Commentary: Will Uber be the next Teamsters target?

   It will be interesting to see how the sharing economy is viewed from a labor standpoint in 10 years. Right now companies with apps that can provide any kind of service imaginable are sprouting up in cities like mushrooms.
   Besides Uber, Lyft and Sidecar for ridesharing, there’s Luxe, a personal parking valet that tracks your smartphone to your destination and sends a uniformed valet to meet you and take your car so you don’t have to hunt for parking. When you’re ready, you use the app to get your car returned. Washio is a service that will do your laundry for you. Shyp does your mailing so you don’t have to go to the post office. Dufl will pack your suitcase. Zeel will deliver a massage therapist to your door. Saucey delivers alcohol and cocktail ingredients. Postmates delivers from any shop in town in about an hour.
   The list goes on, as Geoffrey Fowler pointed out in his “Personal Technology” column in the Wall Street Journal.
   The people working for these companies are all independent contractors. And the model isn’t that different from the drayage trucking industry or the one that FedEx Ground has for its drivers.
   The port trucking sector in Southern California is under scrutiny by state and federal regulators for alleged misclassification of drivers as independent operators who own and manage their own trucks. A coalition of social justice organizations, including the Teamsters union, has succeeded in winning several cases against trucking companies for treating drivers as employees, but not compensating them as such. The cases labor regulators tend to turn on the degree of control a company has over a driver. Many drivers lease their trucks, or at least secure financing, through the trucking company and have the payments deducted from their earnings, often along with fuel, parking, maintenance and other services the logistics company/motor carrier may provide. When drivers are told when and where to show up every day and which loads to take they don’t have control over their destiny, and essentially are employees.
   Let’s see how workers at Uber, Luxe and other service-on-demand companies feel about their job status in a few years, once the tech honeymoon is over. There already are complaints from some Uber drivers that they don’t get enough of the fare to justify the cost of operating their vehicle. Maybe the Teamsters will try to get them defined as employees and then organize them into a union.
   The analogy, however, falls short in one important respect: Uber drivers and similar providers in the sharing economy get to use the app to their advantage too, picking and choosing the assignments and customers they want to accept.
   Then again, there already are companies trying to bring the Uber model to trucking writ large, so we may not have to cross to other industries to see how the labor dynamic plays out.

This commentary was published in the June 2015 issue of American Shipper.