Amicus Brief - Uber/Lyft Ballot Initiatives Case in Massachusetts, El Koussa v. Campbell

WASHINGTON - Today, the Open Markets Institute filed an amicus brief in El Koussa v. Campbell, a case before the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts challenging proposed ballot initiatives in Massachusetts concerning whether app-based companies like Uber and Lyft should be allowed to legally classify their drivers as independent contractors. The brief was authored by Open Markets policy counsel Tara Pincock, legal director Sandeep Vaheesan, and Joel Fleming of Equity Litigation Group LLP.  

To be successful in this case, a group of app-based workers and voters – the challengers, whose arguments our brief supports -- must show that the ballot initiatives present distinct policy issues to voters in a single question and therefore violate Article 48 of the Commonwealth’s Constitution. Ballot initiatives in Massachusetts must be narrowly tailored so that voters may respond to a question about one specific issue at a time. The Supreme Judicial Court explained the Article’s rationale when in 2022 it rejected similar ballot initiatives proposed by the gig corporations: Initiatives should not “yok[e] together disparate policy decisions into a single package that voters are only able to approve or disapprove as a whole.” 

We argue in the brief that the ballot initiatives present many separate questions for voters:  

“The proposed initiatives do not address a single topic and should fail on Article 48 grounds. They reconstruct the relationship between the Network Companies and their workers in several ways, remake the competitive landscape in markets such as ride-hailing and food delivery, and represent an assault on the Commonwealth’s public policy on labor and employment.”  

“Uber, Lyft, Instacart, and other tech giants are trying to deceive Massachusetts voters into believing that they’ll be better off if drivers are stripped of basic protections, including the right to minimum wages and workers’ compensation. The proposed initiatives raise a number of important questions, which is exactly why they do not pass muster as single-issue choices for voters as the challengers have argued,” said Sandeep Vaheesan, Open Markets legal director and one of the authors of the brief. 

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