BOSTON, MA – NOVEMBER 14: Uber and Lyft stickers are pictured inside a ride share vehicle outside the Massachusetts State House in Boston on Nov. 14, 2019. Many drivers pick up fares for both companies. That boxy delivery truck blocking your lane is just one maddening manifestation of a public failure to adapt to the new convenience economy. The technology built around our desire for instant gratification – Uber and Lyft, DoorDash and Grubhub, the Amazon packages whizzing from distribution centers to our doorsteps – has become the source of huge amounts of new traffic. Hundreds of thousands of these trips would never have happened just a few years ago. But the public policy response has been no match for this challenge, the Globe Spotlight Team has found. In Boston, in fact, the operative policy only enables the offender. It is part of a pattern of delayed or passive public response to our slow-moving crisis in commuting. True, state officials were a nose ahead of the pack in imposing a surcharge on Uber and Lyft rides three years ago – an attempt at the time to make the companies pay their share of transportation costs – but now they have fallen out of the vanguard. Confronted by the powerful ride-share lobby on Beacon Hill, state leaders havent summoned the will or nerve to impose the kind of high fees and stringent limits other cities are using to try to curb the traffic. (Photo by Lane Turner/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)
Massachusetts will become the second state ever to pursue legal action against ride-hailing giants Uber and Lyft over their classification of workers, Attorney General Maura Healey announced Tuesday.
Healey filed a lawsuit against the two companies alleging that, by categorizing their nearly 200,000 Massachusetts drivers as independent contractors rather than employees, Uber and Lyft are violating the state's wage and labor laws.
With that misclassification, Healey alleged, the popular app-based services are denying drivers who routinely work full-time hours or more access to unemployment insurance, overtime, workers' compensation, sick time and anti-retaliation protections.
That denial allows the companies to pocket "hundreds of millions" of dollars every year that they should be paying in benefits and to the state, Healey said.
"The bottom line is that Uber and Lyft have gotten a free ride for far too long," she said during a Tuesday virtual press conference. "For years, these companies have systematically denied their drivers basic workplace protections and benefits and profited greatly from it."
In May, California also sued Uber and Lyft on similar grounds. Massachusetts is only the second state to seek such action.
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Healey will seek a declaratory judgment effectively ordering Uber and Lyft to comply with wage and labor laws covering independent contractors that have existed in their current form since 2004.
Her lawsuit does not immediately seek any payments or relief from the companies, but she said that step could follow if the judgment is awarded.
