California reached the unthinkable: A union deal with tech giants
29 comments
·September 15, 2025korse
The tech giants only capitulated because they think that there is a reasonable chance physical drivers will be unnecessary in the near future, thus making all of this a moot point.
This wouldn't have happened before Waymo's demonstrable successes.
JumpCrisscross
FTFA: “in exchange for the state drastically reducing expensive insurance coverage mandates protested by the companies.”
philipallstar
The point of companies is to provide value to customers, not employ employees. We are all customers. We all benefit from better services and lower prices. Anything that degrades either of those ambitions should not be celebrated.
frankbreetz
Pretty much all companies are created in order to make the owner(s) money.
salawat
You cannot make money if there is no one to spend money. Money is meant to move.
JumpCrisscross
“California lawmakers announced the agreement in late August, paving a path for ride-hailing drivers to unionize as labor wanted, in exchange for the state drastically reducing expensive insurance coverage mandates protested by the companies.”
What did the insurance cover? (Also, were AV insurance standards also reduced for Uber and Lyft?)
canada_dry
Guessing the stats will show lower than $1M typical claims for rideshare accidents.
But... I wouldn't want to be an outlier i.e. serious injuries. That would require suing the driver that has few/no assets.
Uber/Lyft sure as hell ain't going to let you sue them for a dime.
jameslk
How does Waymo factor into this equation?
guywithahat
I'm sure a strong enough rideshare union will eventually force autonomous vehicles out of the state, hurting everyone in the process
JumpCrisscross
> a strong enough rideshare union will eventually force autonomous vehicles out of the state
Zero chance. What we may see is the legacy rideshare providers ceding the market to autonomously native providers.
But even then, this is ringfenced to California. If the unions go Luddite, one can contain the problem the way California’s home insurance market is segregated.
GuinansEyebrows
i feel like people who use waymo are probably an extreme minority within california. we'll all be just fine, and rideshare drivers can actually afford to live decent lives in exchange for their labor. i'm fine with your doom and gloom scenario.
thisisnotauser
[flagged]
guywithahat
Lets not forget the hometown of the UAW was Flint, MI. Detroit used to be the richest city in the US by a very significant margin; now most car factories aren't even in Michigan. People may claim otherwise but good employees don't want to work for unions because it limits career growth and innovation, while companies don't want to deal with an adversarial unit within the company. Any private sector unionization is bad, even if this is just going after rideshare drivers now.
breakyerself
This is the opposite of what's true. Unionization is good. What's not good is using slavery adjacent labor to undercut good paying jobs in the US. US trade policy destroyed Detroit.
Nobody wants to go back to the bad old days of 16 hour days in the factory just to live with 16 other people a tenament and then die broke in a gutter when the machine takes your hand off.
JumpCrisscross
> US trade policy destroyed Detroit
US trade, fleet environmental standards and yes, the unions turning into an insular political force each destroyed Detroit.
AnimalMuppet
I agree except for the word "political". Unions destroyed Detroit by their cost far more than by their politics. Particularly the cost of the pensions and the work rules.
triceratops
> good employees don't want to work for unions because it limits career growth and innovation
Tell that to any movie star, director, writer, NFL starting quarterback, soccer star...
sojsurf
I live near Detroit, not Hollywood. Most union workers are not movie stars, directors, staring quarterbacks or soccer stars. Most are cops, teachers and automotive workers.
Speaking with a friend around me who worked in automotive, the unions are a double edged sword. They provide security for you, but they also provide security for a bunch of folks who realized they won't get fired if they put in the bare minimum. My friend found this incredibly frustrating.
Many unions here put large amounts of money toward political goals I don't support. If I want a job at such a company, under Michigan state law I can be compelled to pay the dues, even if the union is working against me politically. Until I can work somewhere without being forced to pay union dues, I am not interested in those jobs, even if they pay more.
null
CamperBob2
Unions can make sense for talent and services that you don't want to keep on your payroll full-time. You could argue that rideshare drivers qualify in that sense, given that the whole idea is to keep them off of a regular payroll... but watch them fight tooth and nail to lock out autonomous operators like Waymo. That'll be next, rest assured. It'll be about "jobs," "safety," and probably, somehow, "the children."
