Something remarkable is happening in Ireland. Drivers are rising up against Uber, and vow to continue until they force the company to leave or to U-turn.
The drivers are demanding that Uber's so-called 'upfront fares' policy, which was introduced on 4 November, is immediately rescinded.
'Upfront fares', where pay is not linked to time and distance travelled and is instead determined by a black-box algorithm, has been rolled-out already in much of Europe by Uber and has been consistently associated with the lowering of average pay for drivers.
To find out more about the strike, GEP spoke to Eamonn Sullivan, a driver in Dublin who has been participating in the strikes and a researcher of ridehail platforms' algorithms in the Department of Sociology, Maynooth University.
Gig Economy Project: Are these the biggest Uber strikes ever in Ireland?
Eamonn Sullivan: We’ve never really had Uber strikes before. A couple of years ago we had a big protest against FreeNow [another ridehail app], after they increased the commission from 12 to 15%. The Indian drivers led that one and blocked the FreeNow offices for a couple of days. This is much bigger than that.
This has been going on for weeks and is not just in Dublin either, there have been strikes in Galway and Kerry as well.
GEP: Tell us about the strike in Dublin last night.
ES: Last night we had 300-400 drivers blocking the city centre and another around 600 drivers doing a go-slow in a loop around Dublin airport, which basically brought the airport to a halt.
Then there was many other drivers who didn’t join the protests but refused to work for Uber during the strike.
There’s 2,000 members on WhatsApp groups which are solidly behind the strike, and then there’s more that are participating in a more passive way.
They reckon there’s about 8,000 Uber drivers in Ireland so I’d estimate at least a quarter to a third have participated in the strike.
GEP: That’s a major strike action that surely is having a serious effect on Uber’s operations.
ES: Absolutely, and the thing that I have been trying to convince drivers of is that Uber doesn’t have an easy solution to this.
Because of Irish taxi regulations no one can just become a driver over-night, it takes time to be qualified, you have to do the geography test and you have to buy a wheel-chair accessible car, which costs around €60,000, or rent one. So there’s not that reserve army of workers available for Uber to draw on.
There’s a debate among drivers on the WhatsApp groups about the best tactics, whether to delete Uber’s app all together or to take assignments and then not turn up as a way to disrupt Uber’s services. So it’s really lively, but I’m still not sure drivers are truly aware of the power that they have here.
GEP: How is the strike being organised and what has inspired this fury against Uber’s change in pay policy?
ES: It’s all being organised out of WhatsApp groups so it’s very ad-hoc.
There’s a huge migrant participation. I was talking to people on the strike yesterday from Kurdistan, Egypt, China, Pakistan, India, Palestine - and there was a parrot there from Brazil! So the main bulk of the drivers participating actively in the strike are migrants.
They know what this so-called 'upfront fares' policy is: it’s wage theft, it’s class warfare, so they are really clear that their livelihoods are on the line with this.
What no one is really talking about yet is the dynamic pricing aspect of upfront fares: that Uber can personalise pay rates for drivers with this, so for instance they could pay migrant drivers less than Irish drivers if they wanted to.
All the talk is about the fact that upfront fares are fixed fares whereas the pay meter we have is based on the actual time of the trip, if you get stuck in traffic etc. That’s obviously important, but beneath the fixed fares are these algorithms personalising pay rates and there’s a strong case to say that is illegal because it breaches EU GDPR law.
GEP: The strikes have also directed demands towards the government. What has been the political response to this?
ES: Yeah the drivers are calling for a review of the regulations to prevent what Uber’s doing.
The Transport Minister Darragh O’Brien asked the regulator, the National Transport Authority (NTA), to examine the complaints of drivers, but the NTA basically said if you want the regulations to change its the government which has to propose laws to change them.
What I am worried about is that Uber has always wanted the regulations to be opened up to reform in Ireland. They are constantly arguing that there’s not enough drivers and the system needs to be liberalised. The regulator, and also FreeNow, have said that’s not true and the data shows that 85% of the time there’s an over-supply of drivers.
So Uber lost that argument, and I think Uber may be seeing this as an opportunity to open that debate again for complete de-regulation, so that anybody can be a driver in Ireland and you don’t need qualifications. Uber have placed a piece in the Irish business press making that exact argument. That’s a concern.
We have a lobbying register here and we know when Uber have had meetings with junior ministers, and sometimes the next day those ministers are giving out Uber’s talking points on the airwaves. The Uber Files scandal was full of evidence connecting Uber to the top levels of the governing parties in Ireland (Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael).
Because the strike is having a viral effect there have been some backbench members of the governing parties criticising Uber, but we know what side this government is on.
GEP: What's next?
There are two-hour strikes once a week so the plan is for that to continue over the Christmas period. Uber so far is just repeating the same nonsense that upfront fares is good for drivers and has not engaged with us at all so far, but let’s see if they can keep that up over the holidays because the strike is really impacting them.
