California reached a union deal with tech giants

52 pointsposted 11 hours ago
by markerz
(politico.com)

43 Comments

korse

10 hours ago

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.

gnulinux996

8 hours ago

> only capitulated because

That seems to me an attempt to discredit union movements. Will you be explaining where are you getting this information from?

JumpCrisscross

9 hours ago

FTFA: “in exchange for the state drastically reducing expensive insurance coverage mandates protested by the companies.”

philipallstar

9 hours ago

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

9 hours ago

Pretty much all companies are created in order to make the owner(s) money.

philipallstar

9 hours ago

This is too vague. They're to make the owner(s) money by voluntary exchange of value with customers. They're not feudalism where the lord makes money off the serfs, who have no choice. It's not monarchy where..it's basically the same. It's not socialism, where the bureaucracy is enriched by the people it pretends to be a fair parent-surrogate to. It's just free interchange of value. And you can provide more value if your costs are lower.

salawat

9 hours ago

You cannot make money if there is no one to spend money. Money is meant to move.

gruez

9 hours ago

Money's just a means to an end, to secure resources for the owner. In a money-less society, jeff bezos would be just as happy if his customers paid him in rocket parts instead.

w10-1

9 hours ago

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.

alephnerd

8 hours ago

> with qualified unions (that seem to only include SEIU)

Unlike other states, the SEIU is the most powerful unions and political players in California.

Senator Laphonza Butler used to be SEIU leadership [0], and SEIU endorsements can make or break political careers, like endorsing Kamala Harris for CA AG back in 2010 [1]. They are also one of the largest lobbyists in CA state politics [2][3]

You cannot hold public office in California without SEIU backing.

I've had mixed experiences with them. Back in HS during the Obama 1 years, one teacher was notoriously grabby with girls and another ended up shacking up with one of their students right when she turned 18 and she spent a significant amount of time with him during her younger years despite her not being an AP Calc BC student like the rest of us and only in Algebra 2 by senior year.

Both teachers had an open history of sexual predation amongst us students, but when it came to a head, our teacher's union (an SEIU local who's leadership alumni are now very prominent in CA and national DNC politics) transferred the former to another HS and ended the latters contract but didn't touch his pension. Our local Safeway was an SEIU shop too, and they made all the students working there part-time students pay union dues but wouldn't given them union benefits or say in union matters, and the SEIU leadership at that Safeway would always prioritize the longer lasting members of the union, and would segregate the agreements and spaces.

As such, I'm not hopeful about this compromise.

[0] - https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2023-10-16/laphonza-b...

[1] - https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-ca-laphonza-butler-2...

[2] - https://calmatters.org/data/2025/04/california-lobbying-spen...

[3] - https://calmatters.org/politics/2024/11/california-lobbying-...

canada_dry

10 hours ago

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.

JumpCrisscross

9 hours ago

“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?)

dragonwriter

8 hours ago

> What did the insurance cover?

Excess liability from drivers with insufficient insurance (the driver’s themselves would still be liable here, but unlikely able to pay; the ridesharing firms having overlapping liability and an insurance mandate means that there is a stronger guarantee of some ability to pay where damage occurs.)

> (Also, were AV insurance standards also reduced for Uber and Lyft?)

California’s separate AV insurance mandate is on the manufacturer, and is not impacted.

jameslk

10 hours ago

How does Waymo factor into this equation?

guywithahat

10 hours ago

I'm sure a strong enough rideshare union will eventually force autonomous vehicles out of the state, hurting everyone in the process

JumpCrisscross

9 hours ago

> 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

10 hours ago

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.

selinkocalar

8 hours ago

Labor agreements in tech are soooo difficult to monitor. How do you collectively bargain around stock options, or remote work policies, or the pace of AI automation? The traditional labor playbook doesn't really apply here.

dragonwriter

8 hours ago

These aren’t “in tech” in the sense you seem to be thinking of it; from the article:

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. It earned rare public support from Gov. Gavin Newsom and received final approval from state lawmakers this week.

guywithahat

10 hours ago

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

10 hours ago

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

9 hours ago

> US trade policy destroyed Detroit

US trade, fleet environmental standards and yes, the unions turning into an insular political force each destroyed Detroit.

