Lawsuits claim Uber, Lyft exposing public to ailing drivers

Sick drivers will continue working, suits allege

Lawsuits just filed against ride-hailing leaders Uber and Lyft allege the companies are endangering the public in California during the coronavirus outbreak by not following state law which requires that employees receive paid sick leave.

“Faced with a choice of staying home without pay and risking losing their access to their livelihood, including housing, food, and other necessities of living, (Uber and Lyft) drivers across California will continue working and risk exposing hundreds of riders who enter their car on a weekly basis to this deadly disease,” the nearly identical lawsuits alleged.

Uber declined to comment on the lawsuits’ claims, and Lyft did not immediately respond.

Uber this week said drivers would be eligible for sick pay if they provided proper documentation of being diagnosed with coronavirus, placed into quarantine, asked to self isolate, or have been removed from Uber’s drivers’ app for 14 days at the direction of a public health organization. Lyft this week said it would “provide funds to drivers should they be diagnosed with COVID-19, or put under individual quarantine by a public health agency.”

But those plans fall short of California law, said Shannon Liss-Riordan, the lawyer representing the drivers seeking class-action status for both suits.

“Uber and Lyft’s policies do not address the crisis we are facing,” Liss-Riordan, a workers’-rights lawyer known for suing gig-economy companies, said in an email. “California law mandates paid sick leave — and you don’t need to be diagnosed with coronavirus to be eligible for it. Testing for the virus is hard to get now, so few drivers are even eligible for whatever compensation Uber and Lyft are talking about, which hasn’t even been well defined. The CDC is recommending that anyone who is feeling sick stay home and not go to work, regardless of whether they’ve been diagnosed with coronavirus.”

Both ride hailing companies have long maintained that drivers are not employees and have continued to mount legal and political

challenges to AB-5, the state law that reclassified contract workers as employees.

At the core of the lawsuits against Uber and Lyft is the broader, high-stakes legal dispute over whether the two San Francisco-based ride-hailing firms can continue to treat their drivers as independent contractors rather than employees. The suits argue that Uber and Lyft drivers are employees, so the companies must abide by state law that mandates that sick days be accrued at the rate of at least one hour for every 30 hours worked. But California’s paid sick leave law does not apply to independent contractors.

Uber and Lyft have each put at least $30 million into a campaign to bring a ballot initiative to California voters this year that would exempt them from AB-5, which mandates a strict test to determine whether an employee such as a ridehailing driver is an employee or contractor.

The law went into effect Jan. 1, but Uber and Lyft have not reclassified their drivers as employees.

Uber in December sued the State of California over the new law, claiming that “app-based independent service providers and the companies that operate the platforms they use have a constitutional right to pursue the occupation of their choice — not to be forced to be employees when they are independent, or to be forced to be taxi or delivery companies when they are technology companies.”