Business
California’s Teamsters call for Waymo ban, saying driverless cars threaten safety and jobs
The Teamsters of California is calling for the suspension of Waymo’s operations in the state amid growing safety and job security concerns.
The union, which has 250,000 members across dozens of industries, called on the California Public Utilities Commission on Monday to indefinitely suspend the driverless car company’s license to operate. The demand comes less than two weeks after a Waymo self-driving taxi struck a child near a Santa Monica elementary school, triggering a National Highway Traffic Safety Administration investigation.
In a statement, Teamsters California co-chairs Peter Finn and Victor Mineros called the incident a “horrifying wake-up call for California policymakers who have repeatedly ignored the growing list of red flags concerning robotaxis.”
The child, who ran out from behind a large SUV to cross the street, wasn’t injured in the collision. The Waymo had been traveling at 17 miles per hour before the child appeared and reduced its speed to 6 miles per hour before contact was made.
“We are committed to improving road safety, both for our riders and all those with whom we share the road,” Waymo said in a statement last week about the accident. “Our peer-reviewed model shows that a fully attentive human driver in this same situation would have made contact with the pedestrian at approximately 14 mph.”
Waymo has been the subject of previous NHTSA investigations and recalls following collisions. In December, motionless Waymo vehicles clogged San Francisco streets after a power outage.
“Imagine a scenario where more and more of these vehicles are on the street and there’s an earthquake,” said Finn of Teamsters California in an interview. “There’s people trying to evacuate, there’s emergency response, and these things can’t move at all.”
Waymo also poses a threat to Californians who depend on driving jobs for their livelihood, Finn said. As the race to master autonomous vehicle technology heats up, the union is concerned that companies will eliminate human jobs to lower labor costs.
A statewide poll conducted last year by Teamsters California found that more than 80% of respondents were concerned about the impact of AI and automation on job availability.
“This incident is emblematic of the broader goal Big Tech companies have to replace skilled human labor with AI … and force our communities to reckon with the fallout of automation’s shortcomings,” the Teamsters’ statement said.
Kodiak AI, a Mountain View-based tech company, is developing autonomous semi trucks it says will improve safety and efficiency on the roads. Tesla is also working on its robotaxi technology, and Elon Musk has shared ambitions for self-driving cargo trucks.
Teamsters California is leading a legislative effort to require a human operator to be present in autonomous commercial delivery vehicles at all times.
Autonomous trucks could be a safety hazard and could eliminate thousands of jobs, the union said. Driving jobs are among the most common jobs.
“The stakes get even higher when we’re talking about trucks and delivery vehicles,” Finn said. “It feels like the regulators, in this case CPUC and the Department of Motor Vehicles, should have to do more to get a handle on this.”
Since the war with Iran broke out, the average American household has spent an extra …
$190.47 on gasoline.
For many households, that is the equivalent of a month’s electricity bill.
Or a week’s worth of groceries for a couple.
The gasoline calculation is part of an analysis conducted by researchers at Brown University as they and others try to assess the economic costs of the prolonged fighting.
Calculating the cost of war — a skipped meal or a drive not made — is an imperfect science. But these estimates can offer a sense of how fighting far away can change behaviors large and small each day, disrupting American life.
Discomfort has not been spread evenly. As the price of gasoline has shot up, the national average is now …
$4.55 a gallon
In Illinois, it is more expensive …
$4.99 a gallon.
In California, it’s …
$6.13 a gallon.
Diesel, which is used to power factories and move most goods around the country, also quickly climbed.
Taken together, the amount of extra money Americans have collectively spent on gasoline and diesel since Feb. 28, when the United States and Israel attacked Iran, is staggering:
$0.0 billion
Hunting for cheaper gas, Americans are going to Costcos and Sam’s Clubs more often to fill up their tanks.
Drivers visited Sam’s Club gas stations 18 percent more in the last week of April than the same time last year.
They are filling their tanks with less gas.
One gallon fewer at a time.
They are riding more subways and commuter trains.
They are using bike shares more often.
People rode more buses in March than before the war:
45 million more rides.
People are spending less on essentials.
More than 40 percent of people in a recent poll said they were spending less on groceries and medical care.
They are putting less into savings.
Richer households are spending a relatively small share of their income on gas:
2.7%.
Poorer households are spending far more:
4.2%.
This is not the first time in recent years that the economy has been shocked by war.
After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, oil prices spiked, sending gasoline soaring. At its peak, the national average was …
$5.02 a gallon.
Where things go this time around is anyone’s guess. When the war does end, it will still take weeks or months for energy supplies to level off.
Nearly three out of four goods move across the country by truck.
Many of those trucks are powered by diesel, making them much costlier to drive, and what’s inside them costlier for consumers.
Last month, a tomato cost …
40% more
than it did the same time last year.
More expensive fuel isn’t the only culprit for rising costs. Extreme weather, tariffs and other factors have forced prices up for many industries. Gasoline also becomes more expensive as the summer approaches.
