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Uber Says Thousands of London Drivers Threatened By English Language Test (reuters.com)
Costas Pitas, writing for Reuters: Tens of thousands of London private hire drivers could lose their licenses due to new English reading and writing requirements, taxi app Uber said on Tuesday at the start of a court battle to halt the plans. San Francisco-based Uber, which allows users to book journeys at the touch of a button on their smartphone, has grown rapidly in recent years but faced bans and protests around the world as regulators play catch-up with technology disrupting traditional operators. Uber launched legal action in August after public body Transport for London (TfL) said that drivers should have to prove their ability to communicate in English, including to a standard of reading and writing which Uber says is too high. "It produces the profoundest of human effects. At one extreme it will lead to the loss of livelihood," Uber's lawyer Thomas de la Mare told the High Court in London. There are over 110,000 private hire drivers in the British capital, according to TfL but around 33,000 would fail to pass their renewal test due to the new language hurdle, de la Mare told the court, citing a calculation of data provided by TfL.
...but self-driving cars won't?
It seems just basic common sense to require people that need to deal with the public, including in a safety context, to actually be able to converse in the national language.
......and that's Uber. They don't give a flying fuck about drivers.
Wait, doesn't the UK require some minimum level of literacy before you can get a driver's license?
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
I'm American, and I've got a neighbor who is from somewhere around London. Nice guy, but his cockney accent is so thick I can rarely understand him. I get tired of saying "What?" everytime I talk to him.
. . . but as an initial point, what's wrong with requiring drivers in ENGLAND to show mastery of ENGLISH ??
But secondly, that's actually a minor hurdle, compared to the "knowledge" required to pass the legendarily hard London Cab Drive License Test.
Specifically:
To achieve the required standard to be licensed as an “All London” taxi driver you will need a thorough knowledge, primarily, of the area within a six-mile radius of Charing Cross. You will need to know: all the streets; housing estates; parks and open spaces; government offices and departments; financial and commercial centres; diplomatic premises; town halls; registry offices; hospitals; places of worship; sports stadiums and leisure centres; airline offices; stations; hotels; clubs; theatres; cinemas; museums; art galleries; schools; colleges and universities; police stations and headquarters buildings; civil, criminal and coroner’s courts; prisons; and places of interest to tourists. In fact, anywhere a taxi passenger might ask to be taken.
Uber: "Please don't disqualify the illiterate fools so that we can take advantage of them"
Uber should step up and offer language training.
In most cases I would support a requirement that people who interact with the public be fluent in the native language. On the other hand, English is a European language, so such a requirement would be RAYCISS!
The only people threatened by literacy are Taliban-minded morons. Does the Taliban think English drivers should be passing licensing tests with gestures, grunts and a childlike wonder at the glyphs on road signs?
$
i don't think there is an argument that a cab driver should speak the language of the country they are working in, and as a heavy user of Uber in London, I've never had a driver who was unable to speak to me.
If you look up the tests, you'll find that they are heavy on written English - complex comprehensions, writing short essays. I don't see why that is remotely necessary for a cab driver.
It has far more to do with the traditional cabs attempting to secure their market.
London has one of the best cab drivers in the world due to requirement about memorizing nearly the entirely of the city map. They call it a "knowledge" and it takes year or more of training before they can become a cab driver.
No London Knowledge test? black cab drivers spend a lot of time studying to pass that test also you need to pay for the many tests needed to pass and uber drivers can just start driving?
Funnily enough people from other parts of Britain, who I'm pretty sure don't understand him any better than you, don't complain and in fact think it's quaint.
No, your children are not the special ones. Nor are your pets.
I'm American,
My commiserations but the problem is probably because he is speaking English, not American.
To become a cab driver in London is insane - it called "the knowledge."
There is no way you can do this and not speak English.
Here is a new york times short documentary about it
http://nyti.ms/2lvvMo4
Its a matter of public safety that I can clearly communicate with the driver. If I speak English I need to have the driver speak English, and if I am in an English speaking country I am going to statistically speak English. If the driver does not have the basic skills for the country they are working in the should be forced to get these very basic skills and if they lose the job they have for not having them then that is simply the free market at work!
