Union-Affiliated Guilds
Description
By Hannah Johnston and Chris Land-Kazlauskas:
"The Independent Drivers Guild (IDG, or ‘the Guild’) is an affiliate of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM). IDG asserts that it represents 50,000 New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission-Licensed Uber drivers (Independent Drivers Guild, 2017). The Machinists’ Union has decades of experience organizing and representing the mostly immigrant workforce of black car drivers in New York City (Ness, 2010). While the IAM registered some isolated wins, including collective bargaining agreements with a number of black car companies, the industry’s structure and regulatory framework, paired with Uber’s disruptive market entry resulted in significant challenges to solving problems “base by base”. Thus, IDG was formed to help achieve wide-reaching industry reforms and create opportunities for dialogue between Uber drivers and the corporation. The five major issues the IDG has sought to influence include: a mandated tipping option; a minimum per minute / per mile rate (which would result minimum earnings of about $250 for an eight-hour day); a cap on the number of TLC licenses (linked to number of trips, as a measure to limit competition in the labour market), and the right for a driver to appeal if the company undercharges or takes away money (for example, following a passenger complaint).
According to Ryan Price, Executive Director of the IDG, “while it could be done company-by-company, given the precariousness of the industry, company-by-company organizing would make it difficult to focus on the "big" issues. The Machinists realised an industry-wide association may be more effective, so we started bargaining with Uber to make the Guild happen.” What resulted was a five-year neutrality and recognition agreement between IAM and Uber, giving rise to a number of benefits, including a regular dialogue with local management.10 “We are building a union – without collective bargaining – but we function like an organizing union,” explains Price, “Our goal is to get them organized, and to get us to start thinking in a perspective of, ‘how do we change the fundamental rules of the industry?’ without worrying about the employee-independent contractor thing for now – just putting that on the backburner.”
As offered by Kelly Ross, one of the benefits of the guild model is that it represents an avenue for unions to form relationships with gig and platform-based workers that positions them, should conditions change and formal union recognition become an option, to mobilize members into a formal organizing drive.
This view was shared by IDG’s Price, “The thing is, in our agreement [with Uber], as soon as [Uber drivers] have the right to collective bargaining, we can, and we will organize for collective bargaining.”
While the Guild’s direct engagement with Uber has not gone without criticism12 it has provided what it views as an important comparative advantage: access. This includes access to the pool of Uber drivers, and access to the company itself – through a works council13 – where the drivers represented by the Guild can raise issues with a view to their resolution. While the latter will be addressed under the section entitled “Toward Collective Bargaining”, access to drivers is seen by the Guild as an important factor influencing their strategy.
Finding and developing relationships with a dispersed workforce can be a major obstacle to organizing in the gig economy. The agreement with Uber provides IDG with driver contact information, a factor that has been incredibly important in shaping strategy. As Price points out, “Our organizing model is based on the fact that we have that list [of Uber drivers], because we can e-mail them all the time. [W]e can turn that contact into actual relationships through the stewardship programme. So, essentially, the staff– become just a hub that connects workers [with] other workers.”
Developing contacts into active representatives has been a major focus on the Guild. Price states,
- 'Their goal is [to] help [drivers] through the industry; they help them with the Taxi and Limousine Commission, they help them communicate with companies, they help them with the N.Y.P.D. if they have to, they help them translate things. So our goal is, with our stewards, to build an actual union to build the feeling of community, the relationships that really are the brick and mortar, like the cement between the bricks of union'." (http://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/---ed_protect/---protrav/---travail/documents/publication/wcms_624286.pdf)