[Congressional Bills 119th Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
[H.R. 6646 Introduced in House (IH)]
<DOC>
119th CONGRESS
1st Session
H. R. 6646
To promote transparency and accountability in covered digital labor
platform work, and for other purposes.
_______________________________________________________________________
IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
December 11, 2025
Ms. Jayapal (for herself, Mr. Norcross, Ms. Omar, Mr. Goldman of Texas,
Ms. Lee of Pennsylvania, Mrs. McIver, Ms. Norton, Mr. Pocan, Mr.
Takano, and Ms. Tlaib) introduced the following bill; which was
referred to the Committee on Education and Workforce
_______________________________________________________________________
A BILL
To promote transparency and accountability in covered digital labor
platform work, and for other purposes.
Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the
United States of America in Congress assembled,
SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE.
This Act may be cited as the ``Empowering App-Based Workers Act''.
SEC. 2. FINDINGS.
Congress finds the following:
(1) Millions of workers in the United States report to work
by logging on to digital labor platforms: software applications
(commonly known as ``apps'') that allocate and manage work.
(2) Businesses are using digital labor platforms in a wide
and growing range of industries and occupations in the United
States. While the most well-known businesses using digital
labor platforms provide ride-hail and last-mile delivery
services, businesses in a variety of sectors, including large-
and low-paid sectors like retail, hospitality, warehousing, and
food services, increasingly manage labor via digital labor
platforms.
(3) Platformed, or app-based, workers of all ages and every
race, ethnicity, gender, and immigration status can be found in
every State. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, app-
based workers are disproportionately people of color,
comprising approximately 42 percent of the app-based workforce,
compared to 29 percent of the overall workforce. A 2021 Pew
Research poll of United States workers found that women (17
percent) were more likely than men (15 percent) to report that
they had ever done app-based work. The growing workforces of
businesses that use digital labor platforms to manage delivery
workers are majority women. Platform work is growing in
industries like retail, hospitality, warehousing, and food
services, in which people of color are overrepresented.
(4) Government and academic research has found that app-
based workers often receive poverty wages and few to no
benefits and are subject to wage theft and wage and employment
discrimination. A 2024 University of California at Berkeley
study of app-based ride-hail drivers in 5 metropolitan areas
found that a majority of drivers earn net pay that is
significantly less than the applicable minimum wage. Job
quality issues may be related to the frequent misclassification
of app-based workers as independent contractors who lack
employment-based rights and protections. Indeed, both courts
and regulatory agencies have found businesses that use digital
labor platforms to have misclassified employees as independent
contractors, stolen wages, and withheld benefits.
(5) Research also shows that some businesses that use
digital labor platforms may be engaging in discriminatory
pricing practices, charging variable rates for the same
services based on particular characteristics of a consumer, and
setting personalized wages for the same work based on
characteristics of a worker.
(6) Businesses use digital labor platforms to determine
access by an app-based worker to work assignments, the pay for
the assignments, and the prices charged to customers. Such
platforms often use electronic monitoring tools and automated
decision-making systems or algorithms, fed by a variety of
inputs, including data derived from workers and consumers.
(7) The use of electronic monitoring tools and automated
decision-making systems is not exclusive to businesses that use
digital labor platforms. Other kinds of businesses do use them
but the heavy reliance by such businesses on these systems to
interface with workers and consumers is unique.
(8) But while the electronic monitoring tools and automated
decision-making systems of businesses that use digital labor
platforms dictate the experience of workers and consumers on
digital labor platforms, their presence, purpose, and mechanics
are, too often, wholly opaque to workers, consumers, voters,
and policymakers. This opacity creates profound information
asymmetries between these groups and the corporations that own
or operate digital labor platforms.
(9) The lack of information about the electronic monitoring
tools and automated decision-making systems used by businesses
that use digital labor platforms prevents workers, consumers,
and policymakers from understanding whether and to what extent
these systems are generating harms and facilitating the
violation of existing laws and regulations.
(10) Unaccountable pay algorithms can enable various forms
of wage theft, such as minimum wage violations, tip-stealing,
routine undercounting of worktime, and illegal fees and
deductions, as well as discrimination based on protected class.