Alors je ne peux pas être Uber parce que je ne parle pas anglais ? L'anglais c'est de la merde, monsieur, oui, anglais is poopy.
In this universe of strange consequences I foresee people making a legal claim of language disability and expecting a welfare like program to support them as they can not work due to a language deficit. There are even some people who are mute who could communicate through an app on their phone with customers. Should we remove them from the work place due to language difficulties? Then there is the tiny problem of the US having no official, national language. Can you imagine a ghetto youth in Chicago trying to understand the queens English when his native tongue is a very weird ebonic argot.
All those non-English speakers form a core part of its exploitable workforce. Maybe they need to supply a phrase book for drivers to passenger interaction - "I am having a heart attack", "I've left my wallet", or "Please stop raping me".
Well as most of the non-English speaking ubersexual drivers are probably driving on a British driving licence,how about we make it a compulsary part of the basic driving test ?
The fact that there are thousands of people driving illegally on "kahn" licences and that there are plenty of doctors who for £150+ will happely lie about how long a person has supposedly been a patient is probably not helping the situation..
Just keep your fingers crossed that it's not you or one of your family/friends that gets involved with one of these illegal licence holders,they have no insurance,so unless you can afford a private prosecution and they have seizable assets,your up shite creek if you get crippled/killed by one..
Does it apply to self driving cars? If yes "OK Google" needs to step up.
That's why we left you cunts to begin with. Couldn't understand you! lol
Eat pepperoni pizza, light a cigar and fart on your own face.
I once got into a taxi at an airport in Chicago. Before we set off the driver pointed at the meter talking in thick Pidgin English that I could barely understand. The only word I could pick out was "meter." I just nodded politely and said yes because I wanted to get to my hotel for a meeting. When I got to the hotel he started wrangling with me to about paying more than was on the meter, apparently he had turned it off at some stage of the journey for some unfathomable reason. He got really belligerent about it too. The hotel was reimbursing me for the trip and after about five minutes of him, the hotel concierge and me trying to discuss it I just asked the manager to reimburse him what he wanted because I hadn't a clue what was going on and it was only another $20 or so.
I know that some people like apps like Uber because they minimize human communication, but it's still a vital skill. As long as you're not asking drivers to write a book report on Ulysses by Joyce, expecting them to communicate clearly in the local language is not too much to ask for.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
I thought I had read somewhere that Taxis drivers in London England were the most heavily skilled, regulated, and trained. Your training was supposed to be equivalent to like a bachelors degree. Someone did brain scans, and the amount of geographical data in them means they are wired significantly differently than the average mans.
And now the only requirement is that you can speak English?
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Could be worse, he could be Welsh where the BBC would likely subtitle him if conducting an interview.
Time to offend someone
Actually it is the Brits who changed their accent not Americans. How Americans sound is a time capsule of how Brits sounded back in 1700s.
...still need subtitles and a dictionary to fully understand a Guy Ritchie movie.
On the other hand... the B1 level which is required is the equivalent of "GCE AS level / lower grade A-level" which is the equivalent of a 13th-grade exam.
Which about 55% of UK students don't take.
Meaning that 55% of UK citizens, raised and educated in UK, don't qualify.
Or that they would have to fork up 200 pounds to take (and pass) an "expected for university admission" level of knowledge of English.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
But... What about clockboy? He invented such a grand alarm clock that he got to visit Obama at the whitehouse, and a got a free higher edumacation courtesy of SLW'ers.
The only thing Uber is doing is making easy to run taxis without obeying the rules. These already existed, they were called bandit taxis, they aren't disrupting anything.
This is the equivalent of starting a car company and making vehicles that don't obey crash safety and emissions laws.
Yeah, a real friggin genius. Later clock-boy tried to game the system for "discrimination" but the Texas judge through it out of court, faster than you can say 9-11. Best of all, clock boy has to pick up the tab for all the lawyers in the case. Ouch!
An English language test? What a stupid idea! If you give in now, next they will demand all drivers to know how to drive cars. Will demand all drivers to know names of neighborhoods and streets too. We. must. put. a. stop. to. government. overreach.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
And you happen to be the only American who speaks decent English?
