With workers in mind, St. Paul takes step toward regulating driverless cars

October 22, 2026 by 1 Comment

Twin Cities rideshare driver Abdikani Ali warns that autonomous vehicles would undercut workers in his industry.

At the urging of workers and labor unions, the St. Paul City Council last week put the city on course to regulate autonomous vehicles before companies like Waymo and Tesla’s Robotaxi begin operating here.

The council passed a resolution Oct. 14 directing the Planning Commission to study the issue and send back recommendations for a regulatory framework that protects workers, prioritizes safety and accountability, safeguards people’s privacy and protects public transportation systems.

“We need to understand these impacts for ourselves – not take big tech’s word for it,” Council President Rebecca Noecker, who led efforts to pass the resolution, said at a press conference inside City Hall before the vote.

Already, Waymo vehicles are surveying Minneapolis and St. Paul streets, although human monitors still ride inside. The Google-owned taxi company currently operates in 15 U.S. cities. Tesla robotaxis have gone live in six urban areas.

Uber and Lyft drivers, who recently began organizing a union with Service Employees (SEIU) Local 26, have lobbied city leaders in both Minneapolis and St. Paul to act now, before autonomous vehicles begin commercial operations here, to prevent widespread job losses.

Minnesota’s rideshare industry generates over $500 million in total economic output, generating about $43 million in local and state tax revenues.

If local governments like St. Paul fail to act, Council Member Hwa Jeong Kim said, “hundreds of millions of dollars that today support working families across St. Paul would instead flow to Silicon Valley CEOs.”

Rideshare drivers like Abdikani Ali agreed. Ali supports his family by driving for Uber and Lyft, working as many as 16 hours in a day to make ends meet.

“I don’t want Waymo or Tesla to come into the St. Paul community and take away the jobs that people like me depend on,” Ali said. “I also don’t want the money and wages that we’re (earning) to leave our community and go to companies and corporations run by Elon Musk and Google.”

Council members in Minneapolis last month attempted to protect rideshare drivers’ jobs with an ordinance requiring autonomous vehicles to carry human monitors, but it failed to pass.

The resolution adopted in St. Paul, Noecker said, does not presuppose any policy outcome. Instead, the council is setting in motion a process that will seek answers from the community about what guardrails are appropriate. “The outcome of that could look a lot of different ways,” Noecker said.

The Planning Commission’s work is expected to take six months to a year.

“Our responsibility is to the people of St. Paul, not to these corporations,” Noecker added. “Depending on what our community tells us, there may be guardrails we can put in place that allow these vehicles to operate safely, but we need to do the work first. And we want to do that work now rather than wait until they are literally at our door.”

– Michael Moore, UA editor

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Proposal would allow Minnesota Uber, Lyft drivers to unionize

March 10, 2025 by

Dawit Kassa (R) spoke during a Capitol press conference on a bill that would allow Uber and Lyft drivers to unionize. (SEIU photo)

Two labor-endorsed state lawmakers announced plans last month to introduce legislation that would give drivers in Minnesota the right to unionize and bargain collectively with ride-hailing apps like Uber and Lyft.

Drivers in the Twin Cities have been organizing in recent years to push local and state officials to address low pay, safety concerns and a lack of transparency in their industry. State lawmakers responded last year with a bill establishing a new minimum wage and other guarantees.

But Dawit Kassa, a driver who served on Gov. Tim Walz’s task force to offer recommendations for the new law, said it doesn’t do enough to level the playing field between the ride-hailing companies and their drivers.

“No law is going to address all of the issues we are facing from these companies,” Kassa said. “We need a union. We need a seat at the table so we can ensure this industry works for us.”

Kassa was among roughly 20 Uber and Lyft drivers at a Capitol press conference Feb. 25. Most were wearing the Service Employees union’s trademark purple shirts, and SEIU Local 26 President Greg Nammacher said the union would support any Uber and Lyft drivers looking to organize.

Lead authors Rep. Samakab Hussein (D-St. Paul) and Sen. Zaynab Mohamed (D-Minneapolis) said they are modeling their bills after a historic ballot measure approved by Massachusetts voters in November.

The Massachusetts law establishes a process for drivers to organize a union and, if successful, bargain one contract with all the apps licensed to operate in the state, known as “sectoral bargaining.”

Drivers, like most other workers in the gig economy, are classified by law as independent contractors, making them ineligible to form a union without a special process like the one in Massachusetts.

