This paper synthetizes and refines the emergent power resource approach (PRA) to explain labor contestation, applying the case of labor’s response to the rise of the gig economy in New York City’s taxi industry. The study utilizes a matched case comparison of the New York Taxi Workers’ Alliance’s success against the rise of Uber in the 2010s and the Taxi Driver Union’s failure to sustain themselves in the face of their employer-driven technological crisis in the 1970s. The analyses advance the notion that power resource construction and deconstruction projects are a means of articulating and synthesizing the PRA, bringing it into conversation with social movement theory. Adding in power construction solves four problems that have plagued the PRA: the lack of a clear taxonomy; the under theorization of capital and the state’s power resources; poor incorporation of temporality; and the struggle to bridge the micro-macro divide. This study is based on archival research on the two unions and two years of ethnographic research with the contemporary union.