They accuse Uber of illegally banning them, following an automatic process. One hundred and seventy-one VTC drivers have mandated the League of Human Rights (LDH) to file a complaint, Thursday, June 17, with the National Commission for Informatics and Freedoms (CNIL).
Many drivers have been banned from the Uber application after “Sending automatic and strictly identical messages, all based on the same model”, is it written in the complaint. In most cases they evoke a “Violation of one of the principles of the Uber community charter” or one ” anomaly “, without further clarification.
“Chain disconnections”
For complainants, this standardized sanctioning process is fully automated and without human intervention, which is illegal. Especially since in the vast majority of cases, there is no recourse to contest these sanctions.
In a survey of 813 VTC drivers, the National VTC Intersyndicale (INV) established that more than half of them had been victims of a permanent or temporary disconnection. Of the 138 drivers who were permanently disconnected, 120 say they have been so without any warning and 123 have not been able to benefit from any recourse to contest the sanction.
These last months, “We are witnessing chain disconnections”, says Me Jérôme Giusti, lawyer for LDH. “There was the ordinance on social dialogue [qui prévoit des élections professionnelles dans le secteur pour 2022] and we suspect Uber of wanting to clean up from this perspective ”, he says.
Previous conviction
On February 24, an Amsterdam court convicted Uber for disconnecting “Based solely on automated processing”, is it written in the complaint. A judgment contested by Uber, which requested its annulment. Any disconnection “Is taken after a manual examination by our team of specialists”, a company spokesperson told Agence France-Presse, adding that drivers could request access to their data at any time, except when “Their disclosure would infringe the rights of another person”.
Jérôme Giusti, for his part, calls on the CNIL to “Urgently seize the courts to put an end to these massive temporary or definitive disconnections”. “Today, it is a risk in the field of social rights that there are computers that process and make decisions”, he concluded.