Minneapolis leaders call on city council to override Waymo veto

Thank you all for being here today. I'm Councilmember Robin Wonsley. I represent Ward 2 and I also serve as the City Council's Minority Leader as well as the lead author on Workers Drive Minneapolis, the ordinance that Council passed but for a veto that aimed to put basic protections in place for workers as well as pedestrians ahead of autonomous vehicles operating on our streets. Earlier this year specifically, residents started seeing robo taxis owned by Google in our streets and drivers immediately reached out to my office to let me know that these represent an existential threat to their livelihoods. We know from a local or state study that about 10,000 drivers in our state pay their rent and feed their families with income that they make driving ride share. Now Google, Amazon and even Elon Musk through Cyber taxis are looking to displace these workers and replace them with driverless robo taxis. So with that, I worked with my colleagues in the community to move forward the policy Workers Drive Minneapolis, which aimed to protect workers from this threat. It will also protect residents from unregulated untested driverless cars, which pose a series of unanswered questions still about safety, about surveillance, about the impacts on our infrastructure and so much more. Um and the policy would have given us a year to work through those unanswered questions and put protections further protections in place while the state was also moving forward their statewide regulations. Again, council adopted the policy, but Mayor Fry vetoed it. Mayor Fry has not outlined any plans to protect the 10,000 workers who are at risk of losing their jobs to big tech and the impacts don't just stop at drivers. I want to make that clear. A new report by the North Star Policy Center found that ride share drivers foster about $561 million in total economic activity across the state and generate approximately about $116 million in tax revenue. That economic activity happens in places all across our city, including right here where we're doing our press conference, which is Carmel Mall. That said, tomorrow the city council will vote on whether to uphold Mayor Frye's veto or to override it. And overriding Mayor Frye's veto means that we will be taking a stance, a continued stance, in fact, with immigrants over Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. But failing to override Mayor Frye's veto means handing over huge profits to big tech companies who do not live in our communities. Their shareholders do not, again, add millions of dollars to our tax revenues. They're not sending their children to our public schools. They're not opening small businesses or supporting businesses with the profits that they earn from these driverless robo-taxis. Those are what our drivers and our workers here do for our community. And we would essentially be allowing Minneapolis to face just unseen and unprecedented threats that we have not experienced by welcoming robo-taxis or autonomous vehicle companies with open arms, with no regulations in place. And that's currently what will happen if we don't override that veto. So with that, I will hand the mic over to Council Vice President Jamal Osman, who's also a co-author on this policy. We'll also hear from small business owners and also drivers about what's at stake in tomorrow's vote. So first, I'll pass it to Council Vice President Jamal Osman. Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Jamal Osman, Council Vice President of City Minneapolis. I want to thank drivers, workers and small businesses. Today we gathered at Carmel Mall. This is a really important job. It matters to a lot of business owners here. Some of the drivers you see in the background, this is where they bring their money back. They're not taking it to California or anywhere. This is where the money comes back. It helps the local businesses. At the City Hall, we have been listening to rideshare drivers for many, many years. Uber and Lyft ordinance in the past and now we're back here and we continue to fight for the most people that that are dealing with all kind of challenges in our country right now immigrants East African immigrants and these drivers matter to me because they are from our community it matters to us as council members because they are our constituents and you know I'm not going to apologize for standing up for them I'm going to continue fighting for them I'm going to continue to put policies that can help keep jobs in Minneapolis. What we need is just to be honest. Are we allowing robot taxis to kill jobs? What is the future for workers? You know, today is the drivers. Tomorrow it might be you. So there has to be some way of balance to take care of people first. And that is why we brought this ordinance. I am really disappointed to Mayor Frey veto this. You have seen Mayor Frey continue to say he stands for immigrants. But as you know, there's over 80% of drivers are immigrants. And this is really clearly, he's not standing up. And it's not the first time he vetoed. I remember overriding the Uber and Lyft. We were successful. Tomorrow, I'm hoping we are successful. I'm encouraging all the council members to really think about the drivers, think about the residents that live here, think about what some of this community went through for the metro search. Someone lost their job, someone couldn't even go to work, and now we're allowing unregulated self-driving cars to kill many, many jobs. And I'll tell you this, where they will start is the airport. When