But inflation last month rose at its fastest pace in nearly three years, and gasoline was among the fastest rising categories.
The layoffs bludgeoning the tech industry continued this week as artificial intelligence reshapes the industry.
Mountain View-based Intuit, the maker of TurboTax, on Wednesday said it was laying off 17% of its workforce, or about 3,000 employees, as part of its restructuring to cut costs and invest in artificial intelligence.
The company said it had slowed down due to “too many organizational layers” and the cuts will simplify the organization to become a “faster, leaner, more focused company.” Intuit said it will close its offices in Reno and Woodland Hills and incur an estimated $300 million to $340 million in restructuring charges.
“We believe we can serve more customers and deliver breakthrough products that fuel our customers’ success by reducing complexity and simplifying our structure,” Sasan Goodarzi, chief executive of Intuit, said in a memo shared with employees.
Intuit announced the layoffs on the same day it reported its third-quarter results, in which revenue jumped 10% from a year earlier, to $8.56 billion.
Intuit adds to the count of more than 114,000 tech-sector employees laid off this year, according to Layoffs.fyi.
Meta laid off 8,000 workers on Wednesday, as the company cuts costs to ramp up investment in AI agents and infrastructure. The ever-expanding list of tech companies that have cut jobs includes Coinbase, Amazon, LinkedIn and more. Some have cited productivity gains enabling fewer workers to accomplish more with AI, while others pointed out restructuring and cost-cutting to prepare for the AI disruption.
In an earnings call, Intuit‘s chief financial officer, Sandeep Aujla, said the cuts were intended to make the organization leaner, and weren’t tied directly to Intuit’s AI use.
“AI is an important part of how we’re evolving as a company, but these decisions were not driven by AI replacing employees,” an Intuit spokesperson reiterated in an email .
Best known for its TurboTax platform, Intuit has branched into accounting with QuickBooks, credit scoring through Credit Karma and email automation via Mailchimp. Facing increased competition for AI-driven tax solutions, the company is integrating AI across its entire portfolio.
“Our AI agents are delivering value at scale, with our accounting AI agents powering recommendations across more than 50 million transactions each week, and business tax AI agents identifying millions of dollars in deductions,” Goodarzi said in the earnings call.
The restructuring will reduce overlapping roles in TurboTax and Credit Karma as the company integrates both into a single team.
A deep sense of anxiety has settled in the tech job market, propelled by consecutive layoffs and coding tasks being automated by AI.
Tech leaders have portrayed the role of human software engineers as a human in the loop, overseeing and verifying AI agents that do the work of coders.
By 2027, software developers are expected to see a 3% job contraction due to AI coding capabilities, according to Labor Automation Forecasting Hub by Metaculus, a popular website where forecasters predict how AI will reshape the workforce.
President Trump on Thursday announced that grocery stories and air conditioning companies will be allowed to keep using high-polluting refrigerants for longer than they would have under a law he signed during his first administration.
“This was a tremendous burden, a tremendous cost,” said Trump, surrounded in the Oval Office by executives from supermarket chains including Kroger, Fairway, Neimann Foods and Piggly Wiggly. “It was making the equipment unaffordable, and the actual benefit was nothing.”
The move loosens rules meant to restrict hydroflourocarbons, a class of climate-damaging chemicals used in cooling equipment. HFCs are known as “super pollutants” because their impact on climate change can be tens of thousands of times greater than carbon dioxide during their shorter lifespans.
In the move Thursday, the Environmental Protection Agency extends the deadline for companies to comply with a 2023 rule transitioning refrigerators and air conditioners off HFCs and onto new cooling technologies. Reducing these chemicals and moving to cleaner refrigerants has long been a bipartisan issue.
Trump is also proposing exemptions from a rule requiring leak repairs on large-scale refrigeration systems.
The administration framed the changes as part of its effort to bring down high grocery costs. EPA administrator Lee Zeldin said the actions will save $2.4 billion for Americans and safeguard 350,000 jobs.
“Americans who wanted to be able to fix their equipment were instead being required to buy far more costly new equipment and that just doesn’t make any sense,” said Zeldin.
David Doniger, senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said the move will not only harm the climate, but U.S. competitiveness in global refrigerant markets as well.
“The EPA is catering to a small group of straggling companies by derailing the shift away from these climate super-pollutants,” he said. “The industry at large supports the HFC phasedown and has already invested in making new refrigerants and equipment, currently installed in thousands of stores.”
Danielle Wright, executive director of the North American Sustainable Refrigeration Council, an environmental nonprofit, said any perceived near-term savings from the rollbacks will be outweighed by the future costs.
“Business owners are far more worried about the escalating cost of keeping aging, high‑global-warming-potential equipment running than they are about the cost of installing new, compliant systems,” she said.
Trump dismissed the climate concerns, saying his changes “are not going to have any impact on the environment.”
He said he wants to get rid of the technology transition rule entirely in the future.
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