Uber versus Unions: Driver Classification

The biggest question now is: should Uber be treating drivers as employees or independent contractors? What is your opinion on that?

I’m really surprised people are still talking about this. The drivers don’t want to be employees, most of them. A lot of them quit whatever old job they had to be an entrepreneur. It’s financially not bad to be an entrepreneur in most countries. There are a lot of tax benefits. You can build something. Very few drivers complain about it, but the motives behind it are often quite dubious, I feel.

So, you think it’s a small proportion of drivers that are trying to claim holiday and sick benefits?

Of course, they would like it. If someone said, “You want 50% more money?” of course you’d take it, but I think they only talk about one side of it. The other side is, you have freedom to drive whenever you want, to do whatever you want. The freedom to buy more cars, have a bigger business, you can take some time off. You’re an entrepreneur. You can work with different apps.

In terms of the unions, they look at the driver pool as one big pool of people, the same person.

Look at humans, we’re so different. Everyone has different problems at home. I think that is extremely discriminating and absolutely the wrong to do.

I think that’s the same in any business—is it very different?

Yeah, when you look at it, it’s a totally different thing. Take a union in the car industry. They all work in a factory, come in at the same time, stamp in at 6am, out at 4pm, five days a week, they have the same vacation days. If a person doesn’t show one day because they had to rush their kid to hospital, they stamp in less, they earn less money, they may have to take half a day’s vacation, they may get a fee or get fired. They’re very similar, they have the exact same working hours and qualifications, doing the exact same job. But if you pull out ten Uber drivers, you will have vastly different people.