The company lured drivers in the developing nation with lucrative subsidies, then undermined those workers with policies that made their jobs more dangerous, documents in newly disclosed Uber files show
July 11, 2022 at 7:00 am EDT
(Lucy Naland/Washington Post illustration; Samantha Reinders for The Washington Post; Morne De Klerk/Getty; Uber screenshots; iStock) Comment on this story
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CAPE TOWN, South Africa – He’s been a cop, a factory worker and a taxi driver, but at 44, Sean Cupido still hasn’t found his way to prosperity. Murderous gangs ruled Manenberg, the apartheid town where he had spent his entire life, and he was tired of reminding his three children to lie down and cover their heads every time they heard the crack of bullets.
Then, in 2017, Cupido found a job that he thought could finally change his fortunes. Uber has promised to let South Africans set their own hours and be their own bosses. He rented a car, began ferrying tourists around Cape Town’s waterfront shopping districts and coastal resorts, and for a while the money was good. He began to dream of building his own business, managing a fleet of vehicles for the transportation company.
But bit by bit, he said, Uber made changes to its service that lowered his pay and raised the risks. The company is recruiting new drivers to the city, flooding the streets with competitors and cutting Cupido’s daily customer base in half. Trying to make up the difference, he logged 12-hour days and began driving in the slums of the Cape Flats, where many drivers were afraid to go.
“Hustling,” as he called it, became even riskier after Uber began allowing passengers in South Africa to pay in cash as part of an effort to increase rides. Cupid had heard of mugged and hit-and-run drivers, but he trusted his instinct for danger.
He folded a wad of bills into his wallet and continued to work long hours, unaware that he was driving right into an ambush.
In its quest to change global transportation and make its investors rich, Uber sold drivers like Cupido a vision of upward mobility. Years later, some drivers say they’re worse off than when they started because Uber made policy decisions that robbed them of their ability to make a living and increased the risks of driving in some parts of the world.
The Uber files are a rare inside look at Uber’s internal deliberations, made possible by more than 124,000 records obtained by the Guardian and shared with more than 40 news organizations, including The Washington Post. The joint investigation, coordinated by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, sheds light on how the company viewed its drivers.
Read the findings of the Uber Files investigation
Emails, presentations and text messages from 2013 to 2017 show that Uber employees, led by then-CEO Travis Kalanick, executed a business plan that turned out to be gradually undermining their own drivers. Top executives advised local managers around the world to spend millions of dollars on lucrative incentives for new drivers and then steadily raise Uber’s commission, depriving those drivers of income and increasing the money flowing to Uber, the documents show.
Publicly, Uber has repeated a message that its service empowers people to become “entrepreneurs.” In private email exchanges, company officials referred to the drivers as a mass of “supply,” whose low pay and minimal job protections are necessary for Uber to make a profit.
The documents, taken together with interviews of four former Uber managers and 20 current and former drivers, show that Uber created working conditions it knew would leave many drivers barely getting by. Uber is incentivizing more drivers to sign up than necessary, squeezing drivers’ earnings and building a system that rewards workers for taking routes and schedules that put them at risk of injury in places plagued by violence, documents and interviews show.
In written responses to questions from The Post, Uber spokesman Gus Glover said drivers have found good economic opportunities using their app, although their earnings fluctuate “as a normal part of business.” Because drivers can freely choose to work for different app-based services, Glover said, “it’s fundamental that we strive to create the conditions for driver retention on the platform.”
Glover did not respond to questions about Cupido or any specific information contained in Uber’s files.
In a statement, Devon Spurgeon, a spokesman for Kalanick, said the Uber co-founder helped pioneer a new business model. “To do so required a change in the status quo, as Uber became a serious competitor in an industry where competition has historically been prohibited,” Spurgeon said. “As a natural and predictable result, entrenched industrial interests around the world have fought to prevent the much-needed development of the transportation industry.”
She did not respond to questions about Uber’s treatment of drivers, its business in South Africa or the introduction of cash payments.
