Uber is facing an uprising from drivers in Europe who want both increased stability and greater freedom and are demanding stronger employment rights and access to their data.
On the employment-rights front, two Uber drivers continue to fight for basic guarantees in the UK's Supreme Court. Uber drivers are classified as independent contractors, which means they are not entitled to sick pay or the minimum wage.
But in 2016, British drivers James Farrar and Yaseen Aslam successfully argued that Uber should give drivers "worker status," which grants them rights like paid holidays and the national minimum wage. Uber has continually appealed that decision and now taken its fight to the UK Supreme Court, where a ruling is expected in October.
It could be a landmark decision for gig-economy workers and a costly outcome for Uber.
Uber's argument is that its platform only connects passengers with drivers, who are given the flexibility to log into the app when they please and turn down rides they don't want to take.
Farrar is a former Uber driver who is involved in both legal cases. He's now the founder of Worker Info Exchange, an organization that hopes to help gig-economy workers in Europe obtain their data.
Worker Info Exchange is one of the founding members of the International Alliance of App-Based Transport Workers, a union fighting for the rights of gig-economy workers. It was formed in January and already has delegates across 23 countries and multiple platforms, including Lyft, Ola, and Bolt, as well as Uber.
In an interview with Business Insider, Farrar countered Uber's depiction of the platform and painted a darker picture of long hours and poor pay. He said he was forced to take all the rides he was offered to chase a 4.4-star average to avoid seeing his account deactivated.
"Uber gives me work, but also I'm obliged to do that work for Uber," Farrar said. "Uber will say you can cancel the job if you like, but you can't do that without incurring some kind of a penalty. If I was truly self-employed, I could cancel all the work I wanted to. It wouldn't make any difference; it's my choice."
He added: "It strikes me as Uber trying to justify a fairly complicated shell game, which ultimately cheats workers. If you're at the lowest rung, and you're vulnerable to terrible exploitation like you can be in the gig economy, then you need the protection of a minimum wage."
Uber says it has changed its model since the 2016 tribunal. For example, it introduced free insurance for its drivers.
Farrar is also part of a second high-profile lawsuit filed on July 20 against Uber in Amsterdam, where the company is headquartered for all of its non-US operations.
This lawsuit seeks to force Uber to release the personal data of drivers, which it claims is hidden in profiles tagged with information about late arrivals, cancellations, and complaints about attitude and inappropriate behavior from customers.
Uber drivers say they believe that the algorithm uses the tags to manage their performance.
"The app decides millions of times a day who's going to get which ride and who gets the nice rides, who gets the short rides," Anton Ekker, the lawyer representing the Uber drivers in the lawsuit, said.
"It's all about the distribution of power. So Uber is exerting control through data and automated decision-making, and it's blocking the access to that," he said, adding that this is a problem throughout the gig economy. "If Uber is forced by the courts to provide more data, this will contribute to workers' rights, to balancing this power relation."
Uber said it had responded to all requests for data.
"Drivers, and anyone else using our app, can request access to the data that we can legally provide," an Uber spokesperson said. "We will give explanations when we cannot provide certain data, such as when it doesn't exist or disclosing it would infringe on the rights of another person under GDPR."
The data-privacy lawsuit is directly connected to the UK Supreme Court case: Farrar said he became aware of what he characterized as hidden driver profiles from the internal communications Uber submitted for its defense case.
The release of such data could be a blow to Uber's argument that its drivers are independent contractors, as it could show that the app does more than just connect self-employed drivers with paying customers.
The lawsuits against Uber are part of a perceived power imbalance in the gig economy, where workers feel they answer to black-box algorithms rather than human managers.
Uber says that using location information to match passengers with drivers leads to more business for drivers, but Farrar said he believed the increasing reliance on algorithms could work against drivers' interest and result in unfair outcomes.
"Uber has a rule that if you reach 4.4 in your ratings, you're deactivated. So basically Uber has outsourced management to the discriminatory view of their customer," Farrar said. "The question then becomes who reaches 4.4 faster? If I'm a white European man from Ireland, am I going to reach 4.4 faster than a migrant worker from West Africa?"
Uber doesn't publicly disclose which rating results in drivers being booted off its platform, but prior reporting from Business Insider put the number at 4.6.
Understanding the data and how it is used by the algorithms is the first step in addressing the asymmetric power between gig-economy workers and tech giants like Uber, according to Farrar.
"The long, hard road that we are on now is how do we organize the dispersed digital workforce? And what is the currency for our organizing? The gateway in the future to worker rights is through digital rights," he said.
A win against Uber could open the floodgates for data-privacy challenges against other apps.
The need to assert the rights of gig-economy workers is now more important than ever, Farrar said, with delivery apps expected to be some of the biggest winners in the post-pandemic economy.
Global customer volume in the digital gig economy is projected to grow to $455 billion in 2023, from $204 billion in 2018, according to Mastercard.
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Uber drivers fight for employment rights and access to their data - Business Insider
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