Uber remains evil, and for once it’s not getting away with every nasty trick it pulls. The company has admitted that it underpaid its New York City drivers by around $45 million, and will give back pay averaging $900 per driver:
The ride-hailing company has previously misled drivers about how much they could make and miscalculated fares. In this case, Uber was taking its cut of fares based on the pretax sum, instead of after taxes and fees as stated in its terms of service. The issue was also raised in a lawsuit against San Francisco-based Uber filed by the New York Taxi Workers Alliance. In March, Uber acknowledged that it had underestimated drivers’ pay in Philadelphia by millions of dollars.
But Uber’s wage theft, even just in New York, doesn’t stop at $45 million.
The Taxi Workers Alliance said the payments Uber is offering didn’t go far enough. "While we welcome progress in Uber acknowledging its unlawful deductions, make no mistake: the full amount that they owe to drivers is much more than what it is now claiming," Bhairavi Desai, the Taxi Workers Alliance’s executive director, said in a statement. "Uber hasn’t just wrongly calculated its commission, it has been unlawfully taking the cost of sales tax and an injured worker surcharge right out of driver pay as opposed to charging it on top of the fare as the law requires."
This is a terrible company, and if you think that once Uber has undercut taxis and found a way to screw over public transit it won’t treat you like it currently treats its drivers … think again. Think hard. And think about the fact that companies like Uber want to turn us all into workers they can exploit this brazenly.