Mass. Senator Lydia Edwards joins Teamsters in fight over bills protecting gig workers
A Massachusetts Senator joins the fight with one of the state’s largest labor unions over a pair of bills that would protect workers for app-based companies from having their compensation and benefits undercut by their employer.
Members of Teamsters Local 25 were joined by State Senator Lydia Edwards, D - Third Suffolk, in Boston’s Charlestown neighborhood Sunday, where they voted unanimously to endorse a pair of bills to take on the fight against Big Tech firms.
The legislation, now before the state House and Senate, would protect collective bargaining rights for union members, while simultaneously strengthening protection of employees from being misclassified as independent contractors.
“These bills are critical to our union,” said Tom Mari, President of Teamsters Local 25. “Workers’ wages, work rules, benefits, and pension plans are all at stake in this fight. We can’t allow greedy CEOs from Silicon Valley to destroy the good jobs we fought to create in Massachusetts.”
The endorsement of the Edwards-Vargas legislation comes amid a push by Uber, Lyft, Instacart, and other Big Tech firms to force a referendum on the upcoming November ballot.
If the push by the gig companies is successful, it would “legitimize many app-based companies’ unlawful business model, which relies on misclassifying workers as independent contractors in order to cheat them out of collective bargaining rights, minimum wage protections, overtime eligibility, unemployment insurance, and other benefits exclusive to W-2 employees,” the union said in its statement.
“Three things every single worker needs to have are just pay, the living wage; be free from abuse on the work site, that means things like physical abuse, discrimination; and the right to form a union,” Edwards said. “This bill protects all three of those things and protects employee status. It is the only bill that does all of that.”
This is a developing story. Check back for updates as more information becomes available.
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