But it’s not about employees – it’s about Waymo
For most of its history, Uber treated labor unions as an obstacle to route around. Founder Travis Kalanick built the company's early reputation on outrunning regulators and driver organizers alike. So it raised eyebrows this year when Uber started showing up in statehouses arguing for driver protections, teaming up with some of the same unions it once tried to sideline.
The shift has little to do with a change of heart. It has a lot to do with Waymo.
A new kind of rival
Uber is pushing state and city lawmakers, including in New Jersey and Washington, D.C., to slow the rollout of fully autonomous robotaxis, according to the Financial Times. The company wants any operator offering self-driving rides to also run a "hybrid network," a mix of robotaxis and human drivers, rather than a pure driverless fleet like the one Alphabet-owned Waymo already runs in several U.S. cities.
Uber's president, Andrew Macdonald, has acknowledged the shift looks strange coming from a company that spent its early years focused on growth without weighing the social costs, according to the FT. Manny Pastreich, president of the New York service workers' union 32BJ SEIU, told the paper that Uber and labor have occasionally landed on the same side of the fight and that the pressure has helped delay the next stages of the autonomous vehicle rollout. He also made clear the union isn't counting on that support lasting.
One former Uber executive put the strategy more bluntly to the FT: "For AVs to scale, drivers have to lose."
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Why Uber actually cares
Robotaxis still make up less than 0.5% of Uber's total trip volume, per the FT's reporting. But the threat to its business model is real. If regulators let pure-play autonomous vehicle companies run their own booking apps the way Waymo does, Uber risks being cut out of rides altogether: no driver to pay, no commission to collect, no app in the middle. A rule requiring hybrid networks protects Uber's position as the aggregator, regardless of who or what is behind the wheel.
There's a technology gap underneath the policy fight, too. Uber sold its self-driving unit, Advanced Technologies Group, to Aurora Innovation in 2020 for roughly $4 billion, a fraction of the $7.25 billion it had been valued at a year earlier, and has spent the years since building a robotaxi strategy through partnerships rather than developing the tech itself. It has since put more than $10 billion into vehicle purchases and stakes in a range of autonomous vehicle companies, spreading its bets across a fragmented field of partners rather than backing one platform. Waymo owns its technology outright. Uber doesn't.
In New Jersey, Uber lobbyists have proposed that any robotaxi operator be required to keep human drivers behind at least 85% of rides during a three-year pilot period, the FT reported. Waymo has pushed back on hybrid-network rules as unnecessary, arguing it already operates alongside human-driven ride-hailing apps in multiple cities without one.
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The contradiction HR leaders should notice
While Uber campaigns publicly to protect driver work, the FT reports the company separately announced roughly 3,300 corporate job cuts, about 10% of its global workforce, aimed at reducing management layers, the same week its driver-advocacy stance made headlines. Uber's own workforce isn't exempt from the efficiency logic it's lobbying to slow down elsewhere.
Uber is hardly alone in this. Plenty of large employers are running two workforce strategies at once: signaling caution in public about automation's effect on frontline or contracted workers, while using AI and restructuring to thin their own management ranks in private. The World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2025 puts a number on the broader trend, projecting 22% of jobs will be disrupted by 2030, with roughly 92 million roles displaced and 170 million created. The net figure is positive, but it says nothing about how well any one employer manages the people caught in the gap.
That gap is what employee relations teams should watch for in their own organizations: the distance between what a company says about protecting jobs and what its own headcount decisions actually do. Employees and gig workers notice, and it costs trust.
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What this means for workforce and labor relations strategy
Uber's alliance with unions is tactical, not a change in culture, and HR leaders should treat it as a case study rather than a template.
Pastreich's comment that the union isn't relying on Uber's support continuing is worth sitting with. Stakeholders remember which side an organization was on before it was convenient to switch. Trust built under pressure tends to be shallow, and it shows the first time interests diverge again.
The classification question hasn't gone anywhere, either. Underneath the hybrid-network debate sits a much older, unresolved argument about whether gig platform workers are employees or independent contractors. Worker classification disputes have followed Uber and its peers for years, and automation is forcing regulators to revisit them with new urgency.
There's also a communications lesson here for anyone running AI-driven restructuring: it needs its own plan, separate from whatever the company is telling customers or regulators about protecting jobs elsewhere. Employees notice the gap between the two messages faster than most organizations expect.
And for anyone in transport, logistics or delivery, state-level AV legislation is worth watching closely. Bills have stalled in roughly half a dozen US states this year largely over labor concerns, according to the FT, which means the regulatory path for automation-driven job change is still genuinely open, not settled.
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Uber's truce with organized labor may buy it a few more years before robotaxis erode its core business. For HR and labor relations professionals, the more useful takeaway sits underneath the headline: automation-driven workforce change is rarely handled with one consistent set of values across an organization. Watching for that inconsistency, in Uber's playbook or your own, is a better use of time than watching the union alliance itself.
