It’s been a tumultuous year for Uber with a seemingly endless stream of scandals resulting in departure after departure of key executives including the CEO, Travis Kalanick.
For us drivers on the streets of London, the corporate drift illustrates just how out of touch Uber's management has become from the people who literally drive their business. For too long, Uber has had an almost contemptuous attitude to drivers. Kalanick famously referred to us as ‘the other dude in the car’, a cost to be removed as quickly as possible on Uber’s pathway to a utopian driverless future with maximum profits through minimal employment.
Last October, Yaseen Aslam and I won a landmark ruling against Uber which confirmed the right of all Uber drivers to be guaranteed the national minimum wage and holiday pay. These are the lowest form of employment rights reserved for self-employed workers who are dependent upon and controlled by a single contracting firm. Rather than abide by the ruling, Uber immediately launched an appeal which will be heard next month.
Read more: The gig economy threatens to take us back to pre-Industrial Revolution times
We might be forgiven, then, for seeing Uber’s announcement of improvements to driver conditions as a PR stunt in the run up to legal proceedings. Uber is trumpeting a raft of largely worthless benefits, while spending millions on lawyers to avoid paying even the minimum wage. If it was not for the support of the Independent Workers Union of Great Britain (IWGB) we could not possibly keep fighting Uber for even these minimal rights.
I don’t want to seem churlish or ungrateful for the concessions Uber has now made, but they must be assessed in the broader context of abysmal working conditions at Uber for drivers. United Private Hire Drivers (UPHD) surveys show our members earn about £6.40 per hour, significantly below the national minimum wage. Last year Uber published that ‘top drivers’ work 48 hours per week to earn £18 per hour yielding £864 per week gross. Once you deduct 25 per cent commission and £400 per week for vehicle rental and commercial carriage insurance, fuel and other costs, we find, even Uber ‘top drivers’, earn far below the minimum wage. Separately, Frank Field MP, chair of the influential work and pensions select committee, published his own investigatory report earlier this year and likened Uber driver conditions to sweated labour of the Victorian era.
Perhaps the most eye catching of Uber’s proposals is to allow tipping and to charge additional waiting time. Last year I asked Uber if I could solicit tips and they told me I was free to do so but that it would likely impact on my ratings.
Currently drivers are ‘deactivated’, aka fired, if their rating falls below 4.4. Drivers approaching this dreaded threshold resort to ever desperate measures including stocking their cars with free water and sweets at their own cost. Others avoid times of surge fares when they could earn more money but would suffer lower ratings as passengers generally rate lower when they pay higher fares, even if all of this is well beyond the control of drivers. So, after five years of Uber telling passengers not to tip how will passengers adjust to new expectations? Will the price of a tip be a lower rating that could eventually see you out of a job?
As for waiting time, it’s great to earn a little more while we wait for late arriving passengers but what about also being paid for the time waiting for a job and travelling to a job? Uber builds loyalty through reliable and fast response times. This is achieved through an oversupply of drivers and it is the drivers who pay for this economic efficiency or inefficiency depending on your perspective. Last year the Employment Tribunal ruled that we are entitled to be paid for every hour we are logged on to the platform. To drive the point home the judge quoted Milton: ‘they also serve who only stand and wait.’
The implementation of a panic button is a measure long sought by drivers but continues to be ignored by Uber. Our surveys show that 58 per cent of Uber drivers have been assaulted or threatened on the job while 73 per cent have been racially abused. In the old days of radio controlled local minicab offices, a driver could call for emergency assistance over the radio and fellow drivers quickly arrived on scene to defuse a crisis.
Today, drivers have no real time, 24-hour emergency support from Uber. With so many drivers on the road and visible in the app we thought it would be good if drivers could alert one another for mutual emergency assistance, just like the old days. In refusing this app innovation, Uber has shown that in the world of modern day gig economy platform employment, you are never more connected yet never more alone.
James Farrar is chair of the United Hire Drivers Branch of the Independent Workers Union of Great Britain and lead claimant in Aslam & Farrar v Uber.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
