Uber Files: An unprecedented and shocking dive
into the black box of lobbying
By Damien
Leloup
Published
on July 10, 2022 at 18h00, updated at 18h30 on July 10, 2022
NEWS
ANALYSIS The investigation by 'Le Monde' and its partners illustrates how a
multinational company can use colossal means, high-level influence games and
dubious methods to change the law to its advantage.
It's an
unprecedented dive into the black box of lobbying. Le Monde and its partners
accessed more than 18 gigabytes of internal data – emails, presentations,
meeting minutes – from Uber. The data, originally sent to the British daily The
Guardian, was analyzed by more than 40 newsrooms around the world under the
supervision of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists
(ICIJ). The data includes documents from Uber's "hottest" period: the
2014-2016 years, during which the company set up shop in France in particular,
while taxis violently protested and questions were raised about the company's
model of not using labor contracts.
Uber Files:
An international investigation
Uber Files
is an investigation based on thousands of internal Uber documents passed on by
an anonymous source to the British newspaper The Guardian and shared with the
International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) and 42 partner
media outlets, including Le Monde.
Dating from
2013 to 2017, these 124,000 documents offer a rare insight into the inner
workings of a multinational company that was at the time seeking to establish
itself worldwide despite a regulatory context that was unfavorable to its
practices. The files shed light on Uber's lobbying actions with public authorities
and reveal possible illegal practices made by the Californian group to get
around laws.
This huge
quantity of documents describes in detail the way Uber used all the tricks of
the lobbying trade to try to change the law to its advantage, in France and beyond.
The company was not content with making the usual contacts at all levels of
politics and administration. It also wrote amendments that it sent to members
of parliament sympathetic to its cause and hired agencies with dubious methods
to conduct influence campaigns. It paid academics to write studies carefully
framed to be favorable to them and it called on the resources of American
diplomacy. And it even secretly helped create an "independent"
organization of professional drivers, while actually controlling the
organization's work.
Taken
together, these strategies of influence illustrate the extent to which large
companies can attack from various angles to circumvent national legislation
These
strategies of influence are not illegal and that is perhaps itself a problem.
Taken together, they depict the extent to which large companies, fueled by
almost infinite budgets raised from major investors in the United States, can
attack from various angles to bypass national parliaments and regulators.
Transparency registers, both in France and at the European level, offer only a
tiny window into the actions of these lobbyists.
The Uber
Files also reveal a totally unknown part of the history of the "start-up
nation" desired by aspiring president Emmanuel Macron. They show to what
extent he went out of his way, as minister of the economy, to support a company
targeted by multiple legal and tax investigations. He worked against the advice
of the Socialist majority in Parliament and without the knowledge of the rest
of the government. Remaining in the shadows, Mr. Macron acted as a true partner
to Uber, getting personally involved on multiple occasions in a case for which
he officially had no responsibility.
'Chaos
strategy' deployed everywhere
At the
time, however, you didn't need to have access to Uber's internal data to know
that the company was controversial. Uber co-founder and CEO Travis Kalanick did
not try to hide it. His business followed the "chaos strategy," which
consists in setting itself up in countries in defiance of national laws,
growing the number of jobs and users and negotiating only once in a position of
strength. This job extortion was theorized and applied by Uber in dozens of
countries. In France, the company maintained its UberPop service for several
months, allowing anyone to become a driver, even though it has been judged
illegal on a number of occasions.
The Uber
Files show how the company tried, on six occasions, to obstruct French
investigators during searches of its offices
Respecting
the law, in its letter or in its spirit, was not Uber's priority at the time.
The Uber Files show how the company tried to obstruct the action of French
investigators during searches of its offices on six different occasions. They
also reveal how Uber has been able to aggressively "optimize" its
taxation situation through its Dutch subsidiary and with the complicity of the
Dutch authorities. And the files show the complex contortions used by the
company to justify the hiring of former European Commissioner Neelie Kroes, who
was theoretically bound by ethical clauses preventing her from joining a
company she had previously managed.
"I
joined Uber nearly 10 years ago, at the start of my career. I was young and
inexperienced and too often took direction from superiors with questionable
ethics," admitted Pierre-Dimitri Gore-Coty, at the time manager for
Western Europe, now the boss of the powerful Uber Eats meal delivery service.
Drivers
paid the heaviest price
Uber claims
that it changed after the departure of Mr. Kalanick, who was replaced in 2017
by the more consensual Dara Khosrowshahi. Duly noted. But the Uber Files only
lift the veil on a very small part of the lobbying that targets members of
Parliament, ministers, mayors of large cities and European commissioners, in
France as elsewhere. In Uber's lobbying campaigns, other American technology
operators also appear intermittently – in this small lobbying milieu, the
"public policy" agents, as they modestly describe themselves, all
know each other and often move from one company to another.
Uber's
defenders will undoubtedly present the defense that the company, despite its
flaws, did radically shake up the taxi industry, which was itself lobbying hard
at the time, and that it created many jobs. This last argument would be more
credible if the VTC (professionally-licensed) drivers at the time had not been
the ones who paid the highest price for Uber's "chaos strategy."
Sometimes
assaulted by legitimate taxis and often weaponized by the company, which
incited them to protest against restrictive measures, Uber's first drivers were
also the hardest hit by the fare cuts decided unilaterally by Uber in 2017.
These pushed drivers, who had sometimes gone heavily into debt to buy a luxury
vehicle and who did not have any particular qualifications, to have to work
ever more hours for ever less money. Less than a decade later, most have given
up – and retrained for other professions.
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