Forms of employer control obscured by algorithmic management
can enable independent contractor misclassification and create
insurmountable roadblocks to app-based workers' ability to
access minimum wage and overtime pay for all time worked, paid
sick leave, unemployment insurance benefits, workers'
compensation, protections from discrimination, and more.
(11) Reliance on electronic monitoring tools and automated
decision-making systems that hide control and enable
misclassification of employees as independent contractors also
has profound implications for social welfare programs and
competing businesses. Businesses that misclassify employees as
independent contractors neglect to pay their share of employer
contributions for programs such as unemployment insurance and
social security. In total, a misclassifying business can save
up to 30 percent of its payroll costs by mislabeling a worker
as an independent contractor, which disadvantages responsible
employers.
(12) The lack of transparency around pricing algorithms
allows businesses that use digital labor platforms to raise
prices on consumers under the guise of increasing labor and
regulatory costs. Businesses that use digital labor platforms
may use opaque pricing algorithms to determine the amount they
charge to customers for a service, as well as the share of that
fee that those businesses keep for themselves compared to the
share that goes to the app-based workers who provide the
service. The variable and opaque share of the consumer charge
that certain digital labor platform providers keep, versus the
share they pay an app-based workers (the ``take rate'') is
concerning.
(13) The issue of fluctuating, opaque, and predatory take
rates is especially pronounced in the ride-hail industry, a
pioneer in the use of digital labor platforms. Initially, ride-
hail companies paid app-based workers 90 percent of the
consumer charge, decreasing it to 80 percent as they attracted
more workers. Early take rates of 10 to 20 percent were styled
as ``service fees'' that drivers paid to access work through
the digital labor platform. Like commissions, if the ride-hail
companies increased their prices, workers likewise received a
raise.
(14) Ride-hail companies later abandoned their commission-
based service fee, and now set consumer prices independently of
app-based worker pay. Both prices and pay are largely
influenced by unaccountable hidden algorithms and automated
decision systems. They are also influenced by individualized
consumer and worker characteristics that offend notions of
equal pay for equal work and fair dealing.
(15) App-based workers now report ride-hail companies
taking as much as 60 percent of the fare. A PowerSwitch Action
analysis of Uber fares in New York City and Chicago between
2019 and 2023 found that driver pay declined even as fares
charged to consumers increased because Uber's take rate also
increased.
(16) Rising, unpredictable take rates and lower pay have
made ride-hail work an increasingly losing proposition. Workers
who provide what has become a growing and crucial
transportation service are entitled to transparent, consistent,
and fair pay for their work. A 25 percent cap on take rates in
the ride-hail industry will limit the most exploitative
algorithmic practices and help ensure the health and well-being
of more than a million U.S. workers. Since expenses and the
cost of living vary from market to market, the take rate cap in
this Act establishes a floor, not a ceiling, and does not
preempt any state or local efforts to establish take rate
standards that exceed that set forth herein.
(17) Although the ride-hail industry has been an early
adopter of digital labor platform technologies, the public
needs to understand how all businesses that use digital labor
platforms utilize electronic monitoring tools and automated
decision-making systems so they may understand how this
unaccountable technology affects their lives. Without
transparency requirements around their use of electronic
monitoring tools and automated decision-making systems,
businesses that use digital labor platforms can exploit
information asymmetries to make false and unverifiable claims
about the potential impacts of proposed and existing public
policies.
(18) Policymakers outside the United States have taken
steps to ensure that platforms operate with more transparency
and accountability. Multinational corporations like Amazon,
Uber, and DoorDash will soon be subject to various transparency
and reporting requirements in the European Union as countries
come into compliance with the European Union Platform Work
Directive. The United States must not be a global laggard when
it comes to platform regulation; workers, consumers, and the
public will suffer for it.
(19) To ensure that app-based work is not an engine of
poverty and racial inequality that places downward pressure on
job quality across the economy, workers, consumers,
policymakers, and regulators must not be left in the dark about
the surveillance and labor management technologies that
businesses that use digital labor platforms are using.
(20) All workers, businesses, and consumers in the United
States, stand to benefit from the establishment of clear rules
requiring transparency and accountability around the use of
electronic monitoring and automated decision-making systems by
businesses that use digital labor platforms to manage work.
SEC. 3. DEFINITIONS.
