This week several revelations have surfaced regarding Uber and its illicit practices to push rollouts into new regions, wilfully ignoring driver safety and rights, as well as putting mechanisms in place to restrict regulators from shutting it down.
Now the latest revelation involves one we have known about for some time – sexual assault. This as a growing list of more than 550 women have filed a lawsuit against Uber regarding sexual assaults suffered at the hands of Uber drivers, according to a report from TechCrunch.
The lawsuit claims that Uber has been purposefully concealing the numbers pertaining to sexual assaults by drivers on its ride sharing platform, along with benefiting financially from women who have suffered such abuse.
Added to this are allegations that the company continues to bill itself as a platform that prioritises rider safety and that it is working endlessly to protect women making use of its services in particular.
“Uber’s whole business model is predicated on giving people a safe ride home, but rider safety was never their concern – growth was, at the expense of their passengers’ safety,” said Adam Slater, founding partner of Slater Slater Schulman, which is the firm that filed the lawsuit at the San Francisco County Superior Court earlier in the week.
“While the company has acknowledged this crisis of sexual assault in recent years, its actual response has been slow and inadequate, with horrific consequences,” he added.
The firm is also investigating as many as 150 more sexual assault cases, so the current 550 involved in the lawsuit to date will likely increase.
As Slater points out, while Uber has indeed acknowledged the concerning statistics regarding assaults via its platform, it looks like little to nothing is actually been done about it. This as the latest US Safety Report found that there were 998 sexual assault incidents in 2020 alone, with 3 824 cases reported in that year ranging different levels of severity.
These numbers are only for one year in the United States, which means one shudders to think what the statistics have been like over the past two years during the pandemic, as well as other parts of the globe.
“There is so much more that Uber can be doing to protect riders: adding cameras to deter assaults, performing more robust background checks on drivers, creating a warning system when drivers don’t stay on a path to a destination,” noted Slater.
“But the company refuses to, and that’s why my firm has 550 clients with claims against Uber and we’re investigating at least 150 more. Acknowledging the problem through safety reports is not enough. It is well past time for Uber to take concrete actions to protect its customers,” he continued.
While it remains to be seen what will happen from this pending lawsuit, it looks like Uber has served up another empty boilerplate response.
“Sexual assault is a horrific crime and we take every single report seriously. There is nothing more important than safety, which is why Uber has built new safety features, established survivor-centric policies, and been more transparent about serious incidents. While we can’t comment on pending litigation, we will continue to keep safety at the heart of our work,” an unnamed spokesperson told TechCrunch in an official statement.
With Uber’s reputation taking a serious hit this week, hopefully more than platitudes are planned to address a serious issue on the platform.
[Image – Photo by Viktor Avdeev on Unsplash]
[Source – TechCrunch]