The challenges facing drivers are particularly pronounced in countries like South Africa, where extreme levels of unemployment and inequality give Uber access to a rich pool of workers willing to endure challenging work with few benefits. One in three South Africans of working age is unemployed – the highest unemployment rate in the world among countries tracked by the World Bank.
“The majority of workers cannot leave and go to another job because there is no other job,” said Darcy du Toit, a lawyer and professor emeritus at the University of the Western Cape who has researched working conditions in the digital economy and helped of a group of drivers to challenge Uber over workers’ rights in a South African court.
Uber says it now has 20,000 drivers across South Africa, including Uber Eats delivery drivers. Some say they struggle to make minimum wage, it now equates to about $1.40 an hour after they share some of their revenue with Uber and rental car companies and pay for expenses like fuel. Some say they’ve been ripped off by criminals, pursued during periodic government crackdowns on Uber and targeting rival taxi operators who attack drivers to protect their turf.
In 2016 and 2017, Uber drivers in South Africa were burned when their cars were set on fire, both victims of alleged attacks by taxi firms, according to news reports. According to the information, one died of his wounds.
“The Uber platform has become a platform of crime, a platform of fear,” said Derrick Ongansi, 66, a former Uber driver who helped organize driver protests and is one of the drivers who filed a legal challenge against the company. “Once you get into that vehicle, you’re either afraid of the traffic cop stopping you and confiscating your vehicle, or you’re afraid of the criminal.”
South Africa is one of the world’s capitals of serious crime, and workers in its volatile transport sector have been subject to theft and violence long before Uber arrived in the country. The Post found no data showing that Uber has caused an increase in crime in South Africa. However, the company’s policy decisions, such as allowing cash payments after previously rejecting the idea as less safe, have exposed some workers – including many first-time drivers – to a level of risk they say they are not presented.
Stefan Swart, a former manager of Uber in South Africa, who says he was briefed on internal management decisions about drivers from 2015 to 2018, said Uber knew that requiring drivers to carry cash would make them more vulnerable to robbery. Uber rolled out the policy anyway, he said, because managers believed it would appeal to millions of South Africans who don’t have credit or debit cards, boosting rides in the country by as much as 30 percent and helping Uber compete with other forms of transportation, such as traditional taxis that accept cash.
Uber did not respond to Swart’s claim, but said the company had taken steps to improve the safety of drivers in South Africa, including giving them the ability to reject cash transactions, more advance information in the app about passenger destinations and a button that drivers can press to call emergency security services.
“Safety is and always has been a top priority for us, and we’ve invested heavily over the years in technology to keep drivers and riders safe,” Frans Hiemstra, Uber’s general manager for sub-Saharan Africa, said in an emailed statement.
One night in 2019, Cupido was carrying about 700 South African rand, or roughly $50, when his phone rang with the name of his next passenger: Nadine.
Two men got into his car, saying their friend Nadine had ordered the ride. After a short ride, they came to a standstill, and one of the passengers struck him several times in the head with the handle of a knife. With blood running down his face, Cupid ran from the car and collapsed in the yard of a woman who saw him and called for help. The two men drove off in his rental car.
Lying in a hospital bed with stitches in his head, Cupid realized he was too scared to drive again. He spends a month recovering from his attack, then takes the first job he can find, working in a graveyard at a factory in the center of town. “I just lost everything,” he said.
Uber, despite promising to help, refused to even pay for the pair of glasses Cupido broke during the attack, he said.
The company declined to answer questions about the incident, but said all Uber drivers in South Africa are covered by its insurance program, which reimburses drivers for emergency medical treatment and lost earnings.
The Washington Post’s Douglas McMillan on how Uber is undermining drivers in South Africa with policies that make jobs more dangerous. (Video: Douglas McMillan, Jason Aldag/The Washington Post)
When Uber came to South Africa in 2013, almost two decades after the end of apartheid, it entered a society that still…
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