To stop drivers from organizing with Teamsters, Uber wants to defeat Kshama Sawant — and the company is betting on Amazon-backed candidate Egan Orion
By Jonathan Rosenblum and Tom Barnard
Amazon is placing some big bets in this year’s Seattle city elections, with hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations to corporate political action committees and candidates that oppose union activist and socialist City Councilmember Kshama Sawant.
But they’re hardly the only major corporation playing aggressively in this election cycle. Uber also is gearing up, with help from powerful political insiders, to support Egan Orion, the Amazon-backed candidate who is Sawant’s general election opponent. (Disclaimer: both authors are strong supporters of Sawant’s re-election.)
The company has two major policy objectives in Seattle: stopping their drivers from organizing with the App-Based Drivers Association, affiliated with the Teamsters union, and instituting a “congestion tax” on cars going downtown in order to get more riders to patronize their app.
To accomplish these goals, Uber has turned to the consummate Seattle political insider, Tim Ceis. A former deputy Seattle mayor, as well as former chief of staff to the King County executive, Ceis is a power-player in the political establishment, usually doing his work well outside the public view.
Ceis is no friend of drivers who are organizing for fair treatment and rights. Three years ago, Ceis was involved behind the scenes in wresting the Sea-Tac Airport taxi contract from a union-friendly dispatch company, Yellow Cab, replacing it with Eastside for Hire, whose managers proceeded to break the Teamsters union and blacklist pro-union drivers. Among other outrages, once Eastside for Hire secured an exclusive contract with the airport, it tried to impose a “pay to work” scheme — demanding that drivers hand over as much as $9,000 for the right to continue picking up fares at the airport. Driver organizing thwarted those plans.
Meanwhile Ceis and his lobbying partner, Ryan Bayne (who also lobbies for Amazon), have been supporting the congestion tax idea as an alternative to an earlier proposal in City Hall for taxing the ride share companies directly. Last year a spokesman said Uber would spend money here to lobby instead for congestion pricing, and a spokesman from an Uber front group, Drive Forward Seattle, noted that Uber and other Transportation Network Companies, or TNCs, would respond to the threat of being taxed directly by raising prices. Needless to say, they’d prefer the people of Seattle be taxed instead, in the hopes of generating more business for their companies.
Sawant is opposed to a congestion tax, noting that it would disproportionately fall on working people, like downtown construction workers and other workers “who have been priced far beyond the city and have to drive in to work.”
Ceis and Bayne have worked closely with the Greater Seattle Chamber of Commerce, most recently consulting with the Chamber to defeat the 2018 Amazon Tax, which would have funded affordable housing and services for people experiencing homelessness.
The Chamber and its national affiliate, US Chamber of Commerce, also have been in the forefront of depriving app-based drivers the right to organize and bargain for improvements in their conditions. The US Chamber sued on behalf of Uber and Eastside for Hire to block Seattle’s breakthrough 2015 law, which Teamsters Local 117 championed and Sawant strongly supported, and which would have given drivers organizing rights. The law is still tied up in court because of the corporate appeals.
And while Uber executives thus far have not given directly to pro-corporate candidates or to corporate Political Action Committees, their lobbyists’ spending this year shows where the company is betting politically.
As of today (Sept. 9), according to records available at the state Public Disclosure Commission, Ceis and his partner Bayne have each given the legal maximum $500 individual donations to the chamber-backed Egan Orion, who is running in District 3 against Sawant, a member of Socialist Alternative and a stalwart champion of drivers who has rallied with and spoke out in support of them on many occasions. Both Ceis and Bayne also have donated to the big business-aligned PAC, People for Seattle, which is supporting Orion as well, and which published several anti-Sawant mailers in the Primary Election.
Ceis and Bayne also have donated to other chamber-backed candidates in three of the other Seattle district races.
Not to be outdone by Uber, Lyft’s lobbyist, Sandeep Kaushik (who also lobbies for Comcast, and has boasted of being a member of Mayor Durkan’s “kitchen cabinet”), also has given the legal maximum donation of $500 to Orion. Like his lobbying counterparts, Kaushik also has donated to the Orion-supporting People for Seattle PAC.
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Jonathan Rosenblum is the author of Beyond $15: Immigrant Workers, Faith Activists, and the Revival of the Labor Movement (Beacon Press, 2017), and is a member of the National Writers Union/UAW 1981. He is a community organizer in the Office of Councilmember Kshama Sawant, and co-wrote this article in a personal capacity. Tom Barnard is a former driver for Uber and Lyft and is a member of Socialist Alternative.