Somehow, I think the problem is more likely to be with your English comprehension skills than with anything related to your neighbor (sic).
For a functional community, every one needs to be able to communicate. Language requirements within that community are not racist or a burden. They're needed to ensure a functional society. One in which everyone of every race, religion, sex, etc can actually interact and not live in isolated bubbles. For some reason Progressives want to segregate people in to colonies within a community. That actually drives people apart and reduces diversity. It creates discrimination from all directions. If you truly want a diverse culture of people, you need to bind people together around a few very common things.
Language breaks down barriers by allowing people to actually communicate and share ideas. It's crazy that Progressives are against that. Unless, of course, their real aim is chaos and completely tearing apart the fabric of society in some effort to create revolution and remake the world in a different image.
That's a very broad and mostly wrong statement. The current-day American accent may be closer to some 18th century English accents than most present day English accents are, but both have changed considerably and regional variations in the UK were much larger at the time than they are now. While some of the differences are indeed due to changes in (mostly) southern England that happened after the first waves of English settlers in North America, many of the characteristic features of the American accent developed independently in later periods.
Bullshit. If that was the case why were only a small handful of Muslim majority countries restricted instead of all of them?
Umm alot of the other countries he owns hotels or other ventures in.
Obama created the list of seven nations, and he did so based on large areas of those countries being under ISIS/Daesh control or influence.
Exactly. The real problem is that it's not just your accents that are stuck back in the 18th century.
A friend of mine, Australian, flew to the USA. Don't remember the airport. He took a "cab" and after 30 minutes driving in circles the driver gave him a map and asked him to find the route to the destination. The drivers english was incomprehensible. Turned out he did not even understand what the destination was supposed to be. It was not an "official cab", though.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
If you can't speak English on a certain level then you no business to drive people around. Learn the god damn language (of the country you're gonna live in) as soon as possible and as good as possible.. I also hate it when I have to talk to someone who speak so broken English (or my native language), where you have to repeat a lot over and over for them to understand or them to you..
Y'know what really pisses me off? The requirement that I gotta pass a bunch of tests like the 'man' says in order to pursue my career as a $%$@$ brain surgeon. And don't start me on the insurance costs... #$$@# the man! What am I supposed to do about my livelihood, which has been lost owing to these restrictive laws and regulations?? You're taking away my way of making a living!!
[sniffle]
Just to clarify: fuck Uber.
who came from Italy to start a business in Scotland(yes..yes.. a bloody chip shop!..LOL)
MY father always said.. If you want to go anywhere and take money from people then it's only polite to speak the language
you MUST be able to communicate on a basic level and Uber are just being sphincters as usual...
My father learned the language from scratch when he came here , those who come now should do the same or quite frankly bugger off!
I caught a cab to San Francisco recently (yes, not Uber, my account broke for unknown reasons). The driver was old school and obviously know every road in the Bay area. But he lived by two different GPS services he used. He says he used to use his knowledge, but now, getting through the traffic, he always relies on GPS and related traffic information.
(On the day, he dropped me two blocks from my Hotel -- the walk was faster than the drive.)
They do realize that this is basically an admission that they are exploiting ignorant people that either don't know any better or have limited options for fair treatment, right? Good god, these companies are the slime of the earth. May the rest in disgrace when they crumble.
Driver should speak the language the customer wants.
If that is Mandarin, great!
If it is English, great!
I'd be pissed if I was in China and a native speaker, but the cab driver only spoke English.
Why is that different in the UK?
In a visit to central America for a job, I was given a 15 minute Spanish test - written and oral - before they'd place me. I didn't feel disrespected at all. At the time, Spanish wasn't a language I could speak well, so I was placed in a position where English worked best.
If Uber has a native Chinese speaker and makes that an available option for customers to request, I see it as a plus for the driver and the customer, provided the driver isn't lying about their skills in any specific language.
Catalan IS a Spanish language you shameless goalpost shifter.
Another goalpost shift to avoid admitting deliberate deception.
You must have utter contempt for the people reading this site when you play such petty little deceptive games that rely on ignorance of the reader.
Give the passengers a language test in all those other languages they'll need to communicate with the drivers...