Otherwise, the people you list are very well-represented by private agencies. Unions like the SAG can benefit the lower-level people in some respects, but they mostly serve to gatekeep their industry and encourage films to be made outside their jurisdiction.
triceratops
The person I responded to said "good employees" are inhibited in "growth and innovation" whenever they belong to a union. A single counter-example, of good employees with talent and innovation, reaping tremendous personal rewards, is enough to falsify that statement. I gave several such examples.
On the other hand you have retail workers and food service workers, who are largely not unionized. So what can we blame their low pay and status on?
Talent and genius and innovative ideas being rewarded (or not) is largely orthogonal to union membership. It is a factor of demand and supply, and prevailing profit margins in that industry. That is all.
Detroit declined because factory workers are more fungible than movie stars. Their unions didn't pay attention to the threat of foreign labor or competition by superior foreign firms. Their management also became complacent about competition and chose to blame it on unions.
Germany is very famously pro-union and boasts a strong auto industry. What did they do differently?
bigyabai
Detroit used to be one of the most-industrialized places on Earth, behind only Germany. Like programming or financial services today, 100 years ago it was considered a privilege to work in a manufacturing.
You can ask any economist what happened. They won't blame unions, they'll blame the proliferation of industrialized economies. America cannot compete in a world where poverty-labor outperforms America's standard-of-living.
waltbosz
Very tangential: In the 1967 Disney film "The Happiest Millionaire", a character sings a song wanting to move to Detroit and get a job designing cars. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-tYKSzlZiUo
It such an anachronistic song.
guywithahat
The research is mixed, with lots of researchers directly blaming unions. This is remarkable, given being a professor is a unionized position and researchers/professors are some of the furthest-left leaning groups (famously a 2006 study showed 25% of sociologist professors identify as Marxist). I would also argue working in unions was never considered an especially big privilege (or any more than it is today). I mean it couldn't be, the Packard Plant employed over 30,000 people. That's just too many people in one city to be an exclusive, privileged job.
Cities do not fall from grace like that for no reason; Detroit and Flint fell from grace because they made it impossible to invest in the cities future. It's easy to say who cares about rideshare drivers, but if you can't operate companies in CA then people will stop founding them there, and then good engineering jobs will leave. Everyone once thought MI would be prosperous forever too
vjvjvjvjghv
I know, it's always the workers' fault. It can't be that maybe the highly paid execs in Detroit slept on trends and instead tried to coast on big gas guzzlers. But yes, it's the workers who screwed it up with their greed.
bigyabai
> Cities do not fall from grace like that for no reason
I just told you the most commonly cited reason, and instead of arguing that I'm wrong, you're arguing orthogonal to my point. Detroit became less special as time went on and there was nothing that Americans could do about it - the culprit was neoliberalism. Unions or not, that is the reason why the economy could not persist.
So let me rephrase my question: barring unions or state-subsidized housing, how was the US supposed to prop-up a manufacturing economy in the 1980s?
Article could use a good summary.
Title is misleading: no company has made any deal with any union. This is legislation to reduce insurance coverage in exchange for limited rights to unionize.
This is per-sector negotiation, affecting all rideshare companies, with qualified unions (that seem to only include SEIU) over wages, leaves, dismissals, and health insurance but not fares, that reduces uninsured insurance coverage from $1M to 300K (thus shifting the burden to drivers and passsengers).
Uber sought the deal after recent court rulings showed prop 22 (costing $100M's) wasn't the complete bar they'd hoped against the unions. SEIU may have gotten the deal in exchange for supporting prop 50 (redistricting to counter Texas). Governor Newsom is eager to play middleman-advocate for both business and labor.