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Trump-Style Tactics Finally Stopped Working For Uber (buzzfeed.com)
BuzzFeed Editor-in-Chief Ben Smith describes a three-year-old meeting that Uber held -- which saw several influencers including actor Ed Norton among attendees -- as the beginning of the ride-hailing company's long slow meltdown. Later today, the company is expected to announce that its CEO Travis Kalanick would be temporarily stepping away, and his closest lieutenant is all set to hand his resignation. On Sunday, the company held a board meeting, which according to several journalists, lasted for nearly seven hours. The meeting capped a difficult stretch for the ride-hailing company, which is trying to weather an investigation into its workplace culture, a lawsuit by Google parent Alphabet over the alleged theft of self-driving car trade secrets, a federal probe into its business practices, and the recent departures of top executives. Back to Ben: At the dinner (which took place three years ago), Emil Michael, the right hand of CEO Travis Kalanick, heatedly complained to me about the press. The company, he told me, could hire a team of opposition researchers to fight fire with fire and attack the media -- specifically to smear a female journalist who has criticized the company. I suggested to him that this plan wouldn't really work because the story would immediately become a story about Uber behaving like maniacs. "Nobody would know it was us," Michael responded. "But you just told me!," I replied. [...] Instead of making any meaningful changes, Uber simply pressed on for years. It found both continued growth and accumulating scandals. Many of its crises, like those remarks to me, were tinged with misogyny, whether sexual harassment of its engineers or pulling a rape victim's medical files. After one of those engineers, Susan Fowler, stepped forward with a blog post detailing systemic sexual harassment and discrimination -- a post that was followed up by a series of devastating stories by The New York Times, Recode, and others -- the company invited former Attorney General Eric Holder to lead an internal investigation. Sunday, the Wall Street Journal reported that Michael is set to resign, and Reuters reported Kalanick will take a leave of absence ahead of what's expected to be a deeply damning Holder report. (Kalanick is also coping with a family tragedy.) They will leave having built the most valuable private company in the world. But it is a company whose cultural darkness is inseparable from its place as the icon of the tech boom. Uber -- and the boom -- have been defined both by massive new conveniences and by a corporate culture that is aggressive, paranoid, and dismissive of, in particular, complaints from women; a culture of enemies lists and cavalier approaches to the law. Emil Michael told Uber employees Monday that he has left the company.
As a current Uber driver, I hate Uber too, but not for the same reasons others do.
Uber/Lyft actually save lives. This fact shouldn't be underestimated. Talk to any longtime bartender or policeman in an area that allows Uber and Lyft and they'll tell you that Uber/Lyft have made a huge impact on the reduction of drunk driving accidents. This is the real benefit to society. And I don't care if you're a Democrat, or a Bernie Sanders supporter, but trying to outlaw or regulate Uber/Lyft out of existence is sheer insanity if you really claim to care about your fellow human beings.
With that said, the CEO of Uber has autistic tendencies and lacks emotional maturity. While Trump is a compulsive liar, Uber's CEO (Travis) is a compulsive truth-sayer (but not in a good way either). And I'm not saying this lightly. For instance, Uber's CEO has spoken to a dinner with hundreds of journalists and told them that Uber was doing opposition research into journalists that were critical of Uber. Now, he didn't say that to threaten journalists, he just said to explain his strategy (which he really should never have). And I don't care that probably most large corporations do use opposition research and compose extensive dossiers on whoever they deem an enemy of the company, I'm sure that many of them do. As an executive, it's just not something that you should just blurt out and say, especially to other journalists.
But that too is not the reason I hate Uber. The reason I hate Uber is because the company has no human empathy for any of its drivers. For instance, when Uber deactivates (fires) a driver, it does it while the driver may still be driving a passenger and it does it in the most dangerous way possible. It just logs you out of the driver app (and it doesn't let you log back in). That's it. So imagine, you're a passenger, you're in the car of an Uber driver, you're about halfway towards your destination on some freeway, and suddenly, the trip gets canceled, the driver won't get paid for having picked you up, in fact, he just got fired. Who does that? Seriously? Not even Walmart will fire their employees when they're in middle of a transaction with another customer. And if the employee was unstable to begin with, that's why you're firing him, then all the reason you shouldn't do that when your associate/employee is in a car alone with your customer. Plus, it's not like Uber is a new company anymore. Uber was founded six or seven years ago. Six or seven years, in my opinion, should be enough to rectify such an issue.
And the second reason I hate Uber is wage theft. Now, I won't go into the details. There is a class action lawsuit on this issue. That is the main reason Uber changed its terms of services with its drivers three weeks ago. But now instead of telling its drivers, sorry, we made mistake, we're sorry we stole the money we owed you and lied about what riders were actually paying us. Uber is now doubling down by essentially telling us, from now on, the amount the rider is paying us has no relation to the amount that we'll be paying you. This is a take it, or leave it, deal. If you don't accept the new terms of services, you can't drive for us anymore.