The ride hailing company Uber is under scrutiny after a whistleblower
leak more than 100,000 documents detailing the company's aggressive
tactics. It has expanded abroad, including efforts to curtail laws
and regulations. Stephanie Sigh has our report.
Judy. The Uber files consist of emails, text messages, memos and
other records that purportedly show among many questionable tactics
that uber used technology to cut access to its internal systems from
regulators and law enforcement using a kill switch, and that the
company used violence against its drivers as a PR tool to win public
sympathy.
Doug McMillon is a corporate accountability reporter for The Washington
Post, who has been covering this story and joins us now from Washington,
D. C. Doug, thank you so much for joining the news hour.
So I wanted to dive right into these findings. One of the main ones
being about how then CEO Travis Kalanick allegedly exploited the
anger being directed against uber drivers. This was in Paris and
Europe around 2000 and 16. Can you explain what was discovered about
what Kalanick did and why it was so egregious?
Yes. So everywhere uber expanded. There was attention with the local
taxi industry where you know these taxi drivers who have been some
invested their whole their whole lives and their whole careers.
In having these taxi jobs saw uber as a threat to their livelihoods
and in some places, they reacted with physical violence against uber
drivers. And we saw this across Europe and in particular in France.
We saw a moment in time where they were a lot of attacks against
uber drivers. And where the executives of the company we're starting
to look at these attacks.
And look at the possibility of not focusing on how we protect our
drivers. And how do we keep them safe, but potentially using these
incidents of violence for Uber's own political gain? And so the text
conversation we saw which kind of is the
The most striking document and all 124,000 documents in this trove
of the uber files was that Travis Kalanick was looking at this possible,
um, possible demonstration where his drivers would put at physical
risk and said, I think it's worth it.
Violence guarantees success. So this kind of like reframing violence
against his own drivers that people who kind of has built his service
on I think is what you know. It's kind of shocking to a lot of people
who, you know, expected kind of more interest in promoting and protecting
the safety of these people.
And for his part, Kalinic's spokesperson issued a statement and this
is what it said. Mr Kalanick never suggested that Uber should take
advantage of violence at the expense of driver safety.
Any accusation that Mr Kalanick directed, engaged in or was involved
in any of these activities is completely false. Um are any of the
actions in the uber files, including
this supposed exploitation of the violence that was already occurring
between taxi drivers and uber drivers?
Criminal is or was it illegal?
There's no indication that Uber has broken any laws here. I'm sure
people will be will be looking at that and studying that, you know,
as there's you know, as we look at these uber files and these documents,
but kind of the main takeaway from me was that
The story of uber uber and Uber's growth as an aggressive kind of
hardball tactics company that took kind of very aggressive measures
to get a foothold in markets around the world. It's kind of surprising
the disregard sometimes that the managers of these companies show
for sometimes sometimes their own drivers and their own employees.
The disregard sometimes they show for law enforcement.
There's one particular episode, which which stuck out, um, which
they were and which uber is using a software system they developed
called the Kill Switch, and This is in the lead up to a potential
law enforcement raid on Uber's Amsterdam headquarters. Travis Kalanick,
the former CEO at the time, says to his managers in Amsterdam hit
the kill switch, and by that he meant
Cut off access to all data on our computers, you know, potentially
to prevent law enforcement investigation of that data, And so you
know, here we have a company. It's actually developing software.
For the express purpose of trying to evade law enforcement efforts
to hold them accountable. And uber has said that that was to protect
intellectual property. For their part. Why did the whistleblower
who ends up being a former company Lobbyists named Mark McGann want
to reveal these details?
Mark McGann said that he was worried that Uber had sold a lie that
the people that uber had recruited to its service a lot. A lot of
low income people that recruited to be drivers of the service. We're
told this vision of If you drive for uber, you were going to build
a better life for yourself, and we're going to empower you to be
an entrepreneur.
And Mark McGann is saying, You know this. This message didn't sit
well with him in the years since he's left the company because when
I ended up happening to a lot of these people is that they didn't
improve their lives. A lot of these people ended up in debt to rental
car companies that they owed money to, and some of the people in
our reporting in the Washington Post showed ended up in with threats
to their physical safety.
Sometimes, you know when uber implemented cash payments and its app
in South Africa, for example, that generated a lot of criminal activity
of uber drivers being targeted for crime on their app. So a lot of
times these drivers were sold this vision of
Uber is going to help you improve your life, and they actually did
the opposite. It did not help them improve their life. And, you know,
I think the source of these leaks has been been kind of worried about
that, and that was part of his motivation for coming forward with
these documents.
And we should say that Uber today says this is all in the past. They
have had new leadership for the last five years. We'll have to leave
it there. Doug McMillon of the Washington Post thanks for joining
the news hour.