A bunch of almost 30 rideshare and delivery drivers will rally Wednesday, April 6 in Los Angeles, demanding elevated assist for staff who’re threatened, attacked or injured on the job.
The drivers, supported by Mobile Workers Alliance, will collect outdoors Uber’s Greenlight Hub in Historic Filipinotown. The alliance is a driver organizing marketing campaign that’s preventing for greater wages and is wanting to unionize the employees via the Service Employees International Union.
Similar rallies are scheduled to be held in Boston, Chicago, San Diego and San Francisco.
The alliance alleges Uber, Lyft and different app-based gig corporations supply little or no compensation to households after staff are killed whereas driving for the tech giants. The alliance plans to host a memorial at Wednesday’s rally for gig drivers who’ve been murdered on the job.
Drivers who work for rideshare and delivery corporations are categorised by their employers as impartial contractors beneath Proposition 22. That means they’ll’t entry staff’ compensation advantages in the event that they’re injured in an assault and so they don’t obtain the identical stage of well being advantages and different employee protections common staff get.
Disappointed and scared
Reyna Hernandez, who drives for each Uber and Lyft, lately confronted her personal scary state of affairs.
“A few months ago I was driving for Uber and had a lady passenger who got out of the car and took my phone,” the 60-year-old El Monte resident stated. “She said I took the wrong way and she wouldn’t give it back to me for 3 or 4 minutes.”
Hernandez stated somebody later tried to get cash out of her checking account. She suspects it was the identical passenger who might have accessed private data on her cellphone.
“I reported this to Uber, but they said ‘just don’t use them as a customer anymore,’ ” she stated. “I feel really disappointed because I was scared … a lot of things when through my mind.”
Drivers declare gig corporations like Uber and Lyft have poor practices for incident reporting and sometimes don’t supply any compensation or different assist to drivers who encounter violence.
Safety measures
In a press release issued Tuesday, Lyft stated safety is constructed into all of its operations.
“We are committed to doing everything we can to help protect drivers from crime, and will continue to take action and invest in technology, policies and partnerships to make Lyft as safe as it can be,” the corporate stated.
Lyft has a system that permits drivers to join with an ADT safety worker who can alert authorities to the driving force’s location. That contains journey particulars, the automobile’s make and mannequin, license plate quantity and the supposed drop-off location.
As quickly as a safety incident is reported, Lyft stated will instantly attain out to the driving force to supply assist.
Uber has an in-app emergency button to name authorities if a driver wants assist. The firm makes use of GPS monitoring on rides from begin to end, it stated, so there’s a document of a driver’s journey if one thing occurs.
The GPS system can even detect if a visit goes unusually off-course or a doable crash has occurred.
In regard to incidents of violence or worse, Uber stated every “is a horrific tragedy that no family should have to endure.”
“While every situation is unique, we have programs in place to support families, including with insurance,” Uber stated in a press release. “Given the scale at which Uber and other platforms like ours operate, we are not immune from society’s challenges, including spikes in crime and violence.”
An 84-page Uber report documented 5,981 sexual assaults in 2017 and 2018, with 42% of the assaults reported by Uber drivers — not passengers, in accordance to theguardian.com. Similarly, The Markup reported 124 carjackings and tried carjackings of U.S. ride-hailing drivers from January 2020 via June 2021.
Closer to residence, an Uber driver captured video on his sprint digicam final month of a passenger punching him after a dispute over a canceled journey in South Los Angeles, in accordance to Fox 11 Los Angeles.
“He just got aggressive with me and then he went and punched me and started hitting me and I jumped out of the vehicle and ran,” the driving force stated. “I’m not sure if he followed me but he took my car keys. He ripped out the wires in my car and then took my cell phone.”