On a muggy June morning, a handful of rideshare drivers descended on Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport with stacks of red, white and blue leaflets, limp in the heat, that demanded to “end unfair deactivations.” A similar scene unfolded at Denver International Airport and at Uber’s Greenlight Hub in San Jose, California. Together, drivers in three states launched Activate Respect, a national campaign against driver deactivations — what workers refer to as being “fired by an app.”
The three-city action also marked an addition to the growing national movement to make rideshare jobs good jobs. “It’s potentially very powerful for drivers to connect across cities,” said Mariah Montgomery, national campaigns director at PowerSwitch Action, an Oakland, California-based advocacy group. That connection, she said, lets workers “learn from both the wins and the losses people have experienced to apply that information in more places.”
