As Uber keeps opposing Spain's law to treat drivers as employees and lobbies against similar statutes, its CEO claims such rules don't break its business model
and has — adapted to treating workers as employees in other countries is a slap in the face to every single driver in the US that Uber continues to exploit.” https://theintercept.com/... @theintercept : Uber is currently spending millions of dollars on advocacy to enshrine independent contractor status laws for drivers in Illinois, Massachusetts, New York, and other states that have considered gig labor reform. https://theintercept.com/... @marietjeschaake : Scaling at the expense of people or respect for regulators and then saying: “We can make any model work” is a pretty good summary of how we allow platforms to grow too powerful ↘️ https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
This fight has a long runway: back in 2016 Uber argued before the EU's highest court that it was a digital platform, not a transportation service, laying the legal groundwork for treating drivers as something other than employees in its landmark EU case. In 2020 the CEO pitched a 'third way' classification to the Trump administration, a proposal about 50 labor groups promptly urged Congress to reject in a joint letter.
What changed this week is the geography and the tone: instead of proposing new categories, Uber is spending millions to defeat an existing employee-classification law in Spain and to enshrine independent-contractor status in Illinois, Massachusetts, New York and other states — while its CEO simultaneously claims such rules wouldn't break the business model anyway.
First-order effects
- Spanish drivers covered by the law face continued opposition from Uber rather than reclassification, while drivers in Illinois, Massachusetts and New York become the targets of Uber-funded advocacy campaigns for contractor-status statutes.
- The CEO's public claim that employee rules don't break the model puts Uber on record that it could absorb reclassification costs — undercutting the urgency argument behind its own lobbying spend.
Second-order effects
- Rival gig platforms operating in the same jurisdictions get their lobbying position underwritten by Uber's spend, since any contractor-status statute won in Illinois or Massachusetts protects the whole sector's cost structure.
- Uber's own California experience shows what adaptation costs look like: it reported that driver-facing concessions like price-naming and destination previews hurt the business and considered ending both, so employee-style rules would likely surface as higher fares or tighter dispatch control wherever they pass.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, gig work settles into a jurisdictional patchwork — employee status in some markets, contractor statutes in others — rather than converging on the single 'third way' category Uber proposed in 2020 in its letter seeking updated labor laws.
- Legislatures, not courts or companies, become the decisive arena for platform-labor economics, with each state-level statute serving as a template other states copy or reject.
The trend: Platform labor classification is being decided jurisdiction by jurisdiction, with Uber fighting reclassification abroad while funding contractor-status statutes at home.