona.
Cross-city organizing among rideshare drivers is difficult because they’re so physically isolated from one another, said Katie Wells, a scholar at Georgetown University and co-author of "Disrupting D.C.: The Rise of Uber and the Fall of the City."
Without a physical hub — like the taxi garages once common in big cities — rideshare drivers don't encounter each other in passing.
“The fact that some folks are coming together to organize — it’s really impressive,” Wells said. “We don’t have regulators standing up to these companies, and so we have no other choice. All these groups have to come together to say that Silicon Valley isn’t going to get to have its way.”
Chicago drivers offer a prime example of collaboration across state lines.
Working with The People’s Lobby and the Chicago chapter of Gig Alliance, drivers have been pushing for the Chicago Rideshare Living Wage and Safety Ordinance since 2022. The proposed ordinance would raise driver pay, cap corporate profit from each passenger fare and standardize notice for deactivations, among other protections.
Last fall, California drivers with Gig Workers Rising flew to Chicago to meet their peers. The chilly trip was the first time Jose Gazo, a San Francisco-based driver, had visited the city, which was exciting. Gazo and others from California called Chicago drivers ahead of time to encourage them to attend a meeting to talk about what they all were experiencing.
The cross-country group also canvassed other drivers at O’Hare, asking them to write letters supporting the rideshare ordinance and to join the deactivation campaign, said Lori Simmons, gig worker organizer with The People’s Lobby in Chicago.
As the drivers spoke about their work, they realized how much they had in common — especially a drop in pay.
“All of us have different efforts going on in different cities to address pay,” said J.C. Muhammad, organizer with The People’s Lobby and part-time rideshare driver.
Chicago driver Joe Negrau, who volunteers for the Chicago Gig Alliance, kept a spreadsheet to track his wages from 2021 to 2023. He said he earned $2.70 per mile from Uber in 2021 before expenses — but only $1.55 per mile in 2023.
A 2023 city of Chicago pay study found that nearly two-thirds (65.3%) of full-time rideshare drivers averaged $31 to $40 an hour driving passengers, but just $18.90 to $27.90 after expenses.
The drivers realized that low pay wasn’t the only problem they shared. Violent customers and unexpected deactivations without recourse were a problem, too.
“The next biggest thing that we needed to tackle on a national scale is deactivations,” Muhammad said.
In March, Chicago rideshare drivers flew to San Jose to meet with the Gig Workers Alliance and Colorado Independent Drivers United to plan for the coming year, Simmons said. They landed on unfair deactivations as their initial target, and the Activate Respect campaign was born.
In the months since, the cross-city meetups have continued, Simmons said.
A Lyft spokesperson said, “What we’ve seen over the past several years is a shift in the public dialog away from should drivers be employees to figuring out the best way to design protections and benefits that make sense in the context of rideshare. That’s why you’ve seen efforts to negotiate compromises in places like Washington, Minnesota and Colorado, where the companies, labor leaders, drivers and elected officials attempted to work together to find common ground.”
When going up against such powerful rideshare companies, the cross-market collaboration helps drivers not only to feel like they are not alone, but also to build power by working together, Montgomery said.
“While the organizing might be happening in pockets, the goal is for uniformly good jobs,” Montgomery said. “Ultimately, drivers, wherever they live, deserve fair pay, respect, job security, safety at work.”
This article was produced by nonprofit journalism publication Capital & Main. An expanded version is available here.
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