For Pablo Godoy, a senior leader with the United Food and Commercial Workers union, successfully organizing a group of Uber UBER-N drivers in Victoria was one of the most surprising and rewarding outcomes of his decades-long career.
“The truth is, this took almost seven years of working with thousands of Uber drivers across Canada – to understand the app, to understand the algorithm, and to understand what drivers wanted,” Mr. Godoy said in a recent interview with The Globe and Mail.
On April 28, more than 1,000 Uber drivers in Victoria ratified their first union contract as members of UFCW Local 1518, making them the first group of gig workers in North America to form a union.
As part of the deal, the workers will get bonus payments for hitting certain performance metrics and access to a sick-days fund. The contract, however, says nothing about wages.
Drivers had voted in favour of unionizing (with a 99-per-cent majority) in July, 2025, and it took eight months of negotiating with Uber Technologies Inc. to jointly come up with detailed language around workers’ incomes and benefits that materialized in the new four-year collective agreement.
Now, Mr. Godoy is looking to replicate UFCW’s success in Victoria across all parts of Canada, especially in rideshare-heavy urban hubs such as Toronto and Vancouver.
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“There’s not a single province today that doesn’t already have union cards that Uber drivers have signed with UFCW,” Mr. Godoy said.
In 2022, UFCW and Uber signed a landmark agreement that gave the union the ability to represent drivers in disputes with the ride-hailing giant. It was a non-traditional union-employer agreement, but one that enabled UFCW representatives to gain access to drivers and better understand the issues they faced.
As it negotiated the Victoria drivers’ collective agreement, Mr. Godoy said, UFCW had to take traditional concepts such as wage increases, benefits and sick days and adapt them to a “world of work that is not traditional, but growing in size.”
The agreement provides a $250 signing bonus to drivers who have completed a minimum of 50 trips since July 1, 2025. Uber drivers are also eligible for quarterly bonuses based on the number of trips they have completed. For example, drivers who have completed more than 750 trips will receive quarterly bonuses of $600. The union also negotiated an annual 5-per-cent increase in wait time and cancellation fees that drivers get if a passenger is late or cancels a trip, and an annual $500 wellness fund for sick time and benefits.
“We heard from drivers that they wanted to tie benefits to the number of drives they do, rather than the distance or time, so we really tried to push for a compensation system that reflected that,” Mr. Godoy said, adding that it was important for the union to ensure that driver ratings determined by customers were not tied to any of the benefits in the collective agreement.
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Unions and labour advocates have long criticized the treatment of gig workers by major app-based platform companies such as Uber and Lyft, arguing that these workers should be classified as employees and paid wages that are consistent and not subject to an algorithm.
In most jurisdictions, rideshare drivers are still classified as independent contractors, meaning that they work flexible hours and are not entitled to benefits such as paid sick days, pension contributions and employment insurance the way traditional employees are. In British Columbia, starting mid-2024, gig workers gained enhanced rights and a slightly different classification: They are still technically independent and flexible workers, but they are also entitled to some benefits under the province’s Employment Standards Act, including compensation for engaged time (time spent completing a ride or delivery) of approximately $20.88 an hour, equal to 120 per cent of the province’s minimum wage.
“B.C.’s more progressive rules about gig workers helped frame the tone of discussions with Uber,” said Patrick Johnson, president of UFCW Local 1518, who was actively involved in the negotiations that resulted in the successful agreement.
The union’s next target is the Lower Mainland of B.C., including Metro Vancouver and the Fraser Valley. Victoria was an easier place to organize, according to Mr. Johnson, because it was smaller and contained. “Drivers spent a ton of time at electric-vehicle charging stations, or at the airport, so a big part of our outreach was meeting them at those places.”
But he is confident that the union will find success in denser areas of B.C., in part because Uber drivers do “a lot of organizing” themselves in Reddit threads, Facebook groups and Whatsapp group chats. “We can tell that there’s a desire to be represented by a union and an even stronger desire to be better compensated.”
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Adam King, assistant professor of labour studies at the University of Manitoba, said the ratification of a first collective agreement with Uber is a good test case for replication in other cities. “UFCW struck while the iron was hot. They caught Uber at a time when they had just made a push into B.C., and their negotiations coincided in a period where legislative changes had already been made that gave gig workers more protections.”
Barry Eidlin, an associate professor of sociology at McGill University, said UFCW has undeniably overcome a big hurdle by negotiating a first collective agreement with Uber.
But he also said the same problem remains that comes up any time a union draws up a first collective agreement with a large multinational company – the workers are isolated.
“How do you unionize more than one Starbucks or one Walmart or one McDonald’s? How will this take hold in a more permanent, long-term fashion?”
Notably absent from the collective agreement was any language around wages. Uber pays its drivers using a system called “upfront fares,” meaning drivers can see their expected earnings before a trip commences, but those fares are determined by a complex algorithm using inputs formulated by Uber. The system has prompted complaints across social media that drivers’ overall wages have decreased as a result.
Mr. Godoy said UFCW did gather a substantial amount of information about Uber’s use of algorithms and tried to initiate a conversation around wages, but it didn’t end up ”having much traction.”
“Ultimately, it often comes down to bargaining a contract that the other side would accept, so yes, there are trade-offs,” he said.
