How Uber and Lyft quietly fund worker groups to pump the brakes on drivers organizing

Do Uber and Lyft drivers want to preserve their “flexibility and independence” as independent contractors? Or do they want to unionize and fight the companies for the pay and benefits they deserve? 

The answer depends on which worker group you listen to. In Massachusetts, two coalitions, each claiming to represent the real voice of rideshare drivers—but with sharply different funders—released dueling ballot initiatives this week to decide the rights of Uber and Lyft drivers. 

One initiative would limit the state’s rideshare workers to being independent contractors, potentially in exchange for limited benefits. It’s sponsored by a political committee called Flexibility and Benefits for Massachusetts Drivers, whose website is filled with quotes from workers: “A typical employment schedule just doesn’t work for me, but Instacart does,” one reads. “Driving with Lyft allows me to spend quality time with my daughter,” says another.

What may not be immediately obvious to voters is that the group is bankrolled by tens of millions of dollars from the gig companies. It’s a reboot of their failed ballot initiative in 2022, a similar proposal that was struck down by the state’s high court for confusing voters with “murky language.” Advocates say it’s just a cynical attempt to use workers’ faces to block them from receiving much-needed labor protections—and it just might succeed.

A prominent face of the campaign is 61-year-old Charles Clemons Muhammad, who says Uber and Lyft are like “family” to him. Two years ago, one of Lyft’s corporate staffers approached him to join the Flexibility campaign, telling him, “You’re a good speaker, you seem to get it, and there’s only a certain amount of people that we would choose to be the voice of the drivers,” as he recalls it. He’s staunchly anti-union (“We have to pay union dues, how much is that going to be?”), and he has complete faith in the companies. “They’ve been taking care of me; I don’t have a problem,” he says. “They listen.”

In exchange for speaking at rallies, the political committee gives him gas certificates and buys him lunch. 

Conor Yunits, the spokesperson for the Flexibility group, says it crafted its ballot proposal by hiring a “grassroots team” that’s spoken to “thousands of drivers over the last few years” by dialing gig workers’ personal phone numbers, which were provided by the tech platforms. “It’s real old-fashioned, grassroots political stuff,” he says. Additionally, Yunits cites a web survey sponsored by the gig companies that found most drivers prefer to “maintain schedule flexibility” over “benefits that employees typically receive.”

That’s a false choice, says Veena Dubal, a labor law professor at the University of California Irvine. Dubal was a vocal opponent of a similar effort in her state: Proposition 22, a gig-company-backed ballot initiative to prevent gig workers from being classified as employees. The initiative passed, thanks to a marketing campaign funded with a record-smashing $200 million from the tech platforms, which Dubal says “emulated grassroots organizing” by inundating voters with imagery of Black, brown, and Indigenous workers and single moms, arguing that these workers would lose their ability to work on-demand if they were made employees. “But it’s misleading because there’s nothing about employment status that as a matter of law mandates a lack of flexibility,” says Dubal. 

Massachusetts voters won’t have an inkling of how much money the gig companies are spending on marketing its new proposal until next January, when Flexibility and Benefits for Massachusetts Drivers will be required to file a political disclosure report. But filings for its previous failed ballot initiative show that the firms spent an eye-popping $43 million on that campaign. 

Such tech money threatens to overwhelm a rival ballot initiative that would give rideshare drivers the right to unionize. That one is being proposed by a coalition called Drivers Demand Justice, including gig workers, nonprofits, and the 32BJ SEIU and Machinists unions, and they say they’re the ones who actually speak for workers.

“If the companies actually wanted to offer substantial benefits for rideshare workers, they would’ve already done it in the last 10 years they’ve been operating here,” says Roxana Rivera, an officer at 32BJ SEIU. “But if workers join a union, they can actually advocate for the things that need to change in this industry.”

One of the workers who wants to unionize is Prisell Polanco, a father who worked full time for Uber until his account was suddenly deactivated without warning. The company was ignoring his messages, so out of desperation he searched on social media to see if any other drivers were in the same boat. “Pretty much there was a whole bunch of drivers with problems just like me,” he says. 

Polanco was one of the hundreds of rideshare drivers who drove in front of Massachusetts’ state house in a cacophonous protest for unionization rights last month—dwarfing this week’s press conference by the company-backed groups, which drew just a handful of workers. (Yunits suggests that the drivers at the state house rally may not have been gig workers at all, but out-of-state plants—an accusation that a 32BJ SEIU spokesperson calls “spurious.”) Polanco says many of the protesters were also full-time drivers—which research suggests comprises the core of rideshare workers. Drivers who support the companies, he thinks, are more often part-timers and retirees who “have extra income, and are just doing this on the side to kill time.”

Will Massachusetts voters be able to tell the difference? Dubal, the law professor, isn’t sure. “I’m very skeptical of these issues being hammered out through the ballot process because of the possibility of misinformation,” she says. “What it amounts to is a battle over who has the most money to convince the public through marketing.”

Polanco says voters should think about which group of drivers needs the most help. “We have no rights, we have no protection. We have no job security because you can be driving one minute, and in the next minute, you can be disconnected,” he says. “If you go and talk to 100 of us, you’ll probably get 98 who will say that the system is predatory. We’re not making this up.”