With Prop 22, Uber and Lyft Successfully Bought the Vote in California. Uber to pay $4.4 million to end federal sex harassment probe. SAN FRANCISCO — Uber Technologies Inc. will establish a $4.4 million fund to settle a federal investigation into allegations that the San Francisco company allowed a rampant culture of sexual harassment, the U.S.
Equal Employment Opportunity Commission announced Wednesday. The agreement ends an investigation launched in 2017 in which the commission found reasonable cause to believe the ride-hailing tech company “permitted a culture of sexual harassment and retaliation against individuals who complained about such harassment.” A claims administrator will send notices to women who worked at Uber between Jan. 1, 2014, and June 30, 2019. The commission will determine which claimants may be eligible for money from the $4.4 million fund.
The company has also agreed to create a system to identify serial offenders and managers who fail to respond to concerns about sexual harassment in a timely manner. The company fired 20 people, including some managers, after an investigation by former U.S. 9 Secrets of Uber Drivers. Tattoos have gone mainstream: what was once considered a mark of rebellion abhorred by grandparents has become more like a rite of passage.
Today, about 30 percent of American adults have at least one tattoo, and among millennials the number jumps to almost 50 percent. Lyft IPO Rush Cashes In on Legally Precarious Labor Model. Gig economy companies Lyft, Uber, and Postmates are racing to file initial public offerings this year, a mad dash replete with ever-increasing multibillion-dollar valuations.
But is the rush to start trading on the public markets also a sprint to evade compliance with current labor law? Recent financial and lobbyist filings suggest that the gig economy giants are hoping to get ahead of a wave of enforcement actions, new legislation, regulatory requirements, and lawsuits that could force these companies to finally and formally classify full-time workers as employees. Virtually every major gig economy company — whether its focus is ride-sharing or grocery delivery — has fought to treat on-demand workers as independent contractors regardless of the amount of time they work.
Despite promises of high pay with flexible hours, ride-share workers have found that they often earn less than $10 an hour after vehicle expenses. Avoiding Labor Compliance. Uber's next big idea is self-driving scooters and bikes. Uber Hires Marketing Firm To Help Decrease Brand Awareness. SAN FRANCISCO—In an effort to simultaneously improve and diminish public perception of the ride-sharing company, Uber announced the hiring of a top marketing and consulting firm Tuesday to help decrease awareness of their brand.
“We’re poised on the cusp of a major IPO, so the last thing we need is our remarkably troubled name on people’s lips. By working with some of the world’s sharpest marketing minds, we’re confident we can make people less aware of our business practices, disappear from the news cycle, and completely tamp down on word of mouth,” said Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi in what industry observers say may have been a counterproductive public statement. Creepy New Uber Algorithm Knows When You're Drunk. Ride-hailing services like Uber have transformed nightlife in car-centric cities, ditching the need for designated drivers and limiting intake of alcohol.
But that may soon change, as Uber has filed a patent for technology that can detect if its users are drunk while using the app. “The system uses a computer model to identify user and trip characteristics indicative of the uncharacteristic user states,” says the patent application. “The system uses the data about past trips to train a computer model to predict a user state of a user submitting a trip request.” The spooky new algorithm will take various factors into consideration, including typos made while requesting a ride, the time taken by a user to interact with notifications, their travel speed, and even the angle at which the device is being held.
An ex-Uber employee raised over $100 million to fill the streets of San Francisco with scooters that people can rent and toss anywhere — here’s how they work. Uber Refuses To Refund Passenger Who Got Cheated By The Driver, So He Shares His Shocking Photos Online. Uber has become a phenomenon is the last few years, revolutionizing the ways many of us travel and shaking up the entire local transport industry.
However despite its conveniences there are inevitably drawbacks, as this passenger found out to their cost. Show Full Text Taking an Uber ride in Las Vegas, things turned from bad to worse for the user, who later uploaded snippets of a conversation with the company on Imgur. The incident shows that while Uber is great for quick and easy trips around town at an unbeatable price, it does seem quite easy for drivers to charge a cleaning fee on their word and a blurry photo or two.
Theconversation. Following TfL’s decision to withdraw Uber’s license to operate in London, there has been a widespread picking over of the ride-hailing app’s recent history – and speculation about its future.
