Uber is lobbying with the driver unions it spent a decade fighting -- to slow robotaxis down

Uber spent a decade fighting driver unions in court and at statehouses over pay, benefits and classification, funding ballot campaigns and legal challenges to keep drivers out of collective bargaining entirely. This year, in New Jersey and Washington DC, it is showing up at the same legislative hearings on the same side as those unions -- arguing for rules that would slow how fast Waymo and other autonomous-vehicle operators can put driverless cars on the road.

The clearest fight is in Washington DC, where the Council is updating its 2012 Autonomous Vehicle Act (Bill B26-0684) to allow driverless testing and commercial operation. The draft requires $5 million in minimum liability insurance, a $0.15-per-mile vehicle-miles-traveled tax split evenly between public transit and driver workforce development, a $5 million non-refundable permit fee on top of a $1 million application fee, and crash-reporting windows of 8 hours for commercial fleets versus 72 hours for private ones. Uber signed on. "We have already seen in other jurisdictions how a flawed, first-party-only regulatory approach can disrupt a city," said Javi Correoso, Uber's US policy lead. "Consumers should have the ability to access both" -- meaning both a human-driven and a driverless ride through the same app.

New Jersey has two different proposals moving at once, and conflating them is easy to do. The bill actually filed, S4702 from state Sen. Andrew Zwicker, creates a five-year pilot program requiring 3 years of on-road testing with a human safety driver present before any commercial autonomous approval; it cleared the Senate Transportation Committee in November and now sits before Budget and Appropriations. Separately, and not yet formally introduced, Uber lobbyists have circulated draft language to Zwicker's office proposing that human drivers handle at least 85% of rides on every platform offering robotaxi service, for 3 years -- a rule that would put Waymo and any other driverless operator under the same staffing requirement Uber's own network already clears without trying.

Uber's own estimate, cited in its lobbying, is that a single autonomous vehicle displaces roughly four human drivers from its network. That figure is doing real work in these fights: it's the basis for arguing that unmanaged AV growth costs driver jobs fast enough to justify a legislative floor under how many rides still require a person. Unions that have spent years fighting Uber over algorithmic pay cuts and misclassification are, for once, arguing the same side of a bill.

That fight over displacement is playing out just as drivers won a foothold Uber spent over a decade preventing. In August, the California Gig Workers Union -- three SEIU chapters representing roughly 350,000 Uber and Lyft drivers -- won certification after a 12-year organizing effort that survived Uber and Lyft's own $200-million-plus 2020 ballot campaign (Proposition 22) to keep drivers classified as contractors, and outlasted it long enough for a 2025 state law, AB 1340, to finally let contractors unionize at all. Uber's response to the new union didn't dispute the AV-displacement math; it echoed it, citing the same four-to-one figure it's now using in DC and New Jersey. One economist's warning about the timing cuts against Uber's public framing rather than for it: better pay for drivers, won through a union, is also exactly the kind of cost pressure that speeds up how fast a company has an incentive to automate them away.

“We think the future of our transportation system will be hybrid.” — Harry Hartfield, Uber's head of AV policy

That framing -- hybrid networks, driver protection, phased transition -- is also, not coincidentally, the one structure that guarantees Uber a seat at the table no matter who wins the underlying robotaxi race. Uber has signed more than 25 AV partnerships, including with Waymo itself, Nuro, Baidu and MOIA, rather than building its own self-driving technology. CEO Dara Khosrowshahi has told investors he wants Uber to be the go-to commercial platform for all robotaxi operators -- a goal a mandatory hybrid-network rule serves directly, since any AV company forced to share a platform with human drivers is likelier to share it through Uber's existing app than to build a rival one from scratch.

None of that stakes breakdown settles whether Uber's alliance with unions is sincere or purely tactical -- and the honest answer is that it doesn't have to be one or the other.

Neither New Jersey proposal has passed. DC's bill hasn't either, though both sides say they want a vote before Mayor Bowser leaves office in January 2027; the Teamsters and SEIU are among the unions scheduled to testify at the Council's hearings, standing alongside Uber's own lobbyists. Until a vote happens, the unusual alliance holds: the same unions that spent a decade suing Uber over what counts as an employee, and that only won the right to unionize its California drivers at all last month, are now standing next to Uber's lobbyists, arguing that a company should still be one.