David Weil, the former U.S. Department of Labor official who oversaw labor standards, is challenging the ride-hailing industry’s favorite sales pitch: that app-based work gives drivers useful control over their time. In a new American Prospect essay, Weil argues that the flexibility Uber and Lyft advertise mostly protects the companies from paying for slack demand.
Weil’s argument draws on the public record from a 2024 Massachusetts attorney general case against Uber over worker classification. Weil served as an expert witness in that case and had access to raw Uber operating data, according to Cory Doctorow’s Pluralistic, which highlighted the essay.
The mechanism is not mysterious. Uber and Lyft decide prices, promotions, dispatch rules and how many drivers they try to pull onto the road. Drivers can log in, but the companies decide whether a paying rider appears. Time spent waiting is treated as the driver’s problem, along with fuel, depreciation and the cheerful psychic tax of staring at an app that knows more than you do.
Weil contrasts that with ordinary employment law. If a platform had to pay at least the federal minimum wage, $7.25 an hour, it would have to limit shifts when enough drivers were already available. Drivers turned away would not earn, but they also would not be burning gas while unpaid. The risk of overstaffing would move back toward the company that controls demand forecasts and dispatch.
Uber executive Tony West has defended the company’s model as letting people “choose work that fits the rhythms of their lives, not the other way around,” according to Weil. West also led Uber’s push around California’s Proposition 22, the $225 million campaign that overturned state gig-work standards, Doctorow wrote.
The choice drivers get is narrow. Doctorow writes that drivers may have roughly 15 seconds to accept a ride, while also judging distance, time and pay, often from behind the wheel. He argues that rejecting too many offers can reduce future opportunities, while accepting low offers can teach the platform that a driver will tolerate worse terms.
Weil also points to the industry’s information imbalance. Platforms hold detailed data on rider demand, driver availability and price sensitivity. Workers, riders and regulators see fragments. That lets companies present earnings figures using paid ride time while leaving out unpaid waiting time, Doctorow argues.
The model has drawn regulatory pressure outside the United States. Weil cites the International Labor Organization’s Convention 193, “Decent Work in the Platform Economy,” as a binding labor standard for platform work. U.S. labor official Keith Sonderling opposed such rules in a Washington Examiner op-ed, writing that the government “will not sit on the sidelines while some foreign governments push to hamper American innovation in the gig economy worldwide.”
Switzerland has already pushed further. Doctorow writes that the Swiss Supreme Court found gig companies’ labor practices unlawful and ordered ordinary worker protections. The union Syndicom responded to weak compliance with a very analog hack: it partnered with a pro-union pizza restaurant, generated delivery orders through the platforms, and used the restaurant as a temporary organizing site for riders who arrived.
Doctorow points to counter-apps as another possible response, including tools that compare offers across platforms or help workers reject low-paying jobs together. He says anticircumvention laws, including rules modeled on the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act, make that kind of app modification legally risky. The platforms call the setup efficient. Weil’s reading is blunter: the code decides who waits, and the worker pays for the waiting.
This story draws on original reporting from Pluralistic.
