#uber employees

[datarep]

Locations of the 400 Uber Employees Laid Off in July 2019

[monicasharmalove]

US labour agency says Uber drivers are 'contractors', not employees

Company News

Drivers for ride-hailing company Uber Technologies Inc are independent contractors and not employees, the general counsel of a US labor agency has concluded, in an advisory memo that is likely to carry significant weight in a pending case against the company and could prevent drivers from joining a union.

The recommendation by the office of general counsel Peter Robb, who was appointed to the National Labor Relations Board by President Donald Trump, was made in a memo dated April 16 and released on Tuesday.The general counsel said in the memo that Uber drivers set their hours, own their cars and are free to work for the company's competitors, so they cannot be considered employees under federal labor law.

A ruling on the case is to be made by an NLRB regional director. Advisory memos from the general counsel's office are generally upheld in rulings. Any decision could be appealed to the NLRB's five-member board, which is also led by Trump appointees but is independent of the general counsel.

The memo will not affect scores of lawsuits claiming Uber drivers should be treated as employees under federal and state wage laws.

San Francisco-based Uber in a statement said it is "focused on improving the quality and security of independent work, while preserving the flexibility drivers and couriers tell us they value."Uber shares were up 6.4 per cent at $39.46 in late trading on the New York Stock Exchange.

The memo signalled a sharp turn for the general counsel's office, which acts like a prosecutor in NLRB cases, and during the administration of Democratic President Barack Obama maintained that many gig-economy workers are misclassified as independent contractors.Under the National Labor Relations Act, independent contractors cannot join unions and do not have legal protection when they complain about working conditions.

[vennomax]

Three Uber security managers resign after CEO criticizes practices

New Post has been published on http://www.vennomax.com/business/three-uber-security-managers-resign-after-ceo-criticizes-practices/

Three Uber security managers resign after CEO criticizes practices

Reuters: Three senior managers in Uber Technologies Inc’s security unit resigned on Friday, an Uber spokesperson said, days after the company’s new chief executive officer disclosed a massive data breach and criticized past security practices

Uber’s CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi, who was installed in the top job in August, disclosed the data breach last month shortly after learning of it himself, saying that “none of this should have happened.” Uber’s security practices are also under scrutiny in a high-stakes legal battle with self-driving car company Waymo, an Alphabet Inc subsidiary.

Uber last week said it fired its chief security officer, Joe Sullivan, over his role in the 2016 data breach, which compromised data belonging to 57 million customers and about 600,000 drivers. The resignations Friday came amid mounting frustration within Uber’s security team over Sullivan’s dismissal and the company’s handling of the public disclosure of the breach.

The three managers who resigned were Pooja Ashok, chief of staff for Sullivan; Prithvi Rai, a senior security engineer and the number two manager in the department; and Jeff Jones, who handled physical security, the Uber spokesperson said. Ashok and Jones will remain at the company until January to assist in transition, the spokesperson said.

A fourth individual, Uber’s head of Global Threat Operations, Mat Henley, began a three-month medical leave, said a separate source familiar with the situation. The departures include most of Sullivan’s direct reports.

None of the four immediately responded to requests for comment. Emails in connection with the departures, described by the separate source, complained of emotional and physical strain from the past year.

Sullivan in August told Reuters that his security team totaled around 500 employees.

Leadership in the unit has been in turmoil since the termination last week of Sullivan and a deputy, as well as Uber’s admission that it paid $100,000 to hackers to delete stolen data from the October 2016 breach and keep it secret, while failing to report the incident to regulators or warn customers that their phone numbers and other data had been exposed.

In the Waymo case, testimony at a pretrial hearing this week focused on claims by former employee Richard Jacobs that Uber had a special unit within its security team that tried to obtain programming code and other trade secrets from rivals.

Uber launched an investigation in response to Jacobs’ claims, which were outlined in a 37-page letter sent to Uber’s in-house attorney and the U.S. Department of Justice. Board members received a report before Thanksgiving on the findings of that investigation, run by law firm WilmerHale. The report has not been shared publicly.

Henley, who was among the Uber security managers named in Jacobs’ letter, said in court Wednesday that the unit at Uber that Jacobs had accused of acquiring rivals’ trade secrets no longer exists.

In addition to having a technical team dedicated to obtaining data from competitors, Uber also had a “human intelligence” team to spy on people and record their conversations without them knowing, according to testimony in the Waymo case.

In one instance, a security vendor hired by Uber recorded a conversation between executives of rival ride-hailing firms Didi and Grab, Nicholas Gicinto, a security manager at Uber, testified in court Wednesday.

Uber’s general counsel, Tony West, on Wednesday sent a note to employees, which was seen by Reuters, saying that human surveillance of individuals would no longer be tolerated.

West said he did not believe the activity was illegal, “but, to be crystal clear, to the extent anyone is working on any kind of competitive intelligence project that involves the surveillance of individuals, stop it now.”