There is a certain kind of job that has always been there when everything else falls through. You need a car, a phone, and a clean record, and by tomorrow you can be earning. No interview. No résumé. Nobody deciding whether you fit.For a decade, that job has been driving for a rideshare app. It became the backstop for immigrants, students, laid-off workers, and anyone stitching together income between other things. In Washington, D.C., thousands of people treat Uber (UBER) and Lyft (LYFT) as the difference between making rent and missing it.That backstop is now the subject of a fight at the John A. Wilson Building. On Monday, July 13, the DC Council held a public hearing on a bill that would let driverless cars carry paying passengers in the District for the first time. One of the largest unions in North America showed up to say the math does not work for the people currently behind the wheel.What the Washington, D.C. autonomous vehicle bill actually doesThe measure, formally the Autonomous Vehicle Deployment Authorization Amendment Act of 2026, would amend a 2012 law and hand the District Department of Transportation, known as DDOT, the power to permit commercial driverless service. Councilmember Charles Allen, who chairs the Council’s Committee on Transportation and the Environment, introduced it in May.More Jobs & Labor Market:New jobs data reveals troubling wave of cuts at retail and restaurant chainsGoldman Sachs sends strong wake-up call on American jobsWorkers just sent Al companies an ultimatumIt is not a green light. The bill sets a $1 million application fee and a nonrefundable $5 million permit fee, and it taxes robotaxi operators $0.15 for every mile driven, according to TechCrunch. Half of that vehicle miles traveled tax, or VMT tax, would fund public transit. The other half would pay for education and retraining for rideshare and taxi drivers at risk of losing work to the machines, according to the same reporting.There is also a ceiling. Any commercial autonomous vehicle fleet would be capped at 200 vehicles until January 2028, according to Afro. Operators would also have to log 250,000 test miles inside the District before they could even apply. In other words, Allen wrote a bill that lets driverless cars in while making them slow down and pay at the door.
The DC Council is weighing B26-0684, a bill that would open the District to commercial driverless cars for the first time.Sergio Formoso / Getty Images
Why the union sees autonomous rideshares as threat to driver jobsThe International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, the IAM Union, represents roughly 600,000 active and retired members, including tens of thousands of rideshare drivers. In a letter to Allen ahead of the hearing, it said it opposes the bill because of what it called a lack of guardrails to address the harm to existing drivers and the local economy. It joined SEIU 32BJ, a chapter of the Service Employees International Union, in that stance.The union’s national political and legislative director, Hasan Solomon, framed it as a question of who benefits. The IAM welcomes innovation that helps workers, he wrote, “not an unchecked innovation that threatens to upend thousands of jobs,” according to the IAM Union. The letter also flagged public transit workers, not just drivers, as exposed.Solomon’s second argument is about geography. The wages drivers earn tend to stay in the neighborhood, covering rent, groceries, and local taxes. His worry is that automation redirects that money “away from the District and into the hands of Silicon Valley investors,” according to the union.How robotaxis are already pressuring rideshare payThe union is not arguing from theory. When I read its letter against the earnings data, the same pattern kept surfacing. In the handful of cities where robotaxis already run, the drivers who share the road with them are taking home less.Trips per hour for human drivers fell about 5.3% in autonomous vehicle markets in the last quarter of 2025, versus 2.6% nationwide.National hourly pay rose roughly 1.8% over that stretch, but it dropped in AV cities, down 3.7% in Los Angeles and 1.7% in San Francisco.Over the prior year, as robotaxis scaled, hourly pay fell 6.9% in San Francisco and 5.3% in Austin.Robotaxis likely need to price near $1 per mile to turn a profit at scale, well under the roughly $3.25 a human fare commands.
Source: Gridwise
The declines are still modest, and S&P Global projections cited by Gridwise do not expect robots to reach parity with human drivers until around 2040. But for someone driving 40 hours a week, a 5% to 7% cut in hourly pay is not abstract. It is a smaller grocery run, a later rent check, and a thinner cushion when the car needs a repair.Where Uber, Waymo, and the money actually standThe bill has split the companies that stand to win or lose, and in my read, the real fight is less about safety than about who captures the value of the driverless shift.Waymo, owned by Alphabet (GOOGL), backs the bill and wants to launch in the District. It is the largest robotaxi operator, running more than 500,000 rides a week across 11 cities, according to TechCrunch. Uber opposes the same bill. It argues the rules would hand Waymo a near-monopoly and push human drivers out, and it points to data suggesting one autonomous vehicle displaces roughly four drivers. Uber is instead pushing a hybrid model, one that would force robotaxis onto the same app as human drivers so riders can still choose a person.Related: Waymo, Tesla must fix a dangerous issue with their robotaxis, NHTSA saysNot everyone buys Uber’s framing. Greg Rogers of the think tank The Innovation Majority called the hybrid push an attempt at “regulatory capture,” according to TechCrunch. That tension matters for investors because the model D.C. picks, AV-only or hybrid, is really a question about who controls the network and who pays rent to whom.The politics add urgency. Waymo has poured money into a D.C. lobbying push, and some read Mayor Muriel Bowser as a lame duck in no rush to start something new, according to Axios. Bowser leaves office in January, which gives the Council a narrow window and pulls the 2026 mayoral race into the story. Lyft, Tesla (TSLA), the Teamsters, and disability rights groups are all set to testify, the Council’s hearing list indicates.What comes after the D.C. robotaxi hearingThe July 20 hearing will not settle it. Backers hope to pass something before Bowser leaves, which means the version that reaches her desk is still being written. The workforce fund, the fleet cap, and the per-mile tax are all live, and each one is a lever the union is trying to grab.What the IAM Union is really after is leverage, a seat at the table before the technology sets the terms rather than after. Solomon urged the Council to adopt “strong guardrails that protect drivers of the city and the economic vitality,” according to the union.Whether the Council builds that in will tell drivers in dozens of other cities what to expect when the robotaxis show up on their streets. Because they are coming. The only open question is who gets to profit when they do.Related: Waymo and Uber make critical robotaxi move in major U.S. market