‘Violence guarantees success’: how Uber exploited taxi protests
On 26 January 2016, more than 2,100 furious French taxi drivers, backed by colleagues from Belgium, Spain and Italy, staged a mass anti-Uber protest in and around Paris, blocking the ring road and reducing the city centre to gridlock.
Plumes of smoke from burning tyres rose into the air. As tempers flared outside the blockaded Orly airport, someone got hit by a minibus. Nearly two dozen cab drivers were arrested for offences from assault to arson.
In Lille, an Uber driver was punched in the face after he dropped off a client – or “rider” as the company calls them – at a hotel. Similar violent incidents took place in Toulouse, Marseille and Aix-en-Provence.
After midnight, an Uber manager in France filed a situation report. “Team – all safe. Drivers/riders – generally safe, though 53 incidents so far including 35 involving a rider,” he wrote. “Three relatively serious cases involving taxi violence including one badly damaged car and two beaten-up drivers.”
The “team” – Uber’s direct employees – were, indeed, safe. They had been told to avoid displaying Uber “swag” in public and to work outside of the office during the protest, with operations run from a remote emergency situation room. With the strike set to persist for a second day, “lots of security” had been hired, the French manager assured HQ.
The Uber files is a global investigation based on a trove of 124,000 documents that were leaked to the Guardian. The data consist of emails, iMessages and WhatsApp exchanges between the Silicon Valley giant's most senior executives, as well as memos, presentations, notebooks, briefing papers and invoices.
The leaked records cover 40 countries and span 2013 to 2017, the period in which Uber was aggressively expanding across the world.
Read more on theguardian.com