A fairly common conclusion is that Uber needs to become more ethical if it is to survive. I want to suggest that this may not be possible. After the calamitous year Uber has had, it should not be difficult for the company to improve its reputation – simply by avoiding many of the unnecessary embarrassments heaped upon itself in 2017. However, merely improving its PR will not get Uber out of the hole it has now dug for itself. It is looking as though, in many territories such as London, Uber’s survival will rely on concrete measures to better care for both its drivers and customers.
Herein lies the problem. The Rise and Fall of Uber's Travis Kalanick - Foundation for Economic Education - Working for a free and prosperous world. Someone Copied The Wrong Person On An Email, And It Just Might Destroy Uber. How to See Your Rating. How to See Your Uber Passenger Rating. In Video, Uber CEO Argues With Driver Over Falling Fares - Bloomberg. When Uber Chief Executive Officer Travis Kalanick takes an Uber, he prefers a black car, the high-end service his company introduced in 2010.
On this particular night in early February—Super Bowl Sunday—Kalanick is perched in the middle seat, flanked by two female friends. Maroon 5’s “Don’t Wanna Know” plays, and Kalanick shimmies. He clutches his smartphone as the three make awkward conversation. The two women ask when his birthday is, and marvel that he’s a Leo.
Log In - New York Times. How Uber Drivers Decide How Long to Work. (The hourly wage of cabdrivers typically reflects how busy they are; the rate they can charge doesn’t change unexpectedly.
For Uber drivers, the hourly wage reflects both busyness and rates, since Uber can increase prices when demand is high.) Photo “A substantial, although not most, fraction of partners do in fact come into the market with income targeting behavior,” the paper’s author, Michael Sheldon, an Uber data scientist, wrote. The behavior is then “rather quickly learned away in favor of more optimal decision making.” In effect, Mr. Pando. Pando. With another mega-round in progress, Airbnb has achieved something Uber hasn’t. You gotta know when to fold ‘em: Uber and Didi call a truce in China with a $35 billion deal - Recode. Revealed in court: 100% cast iron evidence of how Uber lies to secretly investigate and smear its critics. Uber in Europe: back to the future. Where will Uber stop?
After the news that the Saudi’s have decided to invest $3.5bn in the company, came details of a further $2bn Uber wants to raise from financial markets using tecniques never deployed before by a start-up. Uber already has a war-chest of $14 bn. to spend in expanding its role in the Middle East, Africa, India and China, as well as to develop new services like driverless cars and car-pooling. But it’s in Europe that the company has encountered the greatest opposition to its presence and its methods, confirming the Old World’s status as the place where America’s tech giants find their toughest official critics and most militant opponents in local business. Uber’s urge to simply ignore local regulations and apply the same aggressive drive to attract drivers and customers that worked so well in the US has backfired in Europe, as it has in nations as far apart as Indonesia, South Africa and Chile. How Uber and Lyft lost Austin. This story is part of a series of features, The Future of Ride-Hailing.
The project is intended to show how the taxicab industry, with varying degrees of success, is pushing back against the existential threat posed by the rise of ride-hailing services like Lyft and Uber. It’s election day in Austin, Texas, and the campaign that funneled more than $8 million to secure the future of Uber and Lyft in the city didn’t bother to throw an official party to watch results.
An afternoon text from Ridesharing Works for Austin Deputy Outreach Director Huey Rey Fischer reads like resigned contempt for the process. Uber vs. Lyft vs. the taxi industry: How they stack up. This story is part of a series of features, The Future of Ride-Hailing. The project is intended to show how the taxicab industry, with varying degrees of success, is pushing back against the existential threat posed by the rise of ride-hailing services like Lyft and Uber.
To get a license as a taxi driver in Chicago, you have to be current on all child support payments and have paid off all your parkings tickets. D.C. cab drivers must turn in three letters of recommendation and undergo a drug test. San Francisco requires prospective cabbies to pass taxi training school and submit a 10-year print out of their driving record. All three cities also require cab drivers to pass fingerprint background checks. In Seattle, taxi drivers can only wear shorts on in the summer months and, even then, only bermuda shorts. The unexpected perks of Lyft and Uber’s random encounters. This story is part of a series of features, The Future of Ride-Hailing. The project is intended to show how the taxicab industry, with varying degrees of success, is pushing back against the existential threat posed by the rise of ride-hailing services like Lyft and Uber. The first time I met Wesley, I tried to explain the cloud. His red mini-SUV had a spotless yet well-loved interior.
