[...] when Uber first arrives in a city, rates are higher and drivers are often happier. Then, it floods the market with new drivers, sometimes by widening eligibility criteria (such as by extending the range of cars drivers can use), and often lowers the rates at which driven earn their income. By creating a job for everyone, Uber can undermine the interests of dedicated full-timers. In effect, one civil rights cause—equality of access—is pitted against another cause: job security. The sheen of civil-society partnerships gives Uber cover for practices that negatively affect drivers in other arenas.

[...] The multiplying numbers who hold a stake in Uber's future can create paradoxical clashes between civil rights and labor rights efforts when they might otherwise be aligned, because organization in favor of or in resistance to Uber is not uniform.

The specter of managing labor's economic relations along racial lines evokes other social struggles in American history. For example, historian Nancy MacLean reminds us that at the turn of the nineteenth century, a battle brewed in Tennessee between free miners and employers who (in collusion with the state) were keeping wages low by renting cheap convict labor. "The widely reviled system, so redolent of slavery, created a perverse incentive to lock new up for petty offenses so the state could rent them out to coal companies as dirt-cheap labor to rake the jobs of free miners, who had organized the United Mine Workers of America to demand living wages and decent treatment." [...]