Leak of Uber Files

More than 124,000 documents, leaked to the newspaper TheGuardian and around 40 more media outlets, reveal how Uber carried out massive lobbying in many countries worldwide to favor law changes and adaptions in the company's interest. Emmanuel Macron, former economy minister and today president of France, as well as Olaf Scholz, chancellor of Germany, have been in contact with the company's lobbyists.

Messages sent at Uber's top management level are particularly revealing. For example, Kalinick, the group's CEO at the time, expressed that the violent conflicts between Uber drivers and cab drivers in Paris were even to be promoted. The images created in such a confrontation give the impression that politics and conventional companies are preventing a modern, young tech start-up from entering a market to create (important or welcome) jobs there and promote a country's technological infrastructure. The incited drivers are misused as a weapon/means to an end because their well-being is not in the company's interest.

Accordingly, Kalinick called Olaf Scholz a "real comedian" after he spoke out in favor of paying a minimum wage for Uber drivers in a conversation with the CEO. Ultimately, Uber, which has an enterprise value of $48,902 million in 2022, is a company that attracts drivers and passengers onto the app by offering incentives and dumping rides. This approach is financed with unprecedented venture capital funding. Such handling usually cannot be sustained. Moreover, when the system collapses, the weakest members of the chain, drivers and passengers, suffer the most.

FairTube does not approve of such lobbying practices and demands fair working conditions for Uber drivers, just like all other platform workers.