It’s still business as usual at Uber as it rolls out new features for drivers

By Lulu Chang August 29, 2017

A person driving a car. — Lightpoet/Shuterstock

Even in the midst of its leadership change, Uber is putting its product first. On Monday, the ridesharing giant announced a series of new features that ought to please its (potentially dwindling) source of drivers. The latest changes, Uber says, are meant to improve the overall driver experience, and ought to “ensure control and peace of mind, helping to keep all driver-partners safe before, during, and after every trip.”

First and foremost, there’s the new Driver Share My Trip feature. While users have long been able to share their locations with friends and family members to ensure that someone always know where you are, drivers haven’t had the same luxury. Now, that’s all changing. On Tuesday, Uber switched on this feature for drivers in more than 140 cities around the world, and promised to roll the function out to all drivers by early fall.

Uber notes that this is a highly requested feature among drivers, who have expressed a desire “to be able to share their whereabouts with a friend or loved one when they’re out on the road.” Drivers can now start and stop sharing location route information with their contacts, and those they choose to share details with can see a driver’s position on a map, as well as quick-dial contact details and a license plate number.

Then, there’s the introduction of a new ID check in “several countries” that will require new passengers without an electronic payment method stored in the app to verify their identity via Facebook. This, Uber hopes, will further help guarantee the safety of drivers. And finally, the company is offering new insurance solutions, like Driver Injury Protection, which “provides benefits for lost income from disability, as well as survivor and accident medical benefits.” While this was initially announced earlier in the summer, the insurance has now become available to drivers in more than 30 states, and is said to be coming to drivers around the world.

So if you’re an Uber employee or contractor, everything seems to be business as usual. Because no matter who’s holding the CEO position, someone has to keep the wheels turning.

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In 2017, Uber executive Nicholas Valentino, the operations manager for the company’s Atlanta operations at the time, repeatedly corrected the plaintiff’s attorney in a case when the latter referred to the people operating cars on Uber’s platform as “drivers,” the Washington Post reported Monday.
According to Valentino, they are not drivers. Instead, he wanted those individuals referred to as “independent, third-party transportation providers."
If that sounds like an off-the-cuff remark, think again. Apparently, Valentino repeated the claim a total of 16 times in the course of the case. The case, Jessicka Harris v. Uber, was filed by a woman who almost lost her leg when she was struck by a vehicle being operated on Uber’s behalf that she claimed had veered off the road.
In that same case, Uber was asked to “admit or deny that Uber is in the business of providing transportation,” to which the company’s attorneys also repeatedly “denied.”
Uber later settled the case out of court but has maintained throughout a number of similar cases that it does not employ its drivers, going as far as to say about one driver that it “never had an agency, employment, partnership, joint venture, or joint enterprise relationship with him.”
Gives you the warm fuzzies, right?
The transcript of the 2017 case comes as Uber is fighting a similar but different battle in its home state of California regarding whether or not its “third-party transportation providers” should be considered employees.
Last month, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed the bill AB5, which will give gig workers some of the same labor protections and benefits afforded to regular employees of companies, including health care subsidies, paid parental leave, overtime pay, and a guaranteed minimum hourly wage. It also gives employees the ability to unionize.
Uber strongly opposes the bill and said that the majority of the drivers on the platform would prefer to stay independent and have flexibility rather than be classified as employees.
“We expect we will continue to respond to claims of misclassification in arbitration and in court as necessary, just as we do now. But we will also continue to advocate for the independence and choice that drivers tell us again and again in surveys, polls, focus groups, and personal conversations that they value most,” Tony West, Uber’s chief legal officer, said in a blog post after Newsom signed the bill.
“Today, drivers have control over when, where, and how they work," West said. "They can choose to work for any of our competitors at the same time, and many do. In the U.S., 92% of drivers drive less than 40 hours per week, and 45% of drivers drive less than 10 hours per week. This would all change dramatically if they were employees. We will continue to defend the innovation that makes that kind of choice, flexibility, and independence a reality for over 200,000 drivers in California.”
AB5 is expected to go into effect on January 1, 2020.