Uber executives saw bigger bonuses after landmark labor union agreement
A deal Uber struck with state lawmakers last year to lower the company’s accident insurance burdens in exchange for allowing drivers to unionize marked a payday for Uber’s executives, federal filings show.
The company’s board cited successful passage of Senate Bill 371, which lowered Uber’s accident liability for underinsured drivers, as a major reason for awarding four Uber executives annual bonuses of more than $1 million last year. The large bonuses highlight the impact to Uber’s bottom line from reducing its insurance liabilities. Senate Bill 371 dropped Uber’s liability for accidents caused by underinsured drivers from $1 million a crash to $300,000. As a result, the company saved hundreds of millions of dollars a year, both through the California bill and legislation it backed in the Georgia statehouse, according to filings the company made with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission earlier this year.
One executive in particular, Jill Hazelbaker, received a $1.5 million bonus, in large part, the filings say, “due to her extraordinary work on our insurance reform strategy.”
Uber officials contend the California bill lowered fares for its customers in the state and has driven growth in ridership, something a company spokesperson said was good for riders and drivers alike.
“We have been very public about the fact that we view insurance reform as a win-win-win for consumers, drivers, and for Uber,” company spokesperson Zahid Arab told The Sacramento Bee in an email.
The savings outlined in the SEC filings, and the high importance securing them played in executives’ compensation for the year, shows the benefit to Uber’s shareholders and executives from reforming insurance laws nationwide.
Now the company seeks to expand on last year’s win by spending vast sums — putting up more than $70 million so far — on a California ballot measure campaign to cap attorney fees in car crash cases.
If the campaign can convince voters to back that measure, it could again lower Uber’s insurance liabilities. That would allow the company to put those savings into lower fares, according to company officials, or into profits and bonus checks, as critics contend.
The San Francisco Standard first reported on the SEC filings in connection with this year’s ballot campaign.
But legal experts say Uber’s proposal to cap attorney compensation — which would apply to all car accident cases, not just those involving rideshare vehicles — risks shutting poor people who can’t afford to pay a lawyer up front out of courthouses. Uber’s campaign is betting that voters are tired of injury law firms’ omnipresent billboard and television advertising, especially amid well-publicized examples of attorneys engaging in predatory practices. Campaign ads have raised the examples of bad actors such as Thomas Girardi, a once-famed attorney convicted of embezzling from his clients, and the Downtown L.A. Law Group, which is accused of paying people to join its lawsuits over pollution and sexual assault claims.
But a number of law school professors and researchers, including in previous Bee reporting, have argued that although capping attorney fees at 25% may seem benign to voters, it will in many cases remove the financial incentive for law firms to take up cases on contingency. Those cases involve law firms shouldering the costs and the risks of a lawsuit, and taking a payment only once attorneys secure a settlement. The alternative for people injured in car crashes is to pay lawyer fees on the front end.
The Consumer Attorneys of California, which represents trial lawyers, is funding a campaign against Uber’s measure. This week campaign spokespeople for that group pointed to the SEC filings as evidence that the Uber’s campaign committee, called A More Affordable California, in fact seeks to pad shareholders’ and executives pockets.
Uber has insurance reserve accounts funded to the tune of $13 billion, the SF Standard reported. “If Uber’s ballot initiative passes, the company stands to free up billions — and pay its executives more for the win,” the anti-Uber campaign said in a news release this week.
Uber won’t disclose the metrics for executives’ pay in 2026 until required by the SEC, Arab said. No specific legislative or regulatory change impacts executive pay on its own, he said.
“As we’ve said before, excessively high insurance requirements mean that riders pay more and take fewer trips; fewer trips means fewer earning opportunities for drivers,” Arab said. “When insurance costs are right-sized, we pass those savings on to consumers in the form of lower fares, which in turn leads to more trips on Uber — a win for riders, drivers, and Uber.”
According to a University of California Berkeley Labor Center study published in May 2024, the net income for drivers of Uber and other rideshare companies is well below the state’s minimum wage. Researchers found that after gas and vehicle maintenance expenses are factored in, the median wage for a rideshare driver was about $5.97 per hour without tips and $7.63 per hour with tips.
To secure passage of Senate Bill 371 last year, Uber dropped its opposition to a bill providing a pathway for collective bargaining rights for drivers. Uber’s last big ballot fight, on which together with Lyft the company spent $200 million, was a successful campaign to pass a measure that kept gig workers classified as independent contractors, not full-time employees.
Some labor rights experts said the resulting legislative deal in fact offered only watered-down bargaining rights to workers, according to reporting by Politico. On Tuesday, however, the California Gig Workers Union announced they had cleared a key threshold, securing enough signatures to submit proof of union support for rideshare drivers to the state’s labor board.
This story was originally published May 12, 2026 at 4:09 PM.