you get off, the first thing you think about is going to the rideshare and catching a thing but now there will be no drivers to greet you to pick up your bags there's so many different challenges we can talk about but i will continue to say the drivers are this is their livelihood it's not a side gig they bring back to buy groceries to eat our restaurants and to do money money things so um let's win tomorrow let's make sure that we override the mayor's veto. I just don't understand why would you veto? What is the alternative? Alternative is jobless. That's what's going to happen to this community, as you see. So thank you so much, and I will give a compliment. Thank you so much, Vice President Osman. Next, we'll hear from a business owner here at Carmel Mall, specifically for Han Hussein. Hi, thank you, everyone, and good afternoon. Today, the purpose we came over here is just to defend our community and our drivers that came from our community. As we know that the robotic vehicles are coming to our city right now, but we are not against the technology. But we still need to defend our community as most of the rides come from the East African community that comes, you know, take back and invest in the community of the Twin Cities, whatever they get from there. And mostly in our mall, the Somali mall in here, depending on all the ride-sharers as they buy everything from us. And also, you know, we are not only the people who depend on the ride-sharers. The people, all the Minnesotan people and Minnesotan visitors also depends on the ride-sharers, especially for those in need. If someone came off from the airplane and going to take the you know you know the ride share from the airport mostly they need to have someone that's assisting them you know to load and unload their bags and also they need someone that can that can be understandable work with them and you know communicate with them and assist with them and that's what our our Rideshare drivers do for the community. So thank you again. Next, we will have Mardis, who is a Rideshare driver and member of the Minnesota Uber and Lyft Driver Association. Hey, my name is Mardis Washington. It's spelled M-A-R-D-I-C-E. My last name is Washington, W-A-S-H-I-N-G. I am a Rideshare driver. I've been a Rideshare driver for 12 years. I love this job. and I love the people. I enjoy driving around my town. I have used this job to build a living and support my family, and I just want to let you know that I'm standing here as a ride share driver, as a motor worker to help the people, to help the drivers, and fought to help the drivers, But I'm asking for Minneapolis to help us now. We need the help. We're here. We want to do this job. And we don't want to be left behind. We do not want to be left behind. We can do this job with them. We can be there. There's two pilots in the plane. It could be a driver in one of those cars. To help, don't let innovation leave us behind. We're here. We want to be here. We're here. We're here. We're here, Minneapolis. Thank you. And next, we will have Hamza, who's a rideshare driver and member of SEIU Driver Organizing Committee. Hello. Good afternoon, everybody. My name is Hamza Hussain. First name is H-A-M-S-E. Last name is Hussain, H-U-S-S-E-I-N. I'm a rideshare driver almost 10 years, close to 10 years. And also, I'm a part of the local 26, SEIU local 26, driver organizer. And we are fighting to improve our rideshare drivers for the last couple of years in Minnesota, winning two. Also, we are fighting to win the unionized. We want to unionize our drivers. It's the same like other states, like Chicago or California or other states to form a union. But we are here today, part of the fight to stand against robot taxi who's coming to our state or our cities, trying to come to our streets without no rules. That's why our local leaders, the city councillors and state legislation to stand up and try to make a regulation before they come to our streets. And that's important for our safety, our streets. Today, drivers are here with the community and business owners to talk about what it means for thousands of drivers who lose their jobs. If the robotaxis come in no rules, everybody can imagine what happens. Who can stop? There's no transparency, and they do whatever they can. If we don't have jobs, we spend our money. And you can imagine, every morning when I wake up, I spend my money to invest in our community. Groceries, gas stations, grab coffee, and all that money I earn, like my other colleague said, it goes back to our local economy. And no one can deny we are backbone or we are part of our local economy. And if that big tech companies win or take our money, all that money goes to the world, Silicon Valley. Everybody knows that. And we will just take out our community money to take the state and all those rich CEOs, even they're getting richer and richer. They are greedy. Already they have enough money to do something else. Our community has been under attack. This is why years of trauma, now we are facing this. We need our city leaders to step up and do what's right for our people. Here in our city, not CEO tax. And we know some of our local officials, they are in favour of the big companies. And everybody knows. Tomorrow, the city council has a chance to override the mayor's veto of the bill to regulate the Waymo. This is simple. We are asking simple things. And I don't understand our mayor, why he's... And it's not the fairest one, it's not the second one. Always he's killing those basic things. Tesla and others, we call on them to do for the