A protester
gestures as Uber and Lyft drivers drive through Beverly Hills on Wednesday to
demonstrate outside the $72m home of the Uber co-founder Garrett Camp.
Photograph: Mark Ralston/AFP via Getty Images
Uber
reported losses that would make WeWork blush – and that's the good news
Ride-hailing
companies are stepping up their fight against new worker protections. They want
drivers to help
Julia
Carrie Wong in San Francisco
@juliacarriew Email
Thu 7 Nov
2019 11.01 GMTLast modified on Thu 7 Nov 2019 16.42 GMT
It feels a
bit Alice in Silicon Valleyland, but the good news for Uber this week was that
it lost $1.2bn in the third quarter of 2019. While burning that kind of cash in
90 days would make even WeWork’s Adam Neumann blush, it is an improvement over
the previous quarter’s jaw-dropping deficit of $5.24bn.
Uber’s
latest financial results came just two days before its post-IPO lockup period
expired on Wednesday, allowing early investors and employees to cash out and
touching off a stock sell-off that saw the share price reach a new all-time
low. Hundreds of Uber drivers across California marked the occasion with
protests targeting some of the handful of people who have unambiguously
benefited from the Uber economy. Drivers visited the home of the early investor
and former board member Bill Gurley in Atherton and the $72.5m mansion of the
co-founder Garret Camp in Beverly Hills.
The
company’s fraught relationship with its workforce is only going to get more
complicated over the next year, as the fundamental question of Uber’s existence
– are drivers employees or independent contractors? – is put to the test in its
home state.
Uber,
together with Lyft and DoorDash, took the first steps this past week to fight
back against a landmark bill, AB5, that would jeopardize the contractor status
of ride-share and delivery drivers. On 28 October, the three companies filed
the paperwork to begin a campaign for a November 2020 ballot measure that would
exempt them from the new rules for classifying workers.
They were
following through on their August pledge of $30m for the initiative – a
last-ditch attempt to scare state lawmakers off passage of the bill. The
legislature did not blink, and Instacart and Postmates have since thrown in
$10m apiece of their own, putting the nascent campaign on track to be one of
the most expensive in California history.
Uber and Lyft have wasted no time in
leveraging their relationships with drivers to advance the campaign
Uber and
Lyft have wasted no time in leveraging their relationships with drivers to
advance the campaign. Drivers who log on to Lyft to work are shown a screen
urging them to sign up in support of a “ballot measure to preserve your freedom
and provide new protections and benefits”, while Uber sent emails urging
drivers to “vote yes to protect driver choice and flexibility”.
There are
no limits on the amount of app-based campaigning like this that Uber and Lyft
can do under California law, according to Bob Stern, former president of the
Center for Governmental Studies. That means the ride-hail experience in
California is likely to become heavily politicized over the next year. Think
app notifications urging you to vote or campaign flyers delivered alongside
your takeout food. Signature gathering is a quintessential, pre-gig-economy gig
in California, and it may be only a matter of time before ride-hail companies
begin offering drivers bonuses to carry petitions and gather signatures in
their cars.
In
conversations inside Facebook groups for Uber and Lyft drivers, workers are
divided over support for AB5 or the ballot measure – and distrustful of any
claims that their working conditions will ever improve. The ballot measure
promises an “earnings guarantee” of 120% of the minimum wage, provides a
$0.30-per-mile reimbursement for gas and other expenses, and offers a stipend
for healthcare for those who drive at least 15 hours a week. But an analysis by
the UC Berkeley Labor Center – dismissed as “absurd” by the campaign – found
that loopholes in the initiative mean that drivers would only be guaranteed
$5.64 an hour.
Uber has
both claimed that AB5 does not apply to it – and treated it as an existential
threat. In its financial filings, the company acknowledges that classifying
drivers as employees would require it to “fundamentally change [its] business
model”. Also acknowledged in those filings is another unhappy fact: over the
course of its existence, Uber has lost $15.3bn.
At some
point, another fundamental question will need to be answered: is this business
model even worth preserving?
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