Uber and Big Taxi Unite: Inside the Ride-Hail Giant's Union Alliance Against Waymo's Robotaxis

One of the strangest alliances in the modern tech economy just went public. On September 3, the Financial Times reported that Uber — a company whose early history was defined by bulldozing taxi regulations and fighting union-backed labor laws — is now openly siding with rideshare-driver unions in a coordinated bid to slow the rollout of robotaxis. The target of the campaign is Waymo, Alphabet’s autonomous-vehicle arm and Uber’s own business partner in several cities.

For an industry watching how incumbents adapt to AI-driven disruption, the FT’s report is the clearest signal yet that the robotaxi endgame will be fought not just on technology, but on legislation — and that the disruptor of yesterday is perfectly willing to borrow the oldest playbook in the incumbent handbook: regulatory capture dressed up as worker protection.

What the FT found

The Financial Times describes Uber “aligning itself with drivers’ unions in a bid to slow the rollout of robotaxis, finding unlikely bedfellows as it faces fierce competition.” The paper’s headline — “Uber and Big Taxi unite in battle against Waymo” — captures the historical irony in five words.

The alliance is tactical, not philosophical. Uber’s core network of millions of human drivers is under existential threat from autonomous fleets. Waymo alone now provides more than 500,000 paid rides every week across 11 cities, and its expansion shows no sign of slowing. Uber’s own internal data, cited by its policy chief during a Washington, D.C. Council roundtable, estimates that a single autonomous vehicle displaces roughly four human drivers. When your marketplace is built on matching riders with drivers, a four-to-one displacement ratio is not a statistic — it is a countdown clock.

The two legislative battlegrounds

The campaign is playing out on two concrete fronts, documented in public records obtained by Wired and TechCrunch earlier this summer and now supercharged by the union alliance.

New Jersey — the 85% quota. Uber lobbyists have circulated draft legislation that would require human drivers to carry out 85% of all rideshare trips during a three-year trial period. In practice, this would make a standalone robotaxi network like Waymo’s illegal in the state: any operator wanting to run driverless cars would need to keep a human fleet four to five times larger running alongside it, surrendering most of the cost advantage that makes autonomy economically viable. A separate New Jersey bill, A3968, would additionally require fully driverless robotaxis to carry cameras plus two additional distinct sensor types, layering hardware mandates on top.

Washington, D.C. — the hybrid network rule. Uber is fighting a bill introduced by Councilmember Charles Allen in May that would update the district’s Autonomous Vehicle Act of 2012 to permit driverless testing and commercial deployment. That bill carries its own controversial terms — a $0.15-per-mile “vehicle miles traveled” tax, a $1 million application fee, and a non-refundable $5 million permit fee that critics say would price out all but the biggest players. Uber’s counter-proposal is the “hybrid network”: a legal requirement that any robotaxi service must operate on a platform that also employs human drivers, and that consumers must be guaranteed the option of a human-driven ride. “There should be a requirement for consumers to be able to take an Uber that’s driven by a human,” Uber’s U.S. policy chief Javi Correoso told the D.C. Council in May.

The quiet part, said out loud

What makes the story remarkable is that Uber isn’t hiding the strategy. Chief Product Officer Sachin Kansal has said publicly that Uber is “not in the race to be an L4 autonomy provider” — instead, the company is “laying down the race tracks so we can work with multiple players.” Having sold its own self-driving unit to Aurora in 2020 after the fatal 2018 Tempe crash and years of setbacks, Uber concluded it could not win the autonomy race. Its new bet is to own the track the winners must run on.

That bet has two prongs. The first is legislative: force every robotaxi onto a hybrid platform, where the app that aggregates demand — Uber’s app — becomes the gatekeeper. The second is data: through a new unit called AV Labs, Uber is fitting hundreds of vehicles with sensors to collect millions of miles of real-world driving data, which it can share with the very AV firms it competes against. Own the road, and you own the data that runs on it.

Critics see it plainly. Greg Rogers of the think tank The Innovation Majority, testifying at the D.C. hearing, called Uber’s hybrid-network push an attempt at “regulatory capture”: “Any argument that you can improve consumer welfare by forcing certain business models and canceling out others does not improve people’s mobility choices… what it risks is only further entrenching interests and charging rent on anyone who seeks to operate AVs in the district.”

The union reversal, explained

The labor alliance is the newest and strangest layer. Uber spent the 2010s fighting classification laws like California’s AB 5, pouring money into Proposition 22 to preserve gig-worker contractor status, and resisting unionization drives in city after city. Chief Operating Officer Andrew MacDonald now insists the company has changed: “That experience changed us,” he wrote in May. “Today, we partner with cities instead of confronting them.”

The FT’s reporting suggests the conversion is recent, and conditional. Uber needs unions’ political muscle in state capitols; unions need Uber’s lobbying infrastructure and legitimacy. Both fear the same near-term outcome: a Waymo-style future where autonomous fleets operate as sealed, vertical stacks — owned hardware, owned software, owned dispatch — with no role for either human drivers or third-party marketplaces. The enemy of my enemy, in this case, drives a Jaguar I-PACE with a lidar dome.

Why it matters beyond ride-hailing

This is the robotaxi story becoming an AI-labor story, and it previews fights coming to every industry where agentic AI displaces marketplace intermediaries:

• Incumbents will regulate, not compete. When a platform can’t win on capability, it seeks to make rivals’ business models illegal. Expect the same pattern in delivery, freight, and eventually white-collar marketplaces.
• Labor becomes a shield for capital. The 85% quota is framed as worker protection, and it genuinely would protect driver income — but its drafters’ primary beneficiary is a $180-billion-market-cap platform protecting its take rate. Real labor policy and platform self-defense are now indistinguishable in the legislative text.
• The displacement math is finally on the record. Uber’s own four-drivers-per-AV estimate is now part of a public council record. That figure will be quoted in every future AV hearing — and in every future debate about AI-driven job displacement, ride-hailing or otherwise.
• The fight is going national — and global. Uber says it will pitch the hybrid model in other states as they write AV laws. Meanwhile Waymo and Uber are headed for a separate showdown in London, where the first robotaxi services are just launching.

The D.C. bill could come to a vote before Mayor Muriel Bowser leaves office in January. If the hybrid-network principle lands in law anywhere, it will be the first time a major jurisdiction has legally mandated that humans stay in the loop of an autonomous service — not for safety reasons, but for economic ones.

The technology, by most accounts, mostly works now. The open question — as Uber’s whole strategy makes explicit — is who controls the dispatch. The company that spent a decade owning the app between rider and driver is betting everything that the same choke point still pays when the driver is a robot. And it has decided that the fastest way to defend that choke point is to stand with the very unions it once fought.