This ought to be interesting.
A pair of former drivers for Uber and Lyft filed dual class action lawsuits Thursday against the ride-hailing companies over their abrupt exit last month from the Austin market.
The lawsuits, filed in the U.S. District Court in the Northern District of California, claim that Uber and Lyft violated the federal Worker Adjustment, Retraining and Notification Act when they pulled out of Austin in May because they failed to properly notify their employees. Uber and Lyft have long maintained that their drivers are independent contractors and not employees.
[…]
Todd Johnston, the driver behind the suit against Uber, drove for the company since May 2015 while David Thornton, the driver on the Lyft suit, drove for Lyft since October 2015. According to the suits, Johnson and Thornton, along with other Austin ride-hailing drivers, “lost their jobs” after the companies left Austin.
“Lost in the political theater surrounding the Uber and Lyft versus Austin City Council battle was the real-world effect on the thousands of Austinites who suddenly lost their incomes when Uber and Lyft abandoned Austin,” said Michael Slack, an attorney for Johnston and Thornton.
The federal notification act cited in the suits requires employers to notify their employees before any mass layoffs or the closure of a “facility” or “operating unit.”
I Am Not A Lawyer, so I have no idea if this suit has any merit or not. We do know, as the story says, that Uber and Lyft are very adamant about the whole worker-classification thing, so you can be sure that will be a key to their argument against the plaintiffs. How successful they are, and how successful the plaintiffs are at getting terms like “facility” to be interpreted in their favor, will determine how far this gets. Any actual attorneys want to comment on this?
It is abundantly clear that the drivers are contractors in every sense of the word, including the IRS definition. The drivers should lose the case in summary judgement because of that alone. Having said that, Uber and Lyft did drop them in the grease, and that ought to be a cautionary tale for anyone thinking about becoming a driver for them and counting on income from them.