“The tip of the spear”: labor policy experimentation in the US rideshare industry

Thesis

Organized labor in the United States is in secular decline. Private-sector unions have struggled to hold the membership they have, much less organize new workers. Recent laws, however, have granted hundreds of thousands of Uber and Lyft drivers collective bargaining rights and catalyzed the largest private sector unionization drives since 1935. This thesis traces how unions and their allies built new institutions to organize and raise standards for drivers, and tests explanations for why Washington used legislation to set wages and benefits directly, while Massachusetts and California delegated authority to unions. Interviews with union leaders, organizers, legislators, attorneys, and lobbyists, supplement court rulings, bill texts, and legislative transcripts.

In 2022, Washington enacted the first comprehensive state labor regulation of the US rideshare industry through legislation that set minimum pay and benefits. Massachusetts and California followed in 2024 and 2025, respectively, but instead allowed drivers to bargain collectively for improved standards. To explain this variation, this thesis develops a four-stage mechanism. In every state, unions held diverse policy preferences that included reclassifying drivers as employees, lobbying for state regulation, and legalizing collective bargaining. All faced a decisive legal or political defeat, termed foreclosure, which forced unions to update their strategy and then reorient toward an alternative policy for which a blueprint, a legally vetted policy already refined elsewhere, existed. Finally, unions compromised with industry on specific details.

This thesis theorizes blueprints as the product of legal power, a novel labor power resource which describes the capacity of pro-union lawyers to diagnose why earlier policies failed in court and draft successors that survive judicial scrutiny. Washington produced regulation because an antitrust ruling foreclosed bargaining at the municipal level before a blueprint existed for unions to try again at the state legislature. Massachusetts and California, meanwhile, enacted bargaining institutions because union attorneys had built a bargaining blueprint in Massachusetts before reclassification was foreclosed. Where foreclosure left more than one pathway open, variation follows from which union held the institutional power to write its preferred blueprint into law.

Authors: Hoffman, A

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-aqaxpma4v
• Type of award: MPhil
• Level of award: Masters
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: platform work; power resources approach; collective bargaining; trade unions; American political economy; gig economy
• Subjects: United States; Teamsters; Proposition 22; Uber; SEIU; Lyft; IAM