Massachusetts has certified the country’s first officially recognized labor organization for ride-share drivers — a milestone built on a legal workaround that turns the gig economy’s defining argument against itself.
For years, Uber and Lyft won their battles with organized labor by insisting that their drivers were not employees. They were independent contractors, the companies argued — entrepreneurs who set their own hours, chose their own routes and answered to no boss. That framing helped the platforms defeat unionization efforts in courtroom after courtroom and, most decisively, at the California ballot box in 2022, where the two companies spent more than $200 million to preserve the contractor classification.
On Tuesday, that same argument was used to organize against them.
Massachusetts has certified the first officially recognized union for ride-share drivers in the United States. The newly formed App Drivers Union, a joint affiliate of 32BJ SEIU and the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, received state certification Friday to represent nearly 70,000 Uber and Lyft drivers operating as independent contractors across the commonwealth. Because federal labor law covers only traditional employees, Massachusetts was free to extend collective bargaining rights to contractors under its own statute — and now it has.
“It changes the game for ride-share workers across this country,” Gov. Maura Healey said at a rally in Boston with drivers and labor activists, calling the certification one of the largest private-sector bargaining victories since the 1940s.
The moment had been years in the making. In 2020, when Healey was still state attorney general, her office sued Uber and Lyft seeking to reclassify their drivers as employees. The lawsuit was settled in 2024 by her successor, Attorney General Andrea Campbell, in a $175 million agreement that secured drivers a minimum hourly wage — now set at $34.48 — along with health insurance and paid sick leave. But it left their contractor status intact.
Voters, it turned out, were not finished. In November 2024, Massachusetts approved Question 3, a ballot measure that created a novel framework allowing gig drivers to organize and bargain collectively without resolving the classification question. Under the law, a union could seek certification once it had collected signatures from at least 25 percent of active drivers in the state. By last week, organizers had surpassed that threshold decisively, with roughly 32,000 of the state’s 70,000 drivers — about 46 percent — signing on.
“The workers who built these billion-dollar corporations deserve a union contract and a seat at the table,” said IAM President Brian Bryant at Tuesday’s rally.
The legal architecture is deliberately unusual. Because drivers remain contractors under both state and federal law, they fall outside the National Labor Relations Act, which ordinarily governs union organizing. That exclusion, long treated as an insurmountable obstacle for gig workers, effectively handed Massachusetts a legislative opening: the federal government had nothing to say about it.
Uber and Lyft, which fought bitterly in other states to prevent driver reclassification, offered little resistance to Question 3 during last year’s campaign. Both companies have since pledged to bargain in good faith. Lyft said it remained committed to engagement and that the company’s fortunes were tied to those of its drivers. Uber said it would work closely with the union and the state to preserve driver flexibility while maintaining standards for safety and accountability.
Labor experts noted the companies’ muted response with interest. Having spent years insisting their drivers were independent operators, Uber and Lyft were now in a position where opposing a contractor union would have required them to argue, in effect, that independent contractors deserved fewer rights than they had been claiming. The irony was not lost on organizers.
Autumn Weintraub, executive director of the App Drivers Union, called the certification “one of the biggest organizing victories in the last century.”
The union’s immediate priorities are pay rates, safety standards and deactivation procedures — the often opaque process by which platforms can remove drivers from the app, sometimes with little notice or recourse. Contract negotiations are expected to begin shortly. The union plans to survey its members before setting formal demands.
The outcome is being watched closely in other states where similar efforts are gathering momentum. California enacted legislation last October allowing ride-share drivers to unionize, and organizing campaigns are advancing in Illinois. Labor leaders in Boston framed Tuesday’s certification not as a regional story but as a template.