In November, gig companies including Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, and Instacart helped pass California’s Proposition 22, effectively writing their own labor law. Now the companies plan to bring similar legislation elsewhere.

Last month, the companies launched a group called the App-Based Work Alliance to support their agenda. Industry-supported bills in the works in New York state and Illinois would, like the California ballot measure, deny gig workers status as employees, and the workers’ compensation, paid family leave, sick pay, unemployment insurance, and minimum wage guarantees that come with it.

But the bills could give gig workers the right to form something resembling a union, allowing workers to bargain with multiple employers to create wage floors and standards. US workers in trucking, auto manufacturing, and grocery stores have participated in types of industry-wide bargaining, though the arrangement is more common in Europe.

The California Proposition 22, was written by gig companies, who then poured $205 million into supporting it, the most expensive campaign in the state’s history. Proposition 22 is near-irreversible – the law needs a “supermajority” of seven-eighths of the state’s legislature to be changed.

At the same time, gig companies invested in bringing the Proposition 22 fight elsewhere. Lyft stood up a political action committee called Illinoisans for Independent Work that spent at least $660,000 on ad buys and political contributions in local elections. In August, Uber released a white paper laying out its plans for “Independent Contractor+,” a new employment category it hopes to promote across the country.

Now New York, a less-than-traditional gig market in many ways, is set to be among the first states where a post-Proposition 22 battle might play out.

A constellation of gig companies and allies introduced the New York Coalition for Independent Work, which describes its mission as “protecting self-employed, app-based contractors’ independence and flexibility while also working to provide them with needed benefits.” But the state’s relatively labor-friendly climate means that gig companies will have to tread carefully – and that a pitched battle is likely ahead.

In statements, spokespeople for Uber, Instacart, and DoorDash said the companies would work with legislators to protect flexible work schedules for their gig workers, something they have said would be impossible if they were forced to treat the workers as employees.

DoorDash vice president of communications and policy Liz Jarvis-Shean said the company wants to work with state and federal lawmakers “to help create a new portable, proportional, and flexible framework that embraces today’s modern workforce.” Uber spokesperson Matthew Wing said the company supports state laws to require “all gig economy companies – including ours – to provide new benefits and protections to all independent workers.”

Back in California, drivers say plenty of organizing can happen without official bargaining rights or recognition from the gig companies. Moore, the Rideshare Drivers United organizer, says her organization is now focused on recouping unemployment insurance for drivers for the months before Proposition 22 went into effect, when, she says, drivers legally should have been treated as employees. “We’re not going away,” she says.