safety of our community and to protect our jobs, their jobs. To the mayor and the city council members opposed to this plan, we ask, what is your plan? What is his plan? You have to clarify and come up publicly and say, I'm with them. Then we cannot ask you again. How will you make Minneapolis different from Trump, who has said the big tech companies can do whatever they want. We will protect our jobs, our community. What is your plan? We hope this city council, the council will do what is right tomorrow and override Mayor. But if not, we are going to keep asking them, what is your plan to protect our jobs, keep our streets safe and stand up for our community that's facing the money attacks. Thank you, everyone. We're going to take a few questions. So once again, the entire basis of this ordinance was also how do we protect workers. That is not what we're seeing in regulations across the country when it comes to autonomous vehicles. And Minneapolis had the opportunity to lead on that front and say that as we're welcoming technological advancements in our city, we're not going to leave workers behind. And that is why we included the human safety monitor piece. This is not new language. These are languages that were also discussed at the statewide level. People recognize there's a need to protect workers and make sure that jobs are going to be grounded here in Minneapolis and not outsourced to other places like we've seen Waymo and other big tech companies utilize. They've brought in workers, remote workers from the Philippines and pay them below poverty wages. And we're saying we don't want that here in Minneapolis. We support our workers, we stand with our workers, and that is what this ordinance was aiming to do. And we can do both. It's that we can do both. We can protect our workers and develop broader regulations over the next year before it would have gone into effect by October 2027, and we could have done both. It's a both-and approach. Again, we worked with this proposal with the mayor's administration, so they have been very much aware of the intention of council members to make sure that we bring a proposal forward that includes workers. And if you follow the legislative process, you saw Mayor Frye or none of my colleagues introduce amendments to the proposal. That suggests a conversation of a plan or for next steps. That did not happen, so that means right now the option, if we don't override Mayor Frye's veto, is there is no protection. But what I will name is me and my colleagues are bringing forward an introduction of a policy to give us another year while the state does their work to formalize again broader protections that also take into account impacts on workers like those standing behind me and the 10,000 who helped keep Minneapolis afloat and have been keeping us afloat. So we will not abandon these efforts. We're reopening the chapter even tomorrow should we not override the veto. For the override, we shall find out tomorrow. We're having many conversations still with our colleagues. Yeah. So again, we spoke and worked with state leaders, specifically those who were leading proposals around autonomous vehicles, just this most recent legislative session. And they were excited about the initiative that Minneapolis was taking with workers right in Minneapolis and to say you need to move forward with strong regulations as big tech companies owned by Google, Amazon, and Elon Musk are trying to set up shop in your community. So we have been in full collaborative conversations with our state leaders and we will continue that. We have never put this ordinance as in conflict. It's always been complementary. We know that if AVs are looking to automate robo taxis or rideshare services all across the state, there needs to be standardized protections and standards. And we support our statewide leaders doing that, but making sure that there's an avenue for local control so that we can do things like support our workers and make sure that our residents and pedestrians are safe as well. So we see them as complementary. They're not in conflict. And we've been in good conversations with our state leaders. And hopefully we'll see some really good outcomes this next upcoming session. Last question. public transportation嗯 Yeah, so Council Vice President Osmond did speak with Waymo when we initially was forming this proposal with the intention of bringing it forward. From my understanding, there was no conversations around how we can incentivize or strengthen public transit. The entire component of autonomous vehicles is not about investing in the public option. It's about siphoning off public resources to then reinvest and redirect into a private option and as we mentioned that private option sends millions if not billions of dollars to shareholders and CEOs in Silicon Valley that's the problem and that is something that we're looking of how do we keep the revenue that workers are generating here in our city so from my understanding there was not that angle yeah and if you want to yeah my conversation with Waymo representative as soon as they show up in our city was drivers. I was like there will be thousands of jobs that will that will not be needed in your model of bike share services. What's your plan on that? They could not answer that question. I asked them will they employ anybody at all? They pause and they say car need to be washed. So just think about that. Just think about that. So I I encourage my colleagues who did not vote this, reconsider their votes and stand up for drivers. All right. Thanks, everybody.