Elena (she prefers to use a false name) takes a deep breath before she begins to reel off her daily routine. As if to carry the weight of the more than 6,225 careers that she has accumulated driving for Uber on her shoulder. “My day starts at 5:30 in the morning. I get up, get ready and go out, because at 6:05 the train leaves for Madrid”, starts this 36-year-old Ecuadorian woman, who arrived in Spain 20 years ago, and Uber three and a half ago.
Elena and other drivers admit that they are better now than when they started. They have learned to deal with the company, with the passengers and even with the platform. In Madrid, they have an imperfect collective agreement, but better than the award from the seventies that protects their colleagues in Seville. And even so, “people continue to work 12 hours because, behind the scenes, the company is demanding it. We are slaves to this,” she laments.
To keep a job whose conditions are already arduous in themselves -with low salaries, billing requirements and constant pressure from license managers-, they also endure robberies, assaults, sanctions and failures in the operation of the application. The conditions described by the drivers contrast with the scenario reported by Moove, one of the main management companies for Driver Transport Vehicles (VTC) licenses in Spain in which Uber owns 30% of the shareholding: “We have been operating for more than 4 years offering quality employment to thousands of workers throughout Spain”.
The investigation Uber Filesmore than 124,000 internal company documents leaked to the newspaper Guardian and shared with International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), reveal that Elena’s story is not anecdotal, nor are the conditions she tells exclusive to the Spanish market. Uber landed in half the world without the approval of local governments and made drivers the target of the wrath of traditional taxi drivers. In Europe, Asia and South America, taxi drivers have staged protests, harassing Uber customers, beating drivers and setting their cars on fire. The company not only did not support them, but some executives wanted to use the violence in their favor: “we must maintain the narrative of violence for a few more days,” reads an email from a manager from the Netherlands in the worst of times. protests. There are dozens along the same lines, also in Spain.
Many drivers who started with Uber in 2014 or 2015 have told the media about the consortium that is investigating Uber Files that they were duped, that Uber lured them onto its platform with financial incentives that didn’t last, while drastically raising their commission for each ride. Uber took little time to increase its commission (today 25%) and the company now admits “errors” and “false steps” at that stage.
“If Uber wanted, this would not happen”
When Elena arrives in Madrid, she connects to the application that will decide her fate for at least the next eight hours. “I work nonstop. I usually snack on something in the car,” she says. She has an arsenal of tricks to stay alert (coffee, quick stops, candy and gum) and if the dream comes as a surprise with a client, she “pinches” herself, she concludes.
Around 4 PM, he logs off, refuels, cleans the car, and drives it back to Moove’s base. If it is Friday, you must also go to the headquarters to deposit the money for the trips in cash. She comes home 12 hours after leaving: it’s time to cook, clean up the house, check that the girls have done their homework… At 9 she tries to have dinner, to go to sleep half an hour later.
The salaries of the workers of the license managers who drive for Uber in Madrid, where they have an agreement, are around 1,100 euros per month, in exchange for their bills reaching 3,500 euros in trips for Uber. Their position is full of paradoxes: they are pressured to achieve ever-increasing billings, but they are also expected to circulate around the city with empty cars, so that when we citizens request a trip, we have the vehicle in front of us in the shortest possible time. .
They are an essential link in the chain that unites the algorithm with the passengers and those that make a model that continues to be unprofitable viable. As Jimena Valdez, a researcher at the City University of London, explains: “What can hurt Uber is that there really is stronger regulation of how they treat workers. That is its Achilles heel: that it is a business model that really does not work”.
In Spain, most Uber drivers are integrated into fleets associated with companies that in turn depend on two large companies: Ares Capital and Moove Cars Sustainable Transport. Although the workers sign the contracts that determine their conditions with these two companies, Víctor Risk, a researcher at the UNED, explains that the control that Uber and other platforms have over the treatment that drivers receive is greater than it seems. “The sector is practically created by the applications: they set the rules of the market, the prices, the working hours…”, he underlines. The labor lawyer Víctor Llanos, who has brought several lawsuits by drivers against VTC license managers, agrees with Risk: “If Uber wanted, this would not happen.”
“The house always wins,” confirms Arturo, another driver who prefers to keep his real name to himself. Shortly after he started driving for Uber, he says, he got a trip to Vallecas, “just under the San Cristóbal bridge.” He remembers it clearly because, when picking up the passenger, he noticed a sharp object in the neck and a voice that asked for all his money. He tried to explain that he didn’t have much on him, but it was no use. The boy took the 220 euros and ran away while a group of minors surrounded Arturo’s car to prevent him from chasing the thief. “Then I notified Moove and they referred me to Uber,” explains the worker.