Under the proposal from Hussein and Mohamed, pro-union drivers would need to sign up at least 25% of the potential bargaining unit – open to anyone who has completed 100 rides in the previous quarter – before contract talks could begin.

Any tentative agreement would need approval from a majority of voting union members and from the commissioner of the Minnesota Department of Labor before taking effect.

The proposal also establishes an arbitration process if the union and ride-hailing apps fail to reach an agreement within six months of opening talks.

Hussein said that stories from Uber and Lyft drivers confirmed that they need collective bargaining to address their shared concerns around fare transparency and pay for time spent waiting for a job.

And despite safeguards in the new state law, drivers continue to report being deactivated from their Uber or Lyft accounts – making it impossible for them to work – due to rider feedback, without getting an opportunity to respond in their defense.

“Without a voice, these problems are going to continue to come back to the Legislature,” Local 26’s Nammacher said. “The Legislature does not need to be the HR department for these multimillion-dollar, global corporations like Uber and Lyft,”

“Ride share companies continue to do the bare minimum while making millions,” Hussein added. “It’s time for change.”

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Uber, Lyft drivers push local lawmakers to regulate their industry

October 19, 2022 by

Abdi Salah (L) and Eid Ali

With a shoestring organizing drive that began just four months ago, Twin Cities Uber and Lyft drivers are pushing elected officials to tighten regulation of the app-based companies, and fighting for safety, transparency and a collective voice in their industry.

The Minnesota Uber/Lyft Drivers Association (MULDA) will bring its fledgling campaign to St. Paul tomorrow with a rally at the Capitol, set to begin at 12:30 p.m.

Drivers’ demands include higher pay and greater transparency from Uber and Lyft about how they calculate fares. The companies have slashed rates from nearly $2 per mile to around 85 cents over the last eight years, while scrapping a firm, 20% cap on their commission, drivers said.

Abdi Salah, who drives for both Uber and Lyft, said the companies recently removed fare breakdowns from drivers’ online activity log, leaving them to glean information about their cut from conversations with passengers. He recalled a recent trip from Edina to Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, in which he claims he received just $14 out of a passenger’s $50 fare.

“This guy is going on vacation, and he’s pissed off,” Salah remembered. “He’s angry with me, and I was not late. He was mad at me because I was charging him $50. He said it was ridiculous for such a short trip.

“When I dropped him off, I showed him my receipt, and he was shocked. He gave me a $5 tip. Had I not engaged with him, he was going to give me a low rating, and I might not have been allowed to drive again.”

Salah and other drivers have concluded that Uber and Lyft are “charging anything they need to the customer, and the 83 cents per mile minus their (commission), that’s what they give to the driver,” he said.

During an interview earlier this month in the organization’s one-room office, located on the second floor a shopping center in Minneapolis’ Phillips neighborhood, MULDA President Eid Ali said the ride sharing companies’ practices amount to wage theft.

“We don’t trust Uber or Lyft, and there’s good reason why we don’t,” said Ali, who helped lead a successful push to regulate taxi companies in Minneapolis a decade ago. “The public is being ripped off, and so are the drivers. Uber and Lyft are getting as much money as they can from the riders, and in the end giving only a little bit to the driver.”

In meetings with Minneapolis City Council members and Mayor Jacob Frey, MULDA drivers have pushed for an ordinance that would regulate rates, as the city does with taxi cabs, and cap the percentage that ridesharing apps can take out in commission.

Drivers also have reached out to St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter and, with the rally tomorrow, hope to take their campaign statewide. MULDA’s first public event, a September meeting at the Embassy Suites in Bloomington, drew about 400 drivers and a handful of elected officials.

“They were really surprised,” Ali said of the legislators in attendance. “They were not expecting this type of organizing effort. Maybe they were underestimating us. Maybe they thought we were invisible, but that’s not true.”

While increasing pay and transparency are at the top of MULDA’s agenda, drivers have also raised concerns about safety and job security – issues they hope to one day address through collective bargaining.

The U.S. Department of Labor last week issued a proposal to bar firms like Uber and Lyft from classifying so-called “gig-economy workers” as independent contractors, which takes companies off the hook for benefits like workers compensation – and bars them from bargaining as a union.

Several drivers who came to MULDA’s meeting last month, Ali said, claimed to have been injured on the job, including a man who said he was shot by a passenger, leaving him paralyzed from the waist down.

“No one has bothered, not Uber and not Lyft, to help (him) because there’s not any protection, not any work compensation to protect those fellow drivers because we’re misclassified,” Ali said. “Up to today, he’s a piece of garbage in their eyes.”

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