C. Jarrett Dieterle, Man Who Asked "At What Cost?" and Forgot to Check the Receipts
Reason Magazine: Where "Free Markets" Means Two Apps Fix the Wage and You Fix Your Own Transmission
C. Jarrett Dieterle wrote a piece in Reason warning that your Uber driver might soon join a union. He asks “at what cost?” but he never actually produces the receipt. He assumes the answer is self-evident: unions are bad for business, therefore unions are bad for everyone. That is not an argument. That is a bumper sticker.
Dieterle wants readers to believe that letting roughly 100,000 Illinois rideshare drivers unionize, or the 70,000 Massachusetts drivers who already have, or the 800,000 California drivers newly eligible, will somehow destroy the gig economy. The evidence he offers is a stack of hypotheticals dressed up as forecasts. I read the whole piece twice. There is no study showing that unionized rideshare markets have collapsed. There is no data proving drivers would rather earn less than have a voice. There is just fear, and fear is not a fact (Dieterle, 2026).
The Receipts Dieterle Forgot to Bring
Let us start with the basic numbers Dieterle left on the cutting room floor. According to the National Employment Law Project, in 2024 the average Uber driver earned less than the year before while working more hours. Lyft drivers saw their pay drop 14 percent. Both companies now take about 40 percent of the average fare, and on some rides they grab as much as 65 or 70 percent (National Employment Law Project, 2025). That is not a free market. That is a toll booth.
Dieterle also warns that riders will pay more. He points to New York City, where a minimum wage rule for delivery workers produced an UberEats waitlist of 27,000 people. He treats this like a disaster. A waitlist means 27,000 New Yorkers wanted the job because the pay finally stopped being a race to the bottom. That is not a market failure. That is supply and demand working correctly. If paying a fair wage creates a line of people willing to work, the problem was never the wage. It was the poverty (New York Post, 2024).
The author further claims that drivers only want “flexibility and the log-in-anytime access of gig roles.” He offers no survey, no poll, no driver testimony to back this up. Meanwhile, research from the UC Berkeley Labor Center found that when you count expenses and waiting time, the average pay for California drivers is about $9.09 per hour. Drivers surveyed by UCLA researchers stated they want stable salaries, predictable income, and the ability to negotiate their contracts (Sumagaysay, 2025; UCLA Labor Center, 2018). Flexibility without money is just the freedom to go broke on your own schedule.
Sectoral Bargaining Is Not a Shadowy Plot, It Is Math
Dieterle complains that Massachusetts, California, and Illinois use “sectoral bargaining,” which lets a union represent all drivers in a state once it crosses a threshold. He calls this a cost-saving trick for unions. He misses the point entirely. When workers are scattered across thousands of cars and never share a break room, you cannot organize them factory-floor style. Sectoral bargaining is the only practical way to give dispersed workers a seat at the table. The Massachusetts law required the App Drivers Union to hit 25 percent support to become the certified bargaining representative, and it recently cleared that bar with 32 percent support from active drivers. What Dieterle does not mention is that the same law gives competing unions and even anti-union drivers the same opportunity: if any other group hits 25 percent, they can trigger an election too. That is not a backdoor. That is a front door with a doorknob (Klein, 2026).
The author also frames binding interest arbitration as some kind of federal overreach that “dictates contract terms to private businesses.” He forgets to mention that arbitration only kicks in after months of bargaining fail. Right now, Uber and Lyft dictate terms unilaterally every time they change an algorithm, slash a rate, or lock drivers out of the app. A neutral panel stepping in after both sides deadlock is not tyranny. It is the only check on a corporation that currently writes the contract in invisible ink.
The Flexibility Fairy Tale
Dieterle insists that unionization will force companies into “arranged scheduling models” that kill the gig worker’s freedom. This is a fairy tale the industry loves to tell. The freedom to log in whenever you want does not mean much when the company controls the fare, hides the destination until after you accept, and can deactivate you without explanation. A 2025 CalMatters report on California’s AB 1340 notes that drivers under Proposition 22 have struggled to claim even the meager health care stipends they were promised, and many end up on Medi-Cal because the company-designed benefits are barely functional (Sumagaysay, 2025). If that is flexibility, it is the flexibility to absorb all the risk while someone else pockets the profit.
Independent Contractors Cannot Be Independent If They Cannot Negotiate
Here is the core issue Dieterle never addresses. Uber and Lyft call their drivers independent contractors. Contractors set their own rates. Contractors negotiate. If you are not allowed to do either, you are not a small businessperson. You are a price-taker in a rigged marketplace.
When a passenger pays for a ride, that money gets split between the driver, the platform, and a black-box algorithm. The driver has zero power to say, “My costs went up, so my rate needs to rise.” The only way to fix that imbalance is collective bargaining. If the resulting fare is too high for a rider, that rider can choose to drive themselves, take the bus, or walk. Those options exist because we live in a society with choices. The driver, under the current system, has no comparable choice. They can accept Uber’s price or starve. That is not a market. That is an ultimatum.
The Cost Is Already Here
Dieterle ends by saying “the costs of continuing down this path are clear.” He is right, but he has the direction backward. The cost is not in the future. It is already being paid by drivers who cover their own gas, insurance, depreciation, and repairs while Uber and Lyft skim off an ever-larger share. A proposed federal bill by Senators Brian Schatz and Chris Murphy would cap the company cut at 25 percent, leaving 75 percent for drivers. That is the kind of transparency and balance these laws are trying to build toward (Sumagaysay, 2025).
If Reason wants to argue against unions, it is free to do so. But an argument requires evidence, not assumption. Dieterle never proves unionization hurts drivers. He never proves riders will face ruinous prices. He just asserts it, over and over, and hopes the reader nods before the sentence ends. I do not nod. I ask for receipts. And the receipts show that drivers are underpaid, that platforms are overcharging, and that the only absurdity in this debate is the idea that workers should accept whatever number appears on an app without ever asking why.
If you want to see a grown man treat a union drive like a zombie outbreak, read Dieterle’s evidence-free panic here: https://reason.com/2026/06/13/your-uber-driver-may-soon-be-unionized-at-what-cost/
EDIT: I forgot to link to the original nonsense so I had to come back to add it.
Works Cited
Dieterle, C. J. (2026, June 13). Your Uber driver may soon be unionized. At what cost? Reason. https://reason.com/2026/06/13/your-uber-driver-may-soon-be-unionized-at-what-cost/
Klein, A. (2026, May 25). Rideshare union: MA certifies Uber, Lyft drivers org., a U.S. 1st. NBC10 Boston. https://www.nbcboston.com/news/local/uber-lyft-drivers-union-massachusetts/3955054/
National Employment Law Project. (2025, July 30). Unpacking Uber and Lyft’s predatory take rates. https://www.nelp.org/insights-research/unpacking-uber-and-lyfts-predatory-take-rates/
New York Post. (2024, July 14). NYC food-delivery workers losing jobs after minimum wage hike. https://nypost.com/2024/07/14/business/nyc-food-delivery-workers-losing-jobs-after-minimum-wage-hike-report/
Sumagaysay, L. (2025, August 1). What unionization could mean for California Uber and Lyft drivers and riders. CalMatters. https://calmatters.org/economy/2025/08/uber-lyft-unionization-ab-1340/
UCLA Labor Center. (2018). A survey of ride-hailing drivers in Los Angeles. https://www.labor.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Final-Report.-UCLA-More-than-a-Gig.pdf