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Question 3, Massachusetts 2024 voters on ride-sharing drivers unionize

Question 3, Massachusetts 2024 voters on ride-sharing drivers unionize

In what could be a milestone in the years-long battle for workers’ rights in Massachusetts, voters on Tuesday voted on a question that would allow Uber and Lyft drivers to unionize for the first time.

If Question 3 passes, more than 70,000 hail workers will have the right to formally organize a union, even though independent contractors cannot form unions under federal law. (Workers would instead organize under state law, similar to Massachusetts home health aides or New York farm workers.)

A Globe/Suffolk University poll in early October, it suggested voters would support the measure by a sizable margin, and a September poll of union supporters showed 95 percent of drivers were also in favor. Uber and Lyft themselves have not campaigned against it.

However, the measure has labor lawyers divided in Massachusetts, some of whom worry that it would actually be a step back in the long fight to enshrine trucking drivers as employees of their companies, as opposed to independent contractors. These concerns led the state’s largest labor organization, the AFL-CIO, to remain neutral. But two unions that support the effort, Service Employees International Union 32BJ and the International Association of Automobile Manufacturers, say allowing drivers to unionize, even if not as full employees, will help ensure urgently needed worker protections and standards of better pay and safety.

“The labor movement needs to create a space for workers living in the worst conditions,” Roxana Rivera, head of SEIU 32BJ in New England, told the Globe last month. “The moment is here to make a real difference to the lives of working people and we don’t want to miss it.”

The question follows a chaotic few years on the transport front. In 2020, then-Attorney General Maura Healey sued Uber and Lyft for defrauding drivers by not labeling them as employees. That trial ended in June, with the travel giants agreeing to a LOCATION which guaranteed drivers a minimum wage of $32.50 with annual raises, health care stipends and paid sick leave. But this did not address employee classification.

The door remains open, said Attorney General Andrea Campbell, who argued the question.

Travelers enter a pickup location for ride-hailing companies including Uber and Lyft in July on the lower level of a parking lot at Logan International Airport. Steven Senne/Associated Press

“Yes, at 3 and the right to unionize is not just about making a living,” she said. “It’s about making a life for yourself. It’s about making a life and a good one.”

Kate Andrias, co-director of the Columbia Labor Lab, also said the question does not prevent Uber and Lyft drivers from later becoming employees. Instead, it could set an “important model” for states considering similar unionization measures.

“This is an industry where workers have faced relatively low compensation and many challenges related to working conditions and stability,” she said. “This gives workers themselves the ability to decide what’s important to them.”

Neither Uber nor Lyft has taken a position on the unionization measure, though they have said they may try to lobby for changes to it in the next legislative session.

A vocal opponent is the Massachusetts Tax Alliance, which says it creates a “radical category of work that is inconsistent with federal labor law” that will cause platforms to raise costs for the customer.

And the drivers themselves are divided.

Driver Prisell Polanco he told the Globe last month, he and his colleagues are “manipulated by these big companies”, which makes him support the question.

“By having a union, we will have someone to represent us,” he said.

But Jack McDonald, a 73-year-old Uber driver from Marshfield, voted against the question because he believes a union would be “unnecessary” for him as a retiree who drives early in the morning.

“I’m comfortable where I am,” he said. “I’m not sure what the union will mean to me.”


Diti Kohli can be reached at [email protected]. Follow a @ditikohli_.