Uber Angers Customers, Drivers, And Even Its Few Supporters

You really have to hand it to CEO Travis Kalanick and Uber. They sure know how to piss off their drivers, their customers, and now even one of the few municipal governments where they actually had some support.

In late January, Uber filed suit against the city of Seattle over its law that would allow drivers for Uber, Lyft, and other ride-sharing services to unionize. The bill actually passed unanimously in the Seattle City Council but was held up for almost a year as the ever worker-friendly US Chamber of Commerce challenged the bill in court, essentially carrying the water for Uber and Lyft. That suit was dismissed last year as being premature, since the law had yet to be implemented. The city’s implementation began in December when rules about what drivers would be eligible and how organizations could be certified to represent drivers were finally announced. That prompted Uber’s suit which called Seattle’s law “arbitrary and capricious”. It certainly was an odd way  to start off the company’s self-proclaimed “Year of the Driver”. Interestingly, Lyft has not joined or filed a suit of their own, preferring, it seems, to let Uber take all the heat while Lyft is content to see where the chips fall.

It also appears that Uber was once again using an outside firm to investigate “Seattle’s political stakeholders and the dynamics of labor unions in the city”.  This all seems a little too reminiscent of another Uber “investigation” of a citizen who was suing Uber and his lawyer that earned a stern reprimand from a federal judge. The judge in that case believed “the purpose of the [Uber] investigation was to try to unearth derogatory personal information about Mr. Meyer and his counsel that could then be used to try to intimidate them or to prejudice the court against them.” Uber has confirmed the investigation in Seattle but says it is not designed to target specific drivers or union organizers. Sure.

It was only a few days later, that Uber’s effort to take advantage of the taxi strike in support of the protests against Trump’s Muslim ban backfired in the worst possible way. A reported 200,000 customers deleted their Uber app in protest and Kalanick was forced to resign from Trump’s economic advisory council.

That event may have also been the straw that broke the camel’s back in Pittsburgh. That city has been a long-time Uber supporter, defending the company when Uber was fined over $11 million for another one of its blatantly illegal moves, operating in Pennsylvania without proper authorization. In addition, the city also was a testing ground for Uber’s autonomous vehicle trials which created even more problems for Uber when they were tried, again illegally, in San Francisco. Pittsburgh hoped to get something in return for its work with Uber such as information on traffic flows and perhaps even convince Uber to manufacture at least parts of their autonomous vehicles in the city. In addition, they also wanted Uber’s help in winning the Smart City Challenge that would entitle the city to a $50 million US Department of Transportation grant. To that end, it asked Uber to provide a transit connection from Carnegie Mellon University to the area of the city that Uber was testing its autonomous vehicles. What the city got in return was a list of demands from Uber about what the city needed to do for the company including, according to Quartz, “access to bus lanes, designated pick-up and drop-off spots for self-driving cars, and ‘prioritization of snow removal’ on self-driving car routes.” In essence, Uber said it would do nothing to help Pittsburgh while demanding Pittsburgh do more to help Uber. So far, the only thing Uber has apparently done for the city is a $10,000 donation to a homeless shelter. As the exasperated city controller said, ““Unfortunately, to this point, the relationship with Uber appears to be a one-way limited-access highway.They currently operate as though they have been given carte blanche access to our city.” But that is pretty much the way this serial criminal enterprise treats every municipality where it provides its service.

As Erik Loomis says about Uber, “Whenever it comes up in the news, you know it’s going to be because they are doing something awful again.” Truer words may not have been spoken.