Uber leveraged violent attacks against its drivers to pressure politicians

[dalton99a]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/07/10/uber-taxi-driver-violence/
https://archive.ph/8YRmT

Uber leveraged violent attacks against its drivers to pressure politicians
In push for global expansion, company officials saw clashes with taxi cab workers as a way to win public sympathy, a trove of new documents shows
By Aaron C. Davis, Rick Noack and Douglas MacMillan
July 10, 2022 at 12:00 p.m. EDT

Five years into Uber’s war to supplant the taxi industry, executives at the ride-hailing app were in danger of losing a crown jewel in their global conquest: Paris.

The San Francisco start-up was flush at the start of 2016, valued by investors at more than $50 billion, and was racing to expand into Africa, India and Asia. But Uber’s first international outpost — the French capital — had become the center of a bloody battle over the company’s ambition, a trove of documents from inside the corporation shows.

In the previous year, more than 80 Uber drivers had been physically attacked across Europe, and dozens of their cars destroyed, in clashes with taxi drivers who were fearful of losing their livelihoods as Uber’s low fares upended their industry. When protests against the company erupted in Paris, managers began working from an unmarked office and for safety reasons were ordered not to wear Uber-branded clothing in public, the documents show.

In a series of text messages on Jan. 29, 2016, Uber’s then-chief executive, Travis Kalanick, pushed his top lieutenants to mount a counterprotest. Kalanick wanted a peaceful sit-in or march in the city’s center. “Civil disobedience” “15,000 drivers” “50,000 riders,” he wrote in a burst of unpolished, often abbreviated messages. One executive in response raised concern “about taxi violence against” Uber drivers, and another said the company could “look at effective civil disobedience and at the same time keep folks safe.”

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