It’s been a typical day for Abdurzak Hadi, an Uber driver, although he has to pinch himself to believe where he’s ended up. The 44-year-old father-of-three arrived in England on his own in 1992 as a teenage refugee, having fled Somalia’s brutal civil war. When he was old enough, he became a minicar driver. He then signed up with Uber in 2014. Q&A
What are Uber records?
projection The Uber Files is a global investigation based on a trove of 124,000 documents leaked to the Guardian by Mark MacGann, Uber’s former chief lobbyist in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. The data consists of emails, iMessages and WhatsApp exchanges between the top executives of the Silicon Valley giant, as well as memos, presentations, notebooks, briefing documents and invoices. The leaked records cover 40 countries and span from 2013 to 2017, the period when Uber was aggressively expanding around the world. They reveal how the company broke the law, deceived police and regulators, exploited violence against drivers and secretly lobbied governments around the world. To facilitate a global public interest investigation, the Guardian shared the data with 180 journalists in 29 countries through the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ). The investigation was managed and led by the Guardian with the ICIJ. In a statement, Uber said: “We have not and will not condone past behavior that is clearly inconsistent with our current values. Instead, we’re asking the public to judge us based on what we’ve done in the last five years and what we’ll do in the years to come.” Thanks for your response. On the day of the strike, Handy dropped his youngest son off at school and then left his north London home on his bike to help with the demonstration. As president of the London branch of a radical new union, the App Drivers & Couriers Union (ADCU), Hadi is part of a David and Goliath campaign against tech giants. He was one of 19 Uber drivers who took the company to court in 2015, initially with the help of the GMB union, to claim they were workers entitled to the statutory minimum wage. Uber insisted its drivers were self-employed contractors, as it has claimed around the world. UK drivers finally won their case when the high court ruled in their favor in 2021. It took a six-year battle against Uber’s endless appeals to assert their rights. Abdurzak Hadi became an Uber driver in 2014. Photo: David Levene/The Guardian Hadi was in awe of the process. He thought: ‘Wow, how I’m one of the guys sitting here in this court – an average man from Somalia, from a poor background, coming to London, talking to other migrant drivers, can take a huge company to court. It was incredible. I felt like I was part of history.” Handy loves being an Uber driver. He clearly remembers the excitement he felt over the promised revolution in the taxi market when Uber launched in London. The American startup talked about empowering entrepreneurs and gave the impression of a miraculous match of supply and demand, thanks to its algorithm, that would create well-paid jobs. Uber offered huge cash rewards to drivers and £50 credits to customers who brought their friends on board. It used billions of dollars of investor cash to pay for these subsidies to undercut competitors, lure drivers onto the platform and dominate the market. “It was honey at that point, yes honey,” Hadi recalls. But soon the prices dropped. Waiting time increased as Uber flooded the market with cars. He then increased the commission he took from drivers from 20% to 25%. Today, Hadi estimates it takes him 14 hours to make what he used to make in just five hours in the early days, and he believes Uber’s commission can be 35% or more at times, although the price is opaque and variable. By 2015, Hadi found he was making so little as prices fell that his family qualified for tax credits – welfare payments for those in low-paid work. “So Uber is heavily subsidized by you, the taxpayer.” Hadi remembers that a moment of truth dawned when he faced his first problem with violence. He had accepted a reservation on the app for four passengers, but found five drunken men waiting to get into his car. He refused them, as he was not licensed or insured for more than four. One of them smashed his car door in rage. There was no friendly controller to call. The only way to report it was a message through the app, in which he says he received a response that looked like a cut and paste. Hadi typically works 40-50 hours a week on the Uber app, over six days. Photo: David Levene/The Guardian He stayed with Uber because he believed it would give him the flexibility to choose where to work. His son Mohammed was undergoing grueling treatment for leukemia, so Hadi worked for Uber in the area around Great Ormond Street Hospital, accepting rides for a few hours at a time before pausing to take charge of his wife at Mohammed’s bedside, then going out outside. to earn more. But the flexibility wasn’t as good as he’d hoped. he often found himself sent miles away when a return trip was needed. Despite all efforts to save him, Hadi’s son died in 2019. The treatment was often very painful and Hadi is haunted by guilt to this day. “Was it worth putting him through all of this? You don’t wait to bury your son, you wait for your son to bury you. It’s the worst thing that can happen to any parent.” He still refuses to accept any Uber trips that take him near the hospital. Uber says it’s now making it easier to insure drivers in times of crisis. But at the time Hadi saw no point in telling Uber what the family was going through. “There was no human interaction, no one to understand what misery you are going through. It is a system, and so only the system will communicate with you. It’s a system designed to manipulate drivers and squeeze them as much as possible.” The drivers often appear in the Uber files, a cache of 124,000 company documents leaked to the Guardian. But mostly, they are abstractly referred to as “supply” or “liquidity” – a commodity controlled by the algorithm. Uber says it now has about 3.5 million drivers, calling itself “one of the largest job platforms in the world.”
