Uber earns $ 20 million after settling driver dispute



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Photo: Marco Ugarte (AP)

Uber is a company that dictates how a large number of car owners take passengers, the place of their pickup, the state of the car in which these people are settled and the salary that they win, but that does not take into account these drivers to be his employees.

As you can imagine, this has led to quite a lot of lawsuits.

A class action, which began by challenging the way it classified drivers but ultimately focused on Uber's attempts to resolve conflicts with drivers outside a courtroom, was one of those remedies. Installed today in the Northern District Court of California, it will cost at least $ 20 million to the carpool company, pending the approval of the judge. ($ 5 million in legal fees would also be charged to Uber.)

Payments after more than five years of litigation, including the withdrawal of accreditation from the original group, which included 385,000 drivers, will likely be minimal for the remaining 13,000 complainants. The decision to settle the lawsuit, O'Conner v Uber, will not create a precedent for similar cases regarding the status of drivers as full-fledged employees against contractors, nor will it change the company's policy of burying arbitration agreements in the service that few of its drivers will probably read.

For contextual reasons, drivers, customers and the government mingle with Uber with a regularity that could only be surprising if you have totally avoided any story about the company in the last six years. It paid out $ 84 million to Massachusetts motorists, $ 10 million more by checking driving history, $ 10 million more to female software engineers for allegedly discriminatory practices, $ 20 million to file a lawsuit. the FTC that it exceeded the potential earnings of drivers, a handful of hundreds of thousands of dollars for allegedly underpaid and discriminating drivers vis-à-vis the visually impaired, $ 20 million for sending unsolicited SMS spam and $ 148 million for a data breach policy.

In the end, an additional $ 20 million – not even $ 1,500 per driver, before the attorney's fees, after half a decade of lawsuits – are just another slap for a company that has done its evidence in the pretense of circumventing the labor laws and doing what it wants. at the expense of its workers and the places it operates.

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