London, July 21 (UNI) In the wake of the shocking Uber Files revelations, the UK’s App Drivers and Couriers Union (ADCU) staged a 24-hour strike till Wednesday midnight, demanding that the ride-hailing platform be held accountable for breaking laws, secretly lobbying governments and exploiting driver safety to expand aggressively from 2013 to 2017. The union on Wednesday asked passengers not to cross the Uber driver picket line and not use the service, along with asking drivers not to open the app.
The union, alleging that Uber fundamentally changed in 2017 after Dara Khosrowshahi became CEO, also held a public demonstration at Uber UK’s head office at Aldgate Towers in London. The ADCU said that Uber must immediately obey the Supreme Court ruling on worker rights in full and “stop cheating drivers and pay all drivers all back pay owed as a result of the court ruling”.
“Uber must end unethical political influencing in the UK, respect our democracy and the integrity of our regulatory bodies and dismiss Uber Executive Board member Pierre-Dimitri Gore-Coty, a convicted criminal in France, whose conduct which endangered drivers & passengers were exposed in the Uber Files,” the union demanded. Yaseen Aslam, ADCU president, said in a statement that “Uber is desperate to whitewash the Uber files revelations as sins of the distant past, but management behavior is as egregious now as ever it was”.
“Uber continues to defy the Supreme Court ruling to deny drivers their full rights to minimum wage and holiday pay for all working time. In making partial settlement in the wake of the landmark ruling, Uber took advantage of vulnerable drivers, already impoverished by the pandemic, to pressure them to settle for far less than what was really owed and to surrender their statutory rights,” Aslam emphasized. Uber made some tweaks in the UK after the Supreme Court ruling, like paid holiday time for drivers, pension plan, and minimum wages.
However, the ADCU said that Uber has failed to comply with the Supreme Court and lower court rulings to pay drivers at least the minimum wage after costs for all working time from logging on to log off.