Arturo repeatedly tried to find out who was going to take care of the money that had been stolen from him, which included payments for the trips he had made that day. But he got no more answers. The 220 euros came from his salary.
Lack of collaboration and obstructive attitude
According to an Uber spokesperson, drivers can communicate with the company through the application “or by going physically to the many driver support offices throughout Spain, where Uber employees attend them regularly.” The reality described by the workers with whom EL PAÍS has spoken is very different: in the vast majority of their interactions with the company they receive responses from a bot and if they show up at the headquarters, says Juan Fernández, general secretary of the union section of Ares Capital of Workers’ Commissions (CCOO), “they attend you by telephone and do not let you enter the facilities.”
Víctor Risk explains that the strategy is consistent with the one that Uber has pursued since its inception: to present itself as an ethereal technological platform that is not responsible for what happens on the asphalt and those who travel through it. In the files of Uber Files A report from the employment and social security inspection, prepared between 2014 and 2015, is included, where it realizes the “lack of collaboration” and “obstructive attitude” of Uber. A year later, with the launch of UberEats, a law firm was advising the company on ways to “minimize” the employment relationship with delivery people.
The corporate structure of the brand also reflects this attitude, with a network of subsidiaries that hinders and lengthens any request for information or legal proceedings. Llanos explains that on several occasions he has demanded that Uber provide the connection records of its workers: “They did not answer the court orders and if they did, they said that they were not in charge of that, but they did not say who was either.” Santiago Robledo, secretary of the Aliallemar VTC works council, shares the lawyer’s experience and compares the unicorn’s strategy to a shell game: “They put the chickpea in the kites and move it around.”
Although hold-ups are the ultimate consequence, cash payments also open the door for customers to walk away without paying. According to Javier, a driver of Ecuadorian origin who has been in the sector for eight months and avoids giving his real name for fear of reprisals, it happens more and more frequently than passengers, at the end of a trip in which they had requested to pay in cash, choose to get out of the car without paying the price of the race.
If they do not register a credit card, users have no obligation to provide their real data when registering in the application, so there is no way to track them to make the payment effective. The problem for drivers is that if more than three clients resort to this trick in a week, the money from the following defaults begins to be deducted from their already tight salaries. “All the broken dishes are paid for by us”, summarizes Javier.
As if the problems caused by customers were not enough, drivers also face the whims of an application whose algorithm sometimes surprises them with very long trips just when their workday is about to end or with routes defined on obsolete maps and, therefore, impossible to traverse.
Pablo (not his real name) witnessed the birth of Uber in Seville in 2018. This Cadiz driver remembers that around that time it was decided to make the central street of Mateos Gago pedestrian, which runs along the back of the Giralda, one of the main attractions of the city. Three years after the project ended, Uber’s browser still does not have the change integrated.
“If I go through the Town Hall, he tells me, turn left, take Mateos Gago and you will arrive in four minutes. On the right, the turn can take 16 minutes”, explains the worker. While drivers are forced to take the long way around, users see how the car that was originally going to pick them up quickly drives away for no apparent reason. “The one who is from Seville understands it, but the foreigner thinks that you are taking a detour so as not to have to pick him up”, adds Javier. In a similar situation, he ends up receiving poor evaluations for a mistake that is not his fault.
When drivers try to get Uber to fix their maps, the bot replies, “We’re working on it.” But nothing changes.
The best way to get around automated replies and contact a real person, even by phone, is to be harassed. Ismael Cuadrado (Madrid, 27 years old and UGT delegate in the VTC manager with which he works) verified it four years ago, at the beginning of his journey with Uber. “I used to go out at 3:30 or 4:00 to pick up people from the clubs,” he explains.
One of those early mornings, he picked up a boy who began the trip by asking him where he could get drugs in the surroundings. “I told him I had no idea about that,” she recalls. “And then he says to me, ‘Hey, while you’re driving, do you mind if I jerk you off?'” When Ismael refused, the passenger kept insisting. “When he saw that it was starting to bother me, he stopped.”
The driver reported the incident. “Normally when you have a problem with the client, the bot responds to you and tells you that they have adjusted the parameters so that you will not coincide with it again in a service,” he explains. In that case, he received a call informing him that action would be taken. “I don’t know which ones because I asked him and he told me that for privacy he couldn’t tell me anything.”
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