In this Act:
(1) Adverse action.--The term ``adverse action'' means an
action taken by a covered digital labor platform provider with
respect to an app-based worker that a reasonable person would
find negatively impacts the app-based worker's access to or
terms, conditions, or privileges of work, including fewer (by
volume or frequency) or less favorable work assignments or
offers, less or unfavorable hours or shifts, reduced access to
bonuses, incentives, or other benefits, temporary, permanent,
or indefinite suspension, deactivation or termination,
restriction of access to the platform, failure to promote,
failure to pay, and reductions in pay.
(2) Aggregated app-based worker data.--The term
``aggregated app-based worker data'' means data with respect to
multiple app-based workers that is combined or collected
together in a summary or other form that prevents the
identification of any specific app-based worker.
(3) App-based worker.--The term ``app-based worker'', with
respect to a covered digital labor platform provider, means an
individual who performs work or provides services for
remuneration on or through the covered digital labor platform
of the covered digital labor platform provider, regardless of
whether the individual is compensated by the covered digital
labor platform provider or another person.
(4) Applicant.--The term ``applicant'', with respect to a
covered digital labor platform, means an individual who has
signed up for, applied for, activated, or created an account in
order to provide services on or through the covered digital
labor platform of a covered digital labor platform provider as
an app-based worker but has not yet been approved for or
offered work through the covered digital labor platform.
(5) Attribute.--The term ``attribute'' includes, as
applicable, the tenure, demographics, reviews, acceptance rate,
part-time status, average weekly hours, and location of an app-
based worker.
(6) Authorized agent.--The term ``authorized agent'' means
a person (other than a covered digital labor platform provider
or a vendor or affiliated person of the provider) that an app-
based worker has authorized to receive disclosures from a
covered digital labor platform in accordance with section 7,
including a labor organization.
(7) Automated decision system.--
(A) In general.--The term ``automated decision
system'' means any tool, software, system, process,
function, program, method, model, or formula using, or
designed with, computation to issue an automated
decision system output that is used to augment, assist,
or replace human judgment, decision making, or policy
implementation.
(B) Exclusions.--Notwithstanding subparagraph (A),
the term ``automated decision system'' does not include
any spam email filter, firewall, antivirus software,
calculator, database, dataset, or other compilation of
data.
(8) Automated decision system output.--The term ``automated
decision system output'' means any information, data,
assumption, prediction, scoring, classification,
recommendation, decision, or conclusion generated by an
automated decision system.
(9) Commerce; person.--The terms ``commerce'' and
``person'' have the meanings given the terms in section 3 of
the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 (29 U.S.C. 203).
(10) Covered digital labor platform.--
(A) In general.--The term ``covered digital labor
platform'' means a platform provided, offered, or used
by a covered digital labor platform provider that--
(i) is provided, at least in part, through
electronic means such as an online-enabled
application, internet site, or mobile
application;
(ii) provides services performed by an app-
based worker at the request of a consumer;
(iii) involves the facilitation of work to
be performed by an individual in exchange for
payment, regardless of whether such work is
performed online or in a certain geographic
location; and
(iv) involves the use of an automated
decision-making system or electronic monitoring
tool.
(B) Exclusions.--
(i) In general.--Notwithstanding
subparagraph (A), the term ``covered digital
labor platform'' does not include--
(I) any platform that--
(aa) only provides the
means by which service
providers can reach an end-
user, customer, or recipient,
without involvement of the
platform in the terms or
conditions of the work; or
(bb) only organizes the
activities of volunteers; or
(II) any platform that has the
primary purpose of exploiting or
sharing real property assets for short-
term accommodations or that allows an
individual who is not a professional to
resell goods.
(ii) Burden of proof.--A person providing,
offering, or using a platform that the person
believes is a platform described in subclause
(I) or (II) shall have the burden of proof to
establish that the platform is a platform
described in such a subclause for purposes of
any enforcement activity taken under section 9.
(11) Covered digital labor platform provider.--The term
``covered digital labor platform provider''--
(A) means a person engaged in commerce or an
industry affecting commerce that employs an app-based
worker to perform work or provide services for
remuneration on or through the covered digital labor
platform of the person, or that otherwise engages,
arranges, or facilitates the performance of such work
or provision of such services, regardless of whethe