“There are a lot of things that seem to be allowed by the contract to what Uber can do”, Chen said. Three Uber drivers from the San Francisco area have filed a lawsuit against the ride-sharing company.
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U.S. District Judge Edward Chen declined to approve class-action status to a closely-watched worker classification lawsuit against Uber, but appeared unmoved by entreaties from Uber’s outside counsel, Theodore Boutros, that drivers would prefer to remain independent contractors.
A federal judge in San Francisco is expected to hear arguments today on whether a lawsuit by three drivers against Uber should be certified as a class action and include all of the company’s 160,000 drivers in California.
Uber could benefit from handling the case as a class action if it is confident that drivers actually are independent contractors under the law, Chen said. While contractors legally can’t be told when or how to work, they also don’t have to be paid minimum wage or given money for the gas they use on the job. But inside the courthouse, several drivers are suing Uber, saying they’re already treated like employees.
Under that scenario, Schiller doubts Uber would try to settle the case, moving instead to a jury trial, where the company would continue its aggressive defense. On Thursday, Liss-Riordan said her paralegal spoke with 1,700 drives from around the country, more than half from California, and that 50 of Boutrous’ 400 later recanted and said they would like to be reimbursed for their expenses after all but feared retaliation from Uber if they signed their names to public documents attesting to this.
“Do they like the flexibility?” That means if Uber loses the case, it would have to pay damages to all of those drivers. The result is that an entire swath of the technology industry, which has been built on cheap independent contractors may need to incur increased costs as they become full-fledged employees. Curtis Lee, CEO of on-demand valet company Luxe, says that they hope that as employees their valets will be more likely to stick around and be more dedicated to the company.
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It’s not just Uber that’s affected, however. But he said they do perform a service “because Uber would not be a viable business model without its drivers”. “These are real live human beings who vary widely”, he says. Like Liss-Riordan, both of them were arguing cases against Uber, involving issues like how the company conducted background checks. But Chen said what he was really interested in was not whether the three named plaintiffs are adequate class representatives, but the differences in Uber’s right to control its workers within the 17 different driver agreements Uber submitted.