AnimalMuppet

9 hours ago

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.

JumpCrisscross

8 hours ago

Political as in the political incentives of union leadership is to constrain entry into their electorate and extract rents for their members.

guywithahat

9 hours ago

If unionization were good Flint wouldn't have been in such a poor state it could lose clean water access. What is true is auto jobs didn't leave the US, they left Michigan, primarily for right-to-work states. The same story is true for most of the rust belt; a lot of heavy industry jobs didn't necessarily leave, they just moved to Texas or the south.

Also unions didn't get rid of 16 hour days, market competition and regulation did that. Private industry unions have been consistently behind the private market in terms of benefits. The past you're talking about never existed.

triceratops

10 hours ago

> 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

9 hours ago

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.

nradov

8 hours ago

Sometimes they won't get fired even if they put in less than the bare minimum. I know a number of people who have worked in the Detroit area auto industry and they tell stories of hourly workers who kept their jobs after being caught literally sleeping or drunk on the clock. Union leadership doesn't seem to understand that by defending those slackers they might get a temporary "win" and stick it to management, but ultimately it just encourages management to move production elsewhere.

throwaway67499

8 hours ago

Not sure where to mention these, but they seem relevant to this part of the thread: Ben Hamper's Rivethead is a good read about working on the line during the decline of Flint. It's an excellent companion to Michael Moore's Roger & Me.

CamperBob2

10 hours ago

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

10 hours ago

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?

nradov

8 hours ago

The German auto industry is slowly dying. It has been steadily laying off employees and cutting wages. Unionization has done nothing to prevent this. They are not cost competitive with China in terms of labor, energy, and batteries.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cz6pzwj6qq7o

floren

10 hours ago

no you don't get it, the unions are going to tamp down on all the incredibly innovative ideas the Uber drivers are coming up with.

Mostly mine seem to innovate new ways to fail at hiding that they've been smoking in the car...

CamperBob2

9 hours ago

Germany is very famously pro-union and boasts a strong auto industry. What did they do differently

The German auto industry is in a world of shit, actually, but I don't think they can blame the unions for that. Their "works council" model is very different from a typical UAW stronghold in the US. The unions (and in many cases the state itself) are active partners in corporate ownership and management, so they have a stronger incentive not to kill the golden goose.

user

10 hours ago

[deleted]

AngryData

8 hours ago

I take it you don't know anyone that works for the UAW if you think people dislike them?

Yeah they could be better, but people are overjoyed when they are able to get into UAW work because it means they won't have to struggle to survive anymore.

bigyabai

10 hours ago

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.

guywithahat

10 hours ago

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

10 hours ago

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

10 hours ago

> 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?

nradov

8 hours ago

Government policies were a part of the problem but a lot of Detroit area manufacturing companies were simply not very good at their jobs. They coasted on past success while being unresponsive to customers, and failed to improve on quality or productivity. This was primarily a management failure — only a true moron could approve production of vehicles like the Ford Granada — but the adversarial approach taken by most union leaders certainly didn't help. Union leaders were mostly corrupt and incompetent, acting to win elections and enrich themselves in ways that ultimately hurt their members.

The best thing the US government probably could have done to prop up the manufacturing economy in general would have been to spread knowledge of modern best practices, like those promoted by W. Edwards Deming. Plenty of people were willing to improve but simply hadn't been trained in how to do it. For auto manufacturing specifically, legislators and regulators could have phased in emissions and fuel economy rules more slowly to give manufacturers a few more years to react instead of forcing them to hastily modify old powertrain designs in ways that drove up costs and ruined reliability.