‘They were taking us for a ride’: how Uber used investor cash to seduce drivers

theguardian.com:

In the middle of the national rail strike last month when demand for cabs was sky-high, a group of Uber drivers decided they, too, would strike for 24 hours. A few hundred of them marched in protest to Uber’s London office in Aldgate Tower, complaining of poverty pay and arbitrary management by algorithm.

It was a typical day for Abdurzak Hadi, an Uber driver, although he has to pinch himself to believe where he has ended up. The 44-year-old father of three arrived in England on his own in 1992 as a teenage refugee, having fled Somalia’s brutal civil war. When he was old enough, he became a minicab driver. Then he signed up with Uber in 2014.

The Uber files is a global investigation based on a trove of 124,000 documents that were leaked to the Guardian by Mark MacGann, Uber's former chief lobbyist in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. The data consist of emails, iMessages and WhatsApp exchanges between the Silicon Valley giant's most senior executives, as well as memos, presentations, notebooks, briefing papers and invoices.

The leaked records cover 40 countries and span 2013 to 2017, the period in which Uber was aggressively expanding across the world. They reveal how the company broke the law, duped police and regulators, exploited violence against drivers and secretly lobbied governments across the world.

To facilitate a global investigation in the public interest, the Guardian shared the data with 180 journalists in 29 countries via the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ). The investigation was managed and led by the Guardian with the ICIJ.

In a statement, Uber said: «We have not and will not make excuses for past behaviour that is clearly not in line with our present values. Instead, we ask the