The San Francisco City Attorney announced that he reached a $4.5 million settlement with gig staffing company WorkWhile, requiring the company to pay restitution to thousands of delivery drivers. The settlement requires WorkWhile to pay $4.1 million in restitution to its delivery drivers and $400,000 in civil penalties to the City Attorney’s Office.
In June 2024, the City Attorney sued WorkWhile for depriving its gig workers of critical employment protections and benefits by misclassifying them as independent contractors instead of employees. In December 2024, the City Attorney secured a stipulated partial judgment and injunction that required WorkWhile to pay its California non-driver workers $1 million in restitution and reclassify all non-driver workers as employees. The ongoing lawsuit has so far yielded $5.5 million benefitting WorkWhile gig workers and helped bolster the City’s enforcement of labor laws.
WorkWhile is a San Francisco-based temporary staffing company. Since its founding in 2019, WorkWhile has grown rapidly, with half a million workers operating in 30 major metropolitan areas across 27 states. Through its app, WorkWhile provides client businesses with workers, hired and paid by WorkWhile directly, to fill empty shifts. WorkWhile fills shifts in many different industries, including delivery, warehouse, hospitality and food service, food production, event service, and general labor. WorkWhile’s gig workers often work alongside and perform the same functions as employees at the client businesses.
According to the City Attorney, WorkWhile has violated California law by misclassifying and treating these workers as independent contractors. As a result of this misclassification, the workers have been denied a wide range of state and local employee rights, including the right to overtime pay, paid sick leave, paid family leave, health and safety protections, and anti-retaliation protections, among others.
WorkWhile also did not provide legally required workers’ compensation insurance coverage but instead charged its workers a “Trust & Safety Fee,” which funded a substandard insurance-like product, shifting the cost of a workers’ compensation-type protection from the employer to its low-wage workers.
In June 2024, the City Attorney filed a lawsuit to stop to these illegal practices and recover restitution for workers who had been harmed. The lawsuit alleged that the misclassification of WorkWhile’s workforce violated a host of state and local labor laws and denied workers the protections, wages, and benefits guaranteed under law. In doing so, the City alleged WorkWhile gained an unfair business advantage over other law-abiding businesses, constituting a violation of California’s Unfair Competition Law.
The stipulated partial judgment, approved by the San Francisco Superior Court on January 16, 2026, requires WorkWhile to pay restitution to drivers who were misclassified and worked California shifts on or prior to September 5, 2025. The City Attorney will continue to litigate the classification of WorkWhile drivers who completed shifts after September 5, 2025.
The case is People of the State of California v. WorkWhile, et al, San Francisco Superior Court, Case No. CGC-24-615401. The stipulated partial judgment can be found here.