Last summer, Uber offered drivers a company-wide promo to make a guaranteed $1,800 if they completed 140 rides. But that was right around the time that Mark Balentine, a driver for Uber and Lyft since 2014, got sick and missed almost a month of work.
After a last minute scramble to complete the 140 rides within the shortened month, Balentine, 59, looked over receipts and screenshots from the app and tallied up 150 rides all together. But when the bonus never came, Balentine called Uber, and they told him their computer system showed he fell short, and only logged 124 rides that month.
“I said, ‘So y’all just gonna take my money like that?’” Balentine asked the representative. “He shrugged his shoulders, and said ‘I guess so.’”
Over the last five months, Balentine and hundreds of other Uber and Lyft drivers took their stories to Springfield and pushed for a new bill allowing more than 100,000 rideshare drivers in Illinois to form a union. Genie Kastrup, a top advocate for the legislation, said collective bargaining rights could help prevent low wages, unfair and sporadic deactivation of driver’s accounts and unsafe working conditions.
That bill passed early Monday to cheers from advocates who waited in the balconies until 2 a.m. It now heads to Gov. JB Pritzker’s desk for his signature.
Since then, Balentine said he has been on “cloud nine” because next time he has issues at work, “we’re going to have a union where they’re gonna stand up for me, and they’re going to go to bat for me.”
Allotting collective bargaining rights to independent contractors is a novel idea that is only beginning to take place across the country. Illinois is only the third state to pass similar legislation, with California and Massachusetts leading the way.
The bill received support from Democrats, but Republican votes were split.
State Rep. Dan Ugaste emphasized that the devil is in the details when creating a labor agreement for independent contractors who are not employed full-time under one company.
“What I’m trying to understand is how do we unionize people who aren’t employees, people who are their own independent contractors?” said Ugaste, R-Geneva. “They run themselves as their own business, they’re just contracting with an overall company that says, ‘Okay, you can operate under our umbrella.’”
Negotiations over the legislation brought an interesting coalition of parties out of the woodwork. Backers of the bill included Uber, the same rideshare company that inspired advocates to push for collective bargaining rights over unfair work conditions.
But some labor groups like AFSCME Council 31 opposed the bill, concerned that the agreement would restrict drivers from ever qualifying for benefits afforded to full-time employees — like health and dental coverage.
Historically rideshare drivers have been unable to collectively bargain for worker’s rights because they are independent contractors. The measure marks a big shift in who can and can’t unionize.
Kastrup, who is the president of SEIU Local 1, said backers of the measure spent years organizing drivers receptive to pushing for a rideshare union. At the end of the 2025 spring session, supporters of the measure went to Springfield and told lawmakers they planned to introduce legislation this session.
“These drivers are really dedicated, and they understand what it means to not have a voice on the job,” Kastrup said. “Many of them have seen where they used to work 40 hours a week, and now they have to work 80 hours to make what they used to make at 40.”
Balentine said that, while in Springfield, he and other drivers heavily lobbied lawmakers to bring them on board. He said he caught a legislator on the way to a bar after work and pulled him aside.
“I was like, ‘Can I please talk to you for one minute?’” Balentine asked. “He was like, ‘Sure.’ I was going above and beyond, because this deal had to pass. This is history that we’re about to make.”