The California Gig Workers Union has hit the 30% support threshold that puts hundreds of thousands of Uber and Lyft drivers on track to be represented by a union within 30 days — the first real test of a bargaining system built specifically for workers the companies still get to call independent contractors.

This is the payoff of AB 1340, the Transportation Network Company Drivers Labor Relations Act by Oakland Assemblymember Buffy Wicks, which Governor Newsom signed last October. Rather than reopen the Proposition 22 fight over whether drivers are employees, the law leaves their contractor status intact and instead invents a sectoral bargaining process — run through the state's Public Employment Relations Board — that lets a certified driver organization negotiate pay and conditions across the whole industry. The California Gig Workers Union clearing PERB's support bar is the moment that machinery switches on for the first time.

For a dozen years Hector Castellanos has driven for Uber and Lyft out of the East Bay, and for most of that time the fight over what he is — employee or contractor — has gone against him and the drivers organizing alongside him. This week the question changed. It stopped being about his classification and started being about his contract.

The California Gig Workers Union announced it had met the 30% threshold of active drivers backing the effort, a bar verified by the state's Public Employment Relations Board (PERB). Under the timeline set by state law, that support starts a 30-day clock for regulators to certify CGWU. The union says it expects to clear it: PERB has indicated that "no other driver organization is currently eligible to submit proof of support during [the waiting] period," according to KQED, which first reported the milestone. If certification goes through, CGWU becomes the exclusive bargaining representative for Uber and Lyft drivers statewide — and, the union says, the largest gig-driver union in the world.

"It's so incredible that we're fighting for so long and finally we're certified as a union," Castellanos told KQED. "Exciting, crying, I mean, it's been that rollercoaster going up and down."

What makes this more than a symbolic win is the unusual legal scaffolding underneath it. The mechanism is AB 1340, authored by Oakland Assemblymember Buffy Wicks and signed into law on October 3, 2025 as Chapter 335. The bill's text — the Transportation Network Company Drivers Labor Relations Act — is explicit about the workaround it performs: it grants TNC drivers the right to organize and bargain "as well as other terms and conditions of their agreements," while leaving untouched the Proposition 22 framework that classifies them as contractors. Drivers get a union without becoming employees.

The plumbing runs through PERB, the same board that referees California's public-sector labor disputes. Under the statute, network companies must submit a quarterly list identifying their drivers to the board, and the law lays out procedures for certification, good-faith negotiation, mediation and arbitration toward what it calls a "sectoral agreement." In plain terms: instead of company-by-company shop votes, one deal can cover the industry.

The backdrop is a grudge match. Drivers, with organizing help from unions like SEIU Local 1021, have clashed with Uber and Lyft for years over the independent-contractor designation. Voters enshrined that label in 2020 with Prop 22; Castellanos was among the plaintiffs who challenged it as unconstitutional, and the California Supreme Court upheld the measure in 2024. AB 1340 is the state's answer to that stalemate — a path to the bargaining table that routes around the classification war rather than refighting it.

The companies are, notably, not fighting this one. Lyft spokesperson CJ Macklin said the company was committed to engaging in good faith and keeping service dependable, KQED reported. Ramona Prieto, who runs Uber's public policy in the Western U.S., called certification the next step in the "historic compromise" of AB 1340 — a path to representation "while preserving the independence and flexibility they've consistently said they value most."

That framing is the whole game. The hard part starts after the confetti: an actual sectoral agreement over pay and the cut the platforms take from each fare. Lyft says on its website it caps its own fees at 30% of a fare, with other charges layered on top — the exact math drivers say leaves them too little. Certification gets them a seat. It doesn't get them a number.