WORK 14 - The Colossus of Roads

June 19, 2024·38 min·3 clips

UFCW crashes Erla's Valentine's Day driver protest with yellow flags right as the cameras roll.

Uber's timing matters here. Erla and George were trying to get the Drivers' Association moving when Uber came in with its own version of worker representation. The company said drivers and delivery people already had a deal through UFCW. Anthony Milton points out why that sounded odd. UFCW is described as one of the largest private sector unions in the country, with over 250,000 members and a much bigger international structure. In the normal run of things, a union like that has members voting on leaders, bylaws, and collective agreements. This deal did not seem to work that way. Milton says UFCW and Uber appear to have signed it on their own, with no worker vote. The terms were not shown to the people the agreement was supposed to cover. That is the sticky part. Rideshare workers were told they had representation, but they could not inspect the deal, choose UFCW, or vote on whether to accept it. The excerpt is careful about the procedure, which makes the whole thing feel more uncomfortable. This was not a standard collective agreement. It was not the worker led organizing campaign Erla and George were building either. It was something in between: representation announced from above, with consent missing underneath.

As heard by us

A careful labor story about representation, secrecy, and who gets to speak for drivers.

Commons follows the fight over who gets to speak for Uber drivers and what it means when a company claims that role before workers have had a real say.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

You want the strange labor fight behind Uber's claim of representation.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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