Pando. Kalamazoo Killer Jason Dalton Was an Uber Driver Who Took Passengers For a Terrifying Ride During Spree. Kalamazoo police claim the 45-year-old man who went on a shooting spree Saturday night, killing six, was an Uber driver who dropped off passengers between shootings. According to WOOD-TV, authorities are investigating reports that the suspected gunman, Jason Dalton, dropped off a group of people at a Fairfield Inn before going next door to the Cracker Barrel and opening fire on two vehicles, killing four people. People staying at the hotel claimed the passengers dropped off there were interviewed by police following the shootings. FOX17 is investigating an online posting that claimed Dalton had been reported earlier to 911 for driving erratically and scaring customers who escaped from the car when the driver slowed down. Uber and Lyft’s big new lie: Their excuse for avoiding regulation is finally falling apart. Recently Lyft and General Motors made a grand announcement, with all the hoopla meant to convey that this announcement is a really big deal: ta-daaaa, a joint partnership in which Lyft will develop self-driving cars with GM.
GM is going to invest $500 million in Lyft, and GM president Daniel Ammann will join the board of Lyft. Never mind that self-driving cars (beyond test cars) will not appear on the streets anytime soon – and possibly never, due to the severe regulatory and insurance hurdles involved in letting a 3,000-pound machine steer itself with no human at the controls. Nevertheless, that big headline dominated the news cycle, which is so titillated by anything Uber or Donald Trump. Yet the media missed the really big news. Travis Shrugged: The creepy, dangerous ideology behind Silicon Valley's Cult of Disruption. "On bad days, I look at our revenue graph. " - Travis Kalanick When Uber was forced to shut down its yellow cab hailing service in New York last week, founder Travis Kalanick threw a fit that PandoDaily's Nathaniel Mott described as "downright adolescent... just short of [Kalanick] stamping his feet.
" In fact, as Mott explains (and as sources close to the negotiations have independently confirmed), there was precisely one reason why UberTaxi failed to take Manhattan: Travis Kalanick himself. For one thing, the TLC is bound by contracts with existing vendors not to allow any other credit card processing in NY cabs until next February.
Likewise, changing laws on handheld devices and pre-booked pickups cannot happen overnight. Pando. Uk.businessinsider. More States Just Dealt A Blow To Uber Drivers Seeking Benefits. Uber Is Taking Millions Of Manhattan Rides Away From Taxis. Capital - Is this the end of tipping? Uber Drivers' Labor Lawsuit Granted Class Action Status In California. Enter the Wasteland. Tin Foil Hats. High noon: I’m coming up on a red at 7th, heading west on Market. The Tenderloin. There’s an empty Yellow just ahead of me at the light and an historic F line street car just letting off on the platform to our left. As the passengers pour out onto the island dividing the two westbound lanes here, I note one dude – a bit frantic – check out Yellow, and then come running back to me.
Dunno why dude would be getting off a train and then immediately try to hail a cab, or why he didn’t go for the empty Yellow in front, but I wave him in… Although a bit edgy, a skinny 30-ish Pryor is wearing a clean white T nicely tucked-in that complements his chocolate skin, stylish jeans, and a large diamond earring in his left ear – presumably fake, he seems like he may be rational. When You Drive A Taxi, You See All Kinds Of Fares - The Onion - America's Finest News Source. I love being a cabbie. A lot of jobs are pretty much the same thing day in, day out, but in my line of work, every day brings something new.
I’ve been in the business more than 20 years now, and I can tell you from experience that no two shifts are alike. What keeps it interesting? Uber Launches Quarterly Print Magazine For Drivers. New Premium Uber Service Lets Users Commandeer Any Car. The Rideshare Paradox. Friends with Benefits. Uber’s System for Screening Drivers Draws Scrutiny. Photo Uber champions its “industry-leading standards” for vetting its drivers. On its website, it describes its background checks as “often more rigorous” than those in the traditional taxi industry. The Uber You Reap Is The Uber You Sow. I never thought it would happen, but I’m officially sick of reading about Uber. Dear Travis: A Miami Uber driver takes exception to the company’s rate cuts. My Uber Breaking Point. 8 Unbelievable Uber Stories. Black Friday 2014: Best Deals & Bargains. Uber Receives ‘F’ Grade From Better Business Bureau.
The Sharing Economy’s ‘First Strike’: Uber Drivers Turn Off the App. I quit: Miseries of an Uber driver. Behind the Wheel 2: Notes from an Uber/Lyft – The New Zine. Uber's Fight Of California Data-Sharing Rule Highlights Its Bumpy Road.