Friday 19th February 2021
Clap in the UK
Uber has to hire drivers properly
The US transportation service provider Uber is celebrating itself as revolutionary. Many critics regard the business model of self-employed drivers as wage and social dumping. In Great Britain at least this practice is coming to an end after a long legal battle.
The driving service broker Uber has lost an important legal battle in Great Britain in years of struggle for the status of drivers. Uber drivers should be treated as employees of the company and not as independent contractors, the London Supreme Court ruled on Friday. In doing so, the court followed the decisions of previous instances against which Uber had appealed.
As employees, drivers would be entitled to basic employee rights such as breaks, paid vacation or minimum wages. A spokesman for the GMB union described the decision as an "historic victory". One will now campaign for compensation payments.
Treating drivers as independent entrepreneurs is a cornerstone of the business model of Uber and rivals like Lyft – and they claim that this is the only way to be economically viable. Uber has been involved in legal disputes on the subject in various countries for years.
In California, Uber and Lyft even threatened to shut down operations last year after a law passed in the state granted drivers employee status. The set of rules was then overturned in a referendum. Uber and Lyft argued in a lobbying campaign, among other things, that most drivers themselves wanted the freedom not to be permanently employed.
Reform of the driving service market in Germany
In Germany, too, the signs point to change, here in favor of Uber: The federal government's bill to reform the transport service market provides that existing obstacles for new mobility providers should disappear. This is intended to facilitate the entry of new providers into the taxi and driving service market, which are usually ordered via an app. Existing offers are currently running on the basis of an experimental clause. The new services are intended to complement the classic taxi business and local public transport. So-called pooling offers for transport services in which several passengers share a vehicle are to be allowed on a permanent basis.
According to Federal Transport Minister Andreas Scheuer, it is not about "taxi versus Uber". Nobody wants to diminish the good service of taxi companies, they are very important. There should be no social dumping and no distortion of competition. It is about new mobility options that citizens have long since accepted.
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