When New York became the first city in the country to mandate that rideshare companies like Uber and Lyft pay their drivers a minimum wage, it seemed like a major win. Low, unpredictable wages are built into the companies’ business models, predicated on their ability to classify their legions of drivers as independent contractors rather than employees, exempting companies from following labor laws that include standards like a minimum wage.

In New York City, some drivers in previous years made as little as $6 an hour, largely as a result of being unpaid for the vast amounts of time they spend waiting between rides. So in 2018, the city passed a law to change that, ensuring that New York’s roughly 84,000 rideshare drivers receive a predictable minimum wage like any other worker.

The legislation requires these companies pay a $17.22 hourly minimum. Overseen by the NYC Taxi and Limousine Commission (TLC), the rate is calculated annually on the basis of a company’s average “utilization rate,” which measures how often drivers are giving rides versus waiting for new rides per working hour. The higher the utilization rate, the lower the amount Uber or Lyft is required to pay drivers per ride.

The bill basically worked: it raised drivers’ wages without significantly raising costs or wait times for customers. But as of late, rideshare companies have found a new way to evade the fix, exploiting a loophole at drivers’ expense. Uber and Lyft have a long history of arbitrarily deactivating drivers’ accounts (and not only in New York). But workers across the city say that since June, the companies have begun frequently and arbitrarily locking them out of rideshare applications when they try to log in to begin picking up customers.

“Unable to go online,” Uber’s app will tell a driver, inaccurately adding that “TLC rules force us to limit access.” Lyft’s lockout message is much the same. The lockouts happen unpredictably; it’s not uncommon for a driver to get unlocked long enough to complete one ride, then get locked again, and told they must wait several hours before being once again unlocked.

A Bloomberg investigation published earlier this month found that the companies are systematically locking drivers out to artificially inflate the utilization rate. Doing so cooks the books in the companies’ favor: the TLC uses company-provided data on drivers’ work hours and trips to determine the year’s utilization rate, then applies the rate to pay rates the following year, to ensure that the rate drivers earn for each trip covers the average time they are waiting. By locking drivers out, rideshare companies are manipulating how many drivers seem to be waiting for a ride, artificially raising the utilization rate and thus reducing next year’s pay rates.

Bloomberg estimates the practice sets the companies up to save hundreds of millions of dollars in driver payouts. Dozens of drivers said that the months of lockouts have “caused them to fall behind on taxes, auto loan payments, rent and credit card bills.” Several mentioned contemplating suicide.

At a press conference last week, New York Taxi Workers Alliance (NYTWA) president Bhairavi Desai said that the practice of juicing the utilization rate could end up reducing individual drivers’ annual pay by $5,000 to $8,000 next year. The press conference followed a rally organized by the NYTWA and rideshare drivers outside City Hall last month, where the group demanded elected officials address the problem and then marched to Uber headquarters.

“Uber and Lyft have left drivers in anxiety, insecurity, on the brink of eviction, debt, and despair from lockouts — and low pay — since this summer,” Desai said at last week’s press conference. She spoke alongside Comptroller Brad Lander, who sponsored the 2018 legislation.

“We won’t stand by as Uber and Lyft dodge our regulations with cruel, arbitrary lockouts that exploit drivers and pad their profits,” Lander said.

The comptroller, who has also announced he is running for mayor, has vowed to use the power of his office to rectify the companies’ latest form of labor exploitation. He has sent a letter to the TLC seeking raw trip data, income data, compliance, and communications between the Eric Adams administration and the apps regarding lockouts, the first step for rectifying the problem legislatively.

The NYTWA has criticized an August agreement between the Adams administration and rideshare companies that the city touted as a means of easing the pain from the lockouts. Under the agreement, Uber would begin phasing out the practice; it is unclear if Lyft has begun doing the same (critics say it’s actually predicated on Lyft increasing those lockouts). The NYTWA called the deal a “corporate giveaway” that neither compensates drivers for the wages denied them from the ongoing practice, nor fixes the damage done to next year’s pay rate from this year’s manipulation. The organization is petitioning the TLC to use driver data exclusively from before the lockouts began to calculate next year’s rate.

NYTWA is also backing a bill by City Councilmember Shekar Krishnan that would prohibit rideshare companies from arbitrarily deactivating drivers, mandate at least two weeks’ notice before permanent deactivation, allow for back pay if drivers are reactivated, and provide an opportunity for previously deactivated drivers to appeal within a year of the legislation’s passage. In doing so, the measure would shift the burden of proof back to the companies and power back to the drivers themselves.

As for those drivers, Hell Gate reports that during last week’s press conference, at least six drivers in attendance received real-time notifications that they’d been locked out of the app.