Cash burn for “revenue purchase”
Many of these millions of drivers will be familiar with Uber’s sliding pay scale. When entering new markets, it heavily subsidized drivers to attract a pool of cars large enough to offer prompt service to customers and undercut taxis. Those subsidies involved spending billions in investor cash, and Uber tried to cut what it paid drivers as soon as possible, the leak suggests. A presentation to dozens of Uber executives gathered for a summit at its Amsterdam headquarters in January 2015 reveals how aggressively Uber subsidized rides in each city when it launched and how it designed price cuts that drivers like Hadi experienced as devastating loss of income. In October 2014 in Madrid, the presentation shows, the $17.50 hourly subsidy to drivers was nearly double the hourly fare they charged, which was only $9.10. In Berlin, Uber’s gross hourly fare was $2.20, while the subsidy it paid drivers was $10.20 an hour. Uber burned through cash to “buy revenue,” in the words of the presentation. At the same meeting, a senior manager spoke of “burning the burn” – that is, cutting subsidies. “New City: You’re still subsidizing your market. Get a real feel for the net fare/hour the quote scales to. Make sure drivers don’t end up making more than they need to,” said one of the slides. In cities like Paris, where Uber had been operating for some time, the subsidy had been cut and the company paid just $0.10 an hour in incentives, while bringing in $23.40 an hour in revenue. The drivers were already squeezing. In Cape Town, Uber’s initial subsidies of $4 an hour have been reduced to almost zero. Derick Ongansie, 66, remembers the impact of those cuts clearly. He had invested in three vehicles to become an Uber driver entrepreneur in Cape Town in 2014 after taking a break from work due to cancer. He was enticed by Uber’s presentations about how much could be done. For the first year, he said, it was very lucrative and he could make “fantastic” money, up to $290 a day. But a year later, he said, Uber began withdrawing some of the incentives and then introduced a new Uber service paying a fraction of the fare. The commission he got went up. “That’s when we all started crashing. Uber was taking us for a ride,” he said. Derick Ongansie says his pay was often under $1 an hour. Photo: Kevin Jones In his third year driving for Uber, he says, he made about a third of what he made in his first year. After expenses including fuel, insurance, phone and car maintenance, he estimated his pay often came to less than $1 an hour. Drivers around the world felt the same results. Uber disputed that initial large subsidies followed by inevitable cuts were an inherent part of its business model for expansion. “Our interests are aligned with drivers, making sure they have a positive earning experience on the platform,” said Uber’s head of public affairs, Jill Hazelbaker, adding that drivers would otherwise go elsewhere. Uber records suggest that where drivers fought back, Uber adjusted its algorithm to buy its way. When it cut prices and driver payments in Italy in October 2014, a manager again reported an “attempted strike/mutiny, with an extremely low offer, around 50 drivers joined…
