Bus drivers who shuttle employees of Facebook to and from its headquarters in Menlo Park, California, have voted to unionise.

On Wednesday the 87 drivers, who work for Loop Transportation, a contractor, voted 43-28 to join the Teamsters.

The International Brotherhood of Teamsters, founded in 2003, represents more than 1.4 million people in the US. It has nearly 188,500 likes on Facebook.

Working conditions for Facebook’s bus drivers have drawn controversy. Drivers work 16-hour days and often sleep in their cars between split shifts, according to a press release from the Teamsters.

They have also complained about the pay disparity between them and the tech workers they chauffeur. Drivers at Loop Transportation – which has 109 likes on Facebook – earn between $17 and $25 an hour. The average Facebook software engineer earns more than $122,000 a year, according to Glassdoor.com.

Drivers, Teamsters representatives and supporters held a rally outside the Facebook campus on Tuesday and delivered a petition of nearly 5,000 signatures to the company.

Facebook refused to accept the petition, according to the Teamsters, though by Thursday a group entitled ‘Solidarity with Facebook Bus Drivers Union’ had 1,145 members on Facebook.

“The only way that Loop will listen to us is with a union and a collective voice. I’m very relieved that we have that now,” said Demaurae Hooston, a driver, in a release.

In a letter to Mark Zuckerberg in October, Rome Aloise, vice-president and secretary treasurer of Teamsters Local 853, compared the situation to “a time when noblemen were driven around in their coaches by their servants.”

“Frankly, little has changed,” he said, “except the noblemen are your employees, and the servants are the bus drivers who carry them back and forth each day.”

The drivers will become part of the Local 853 chapter, which has 11,000 members in northern California – though it only has 162 members on Facebook.