Shortly before noon on Wednesday, several dozen rideshare drivers walked out of Los Angeles International Airport to hold a rally in a nearby park. The sky was gray, and a dull brightness bathed the parking decks and palm trees, the modernist street lamps and knotted traffic. The demonstrators held signs that read “Regulate Rideshares” and “Uber and Lyft Stop Stealing from People.” They waved these slogans toward an endless river of cars delivering passengers to their flights.

An estimated hundred thousand people serve as drivers for ridesharing apps in Los Angeles. Airports, where fifteen per cent of Uber bookings start or end, are one of a few places where the diffuse network of freelance drivers converges. For Rideshare Drivers United, a driver-advocacy group that was established in Los Angeles last year, airports were an obvious place at which to protest Uber’s initial public offering—the company is expected to début on the New York Stock Exchange at a valuation of between eighty and ninety billion dollars. According to a 2018 study by the Economic Policy Institute, the average rideshare driver makes $11.77 an hour after expenses and fees, less than the average compensation for retail workers. Dara Khosrowshahi, the C.E.O. of Uber, earned forty-five million dollars in executive compensation last year. On Wednesday, drivers turned off their apps and picketed in ten cities across the country. In Los Angeles, the call to turn off the services began at midnight on Wednesday and lasted for the next twenty-four hours.

“Uber and Lyft, you can’t hide—we can see your greedy side,” the protesters chanted. Most rideshare drivers work for multiple services. They are classified by the companies they drive for as independent contractors rather than employees. They get no benefits, are responsible for their own expenses, have no power to negotiate their rates, and have no one to represent their collective interests to the company. If they disagree with a change in the terms of their employment, their choices are to click “no” on a pop-up contract and have their accounts deactivated or, at least in this case, to keep working and stand outside an airport holding a sign. A baby-blue taxi from Beverly Hills Cab honked in solidarity. Many drivers who passed by in cars with Uber and Lyft stickers on their windshields stared straight ahead.

Uber has a history of fighting against drivers’ attempts to regulate their earnings. In 2017, a dashboard camera video of then C.E.O. Travis Kalanick arguing with a driver over a decrease in rates went viral. “Some people don’t like to take responsibility for their own shit,” Kalanick said to the driver, before exiting the car. “They blame everything in their life on somebody else.” Last month, in a regulatory filing in advance of its initial public offering, Uber noted, “We continue to experience dissatisfaction with our platform from a significant number of Drivers. In particular, as we aim to reduce Driver incentives to improve our financial performance, we expect Driver dissatisfaction will generally increase.” Drivers United organized an earlier protest in March, after Uber cut the per-mile rate that drivers in Los Angeles earn, from eighty to sixty cents a mile.

Police accompanied the small parade as it walked down Sepulveda Boulevard, past a sprawl of off-ramps, on-ramps, and billboards advertising marijuana-delivery apps. The air smelled of jet fuel. At Airport Landing View Point Park, the demonstrators helped themselves to pizza from the back of a pickup truck and then arrayed themselves before a dozen or so cameras for a short news conference.

Rideshare Drivers United has a platform, the main goal of which is to achieve a $27.86 per-hour-minimum guarantee that drivers recently won in New York City, which translates to about seventeen dollars an hour after expenses. Another major goal of the movement is to cap commissions that Uber or Lyft take from each ride at ten per cent. Many of the signs held aloft were simply enlarged screenshots of receipts that showed Uber or Lyft taking forty or even seventy per cent cuts of fares.

“This is one I took just this week,” said a driver named Esterphanie St. Juste, holding up a poster that she had made of an earnings report from a Lyft ride. “I was up at three or four in the morning, and I got a scheduled ride. For that scheduled ride, the rider paid $81.25. I got $46.13.”

The gathered drivers hooted in sympathy. Several speakers, including a representative from the local longshoremen’s union, expressed resistance to an automated future. The drivers were well aware that the revenue they generated for the companies was also being used to fund research on how to eventually eliminate their jobs.

“All of us have had a front-row seat to the early stages of a new era in app-enabled exploitation,” said a driver named Jos Cashon, who has driven for rideshare apps since 2015. “These Silicon Valley one-per-centers have only one goal: to slowly but surely turn us partners into an underclass so that they can become modern-day robber barons.” She described the job as having changed in those years from a decent way to make a living to one that did not even offer a subsistence wage.

“Do we like what we’ve seen?” she asked.

“No!” shouted the crowd in reply.

“They’re not going to rest until they’ve undercut and gig-ified and automated away every sector of the market until there’s nothing left that’s not under their control,” she continued. “Fifty per cent of jobs will be freelance by 2027. Forty-seven per cent of jobs will be automated away completely by 2034. Is that the future of work that we want?”

“No!” the crowd yelled again.

After the rally, I visited an area where Uber drivers wait, after dropping off a ride, for a new fare. It was a desolate surface lot next to a construction site in a no man’s land just outside the airport. A few porta-potties were set up in a corner, but the pervasive smell of urine indicated that not everyone bothered using them. Still, it was peaceful there, except for the roar of the planes. Drivers stood alone and stretched their legs or chatted with friends. I approached a group gathered around a Mercedes S.U.V.—they drove for Uber Select, they said, and deflected questions about the strike.

Another driver, who was smoking a cigarette, said that he was working that day, even though he supported the strikers’ demands. “I hope the government will listen to them,” he said. “It’s not a living wage at all.” He told me that he had driven a passenger to the airport from the neighboring city of El Segundo. That trip, plus the wait time in the airport parking lot, had earned him seven dollars in an hour of work. “Yesterday I put in at least nine hours of work,” he said. “I only made a hundred and five dollars.” He shrugged when I asked why he didn’t strike. “Right now it’s very, very hard out there,” he said. “Either you love it or you leave it.”

After he drove away, a driver nearby who was sitting on his back bumper and drinking a Dr Pepper beckoned me over. His name was Anthony Saldana, and he said that he saw no reason for the strike. He said that he usually made at least a thousand and seven hundred dollars a week before expenses, working sixty hours a week.