For years, both Uber and Lyft have insisted that their drivers are not their employees, but rather, independent contractors who therefore don’t qualify for minimum-wage and other such laws, and who cannot unionize under the terms of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA).

Their hard-fought position—roughly speaking, if it quacks like a duck, that still doesn’t make it a duck—immunized them from the normal duties of an employer (providing benefits, adhering to minimum-wage laws, and the like).

Until today.

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Today, in Massachusetts, Uber and Lyft drivers succeeded in establishing a union with which Uber and Lyft must bargain or face binding arbitration—precisely because their drivers decided to agree with the companies’ claims that they’re independent contractors. Since independent contractors are excluded from coverage under the NLRA, a federal law, that means that individual states can enact laws concerning the rights of those contractors. Massachusetts voters did just that by passing a 2024 ballot measure, Question 3, which extended collective-bargaining rights to gig drivers, and enabled them to unionize once 25 percent of such drivers in the state had formed a union. By last week, the number of those drivers who’d joined reached roughly 32,000 out of the 70,000 rideshare drivers in the state—46 percent. And today, the App Drivers Union (ADU) officially formed, in a ceremony attended by Gov. Maura Healey and the presidents of the two unions that had worked to organize the drivers, the Machinists and SEIU.

This is an organizing breakthrough in an economy dominated by the service sectors, where low-wage jobs abound and gig work is increasingly common.

Uber and Lyft are now required to bargain with the new union, and have expressed a willingness to do so. If they balk, or if the bargaining fails to yield a first contract within six months, the state will appoint an arbitrator who, following consultations with both sides, will impose a contract. (So weak is the NLRA when it comes to guaranteeing a first contract that, on average, it takes more than a year for the parties to agree on one, and many companies simply refuse to sign one or even show up for bargaining—an avoidance for which the NLRA imposes no significant penalties. Nor is mandatory arbitration even an option under the NLRA. The workers at Amazon’s Staten Island warehouse, for instance, voted to go union four years ago, but Jeff Bezos’s company has yet to sit down with them even once.)

For years, union leaders and activists, as well as academics and law professors, have debated whether unions should try to organize such gig workers under the NLRA (since the National Labor Relations Board during Democratic administrations might reclassify such workers as employees) or accede to the companies’ position that they’re just independent contractors—a kind of halfway house in the views of the NLRA-or-bust advocates. It turns out, however, that state-created independent contractor collective bargaining put Uber and Lyft in a bind. They’ve argued for decades that their drivers are indies, not employees, and hence, can’t go union under federal law. Indeed, in 2022, the two companies spent upwards of $200 million to persuade California voters—successfully—that their drivers were indeed independent contractors, and not subject to a recently enacted state law that treated them as employees.

Today, their Massachusetts drivers, following 2024’s Massachusetts voters, told the companies that they’ve been right all along: Their drivers aren’t employees and can’t organize under federal law. But precisely because federal labor law claims no jurisdiction over independent contractors, they sure as hell can organize under state law.

So today, the leaders of the fledgling ADU, joined by SEIU President April Verrett, Machinists President Brian Bryant, and Gov. Healey, celebrated what they termed the largest unionization of private-sector workers (counting all 70,000 who’ll be covered by the yet-to-be-negotiated contracts) since Ford went union in 1941. As Verrett told the Prospect, the 1941 union victory epitomized labor’s success in organizing workers in an economy dominated by manufacturing, with clear employer-employee relations. Today’s success is an organizing breakthrough in an economy dominated by the service sectors, where low-wage jobs abound and gig work is increasingly common. (What remains constant, from Ford through Uber, is the centrality of cars to American life.)

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For much of the past decade, the Machinists were the only major union that focused, initially in New York, on efforts to organize gig workers in their status as independent contractors. Joined by SEIU, they’ve now had a huge breakthrough in Massachusetts that may tee up other such victories in trifecta Democratic states. Both Verrett and Machinist President Bryant told me that Illinois is considering a similar law to Massachusetts’s; the two largest blue states—California and New York—are now in play; and Bryant also expressed optimism about unionizing Lyft and Uber drivers in New Jersey and throughout New England.

For decades, unions have tried and failed to restore some teeth to the NLRA, whose mandates American employers have routinely flouted for the past half-century. Every time the Democrats have controlled the White House and both houses of Congress, going as far back as the Truman administration, Democrats have tried to restore the powers that the act had for its first decade in existence—1935 to 1945, when the rate of unionization rose from single digits to more than one-third of the workforce. Every time, they’ve failed to overcome the supermajority cloture requirement in the Senate. So today, the rate of private-sector unionization has descended to a bare 6 percent, even though polls show that unions’ approval ratings today stand at more than ten times that 6 percent.

Today’s victory, then, marks labor’s first success, not at amending the NLRA, but at going around it entirely. It is not a panacea for American workers generally, most of whom are still employees and still saddled with a dysfunctional NLRA. But, as Bryant told me, “Today’s victory goes further than rideshare drivers; there are plenty of other gig workers.” To which Verrett added, “We have to figure out a way to throw open the doors of the labor movement to new groups of workers, to shift the nation’s power dynamics from corporations to workers.” Whatever its future may hold, today’s victory certainly opens that door wider.

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Harold Meyerson is editor at large of The American Prospect.