On April 20, 2026, Rideshare Drivers United (RDU) — a nonprofit that says it represents roughly 20,000 California app-based drivers — filed suit against Uber in San Francisco Superior Court, alleging the company has never built the "meaningful" deactivation appeals process that Proposition 22 promised voters. The complaint, led by veteran plaintiffs' attorney Shannon Liss-Riordan, also accuses Uber of deactivating drivers on grounds not enumerated in its Platform Access Agreement and of withholding the earnings data drivers would need to verify the law's 120%-of-minimum-wage floor. The remedy RDU is seeking is the headline: a court declaration that Uber is disqualified from classifying its drivers as independent contractors under Prop 22 at all.
That ask deserves to be parsed carefully, because the underlying grievance is real and the proposed cure is not proportionate to it.
The grievance is legitimate
Prop 22, the 2020 ballot initiative whose campaign drew more than $220 million from gig platforms, traded an independent-contractor classification for a bundle of statutory benefits: a wage floor pegged to 120% of local minimum wage for engaged time, healthcare stipends, occupational accident insurance, and — critically for this lawsuit — "mandatory contractual rights and appeal processes" for drivers who get kicked off the platform. The text never spelled out what an appeal had to look like. That ambiguity is now load-bearing.
Drivers in RDU's complaint describe the consequence of that drafting gap: chatbot intake funnels, scripted offshore agents reading from decision trees, and rare access to anyone empowered to actually reinstate a driver or explain the basis for removal. For a worker whose car payment depends on platform access, a black-box deactivation with no human review is a livelihood event. Steelmanning the plaintiffs' position: due process for decisions that end a person's income is a baseline civic expectation, regardless of whether the person is technically an employee, a contractor, or something in between — and California voters were specifically promised it.
The California Supreme Court's unanimous July 25, 2024 ruling in Castellanos v. State of California settled the constitutional question of whether Prop 22 could exempt drivers from workers' compensation. It did not bless every platform's implementation of the law's procedural obligations. Those obligations are still live, still enforceable, and — on the facts alleged — still being shortchanged.
The remedy is disproportionate
Where the lawsuit overreaches is in asking a trial court to nullify the entire independent-contractor classification for Uber's California fleet as the consequence of an inadequate appeals process. That is the nuclear option, dressed as a remedy.
Its effects would land mostly on the workers the suit claims to defend. California's app-based driver population — by every published survey of the cohort — overwhelmingly values schedule flexibility and multi-platform work. Both are the freedoms that Business and Professions Code § 7451 preserves and that Prop 22 was sold on. Forcing Uber alone into the employee model would not simply give drivers more rights; it would force the company to ration shifts, set schedules, and end the ability to drive for Lyft, DoorDash, or Instacart between rides. That is the trade-off voters considered and rejected by a 17-point margin in 2020 and that the Supreme Court declined to disturb in 2024.
A court order stripping IC status would also create a two-tier rideshare market — Uber drivers as W-2 employees, every competitor's drivers as contractors — that would invite immediate appellate reversal and years of further uncertainty for everyone. As a procedural lever to extract a better appeals process from Uber, it is wildly out of scale. As a sustainable labor framework, it is incoherent.
A proportionate fix exists, and California should write it
The cleaner answer is to enforce the specific obligation that was actually breached. A court can — and a regulator should — define what a "meaningful appeals process" requires: written notice of the specific deactivation reason, access to the underlying evidence (including any algorithmic risk score), a human reviewer with authority to reinstate, a defined timeline, and an independent arbiter for contested cases. None of that requires unwinding Prop 22. All of it is already implicit in the statute's promise.
The Labor Commissioner's office or the Attorney General could publish implementation guidance defining minimum due-process standards for platform deactivations across the sector — Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, Instacart, and the smaller players alike. That approach matches the Castellanos court's reasoning that Prop 22's substantive obligations are real and enforceable, just not constitutionally fatal to the IC model. It also gives platforms a clear compliance target instead of relitigating the whole framework every time a deactivation dispute reaches court.
The broader lesson for platform regulation
This case is what happens when a ballot measure promises a procedural right ("meaningful appeals") without defining its contours. The same drafting gap is visible in newer platform laws around the world — from EU Platform Work Directive transposition to India's Code on Social Security gig-worker rules. Each leaves enforcement of vague procedural duties to litigation rather than regulation.
The better path, for innovation and for workers, is to define the procedural floor up front. Uber should be held to the appeals obligation it signed up for. It should not be punished for that breach by losing a classification that a different question — the substantive employment status of its drivers — already resolved in its favor.