Company
ActiveUber
San Francisco · Since 2009
Still independent. In many places courts and statutes have forced it to treat drivers as employees. In others it still classifies them as contractors.
Garrett Camp and Travis Kalanick founded Uber in 2009. The app dispatched a car and charged a card. The person driving was, in the company's account, a customer of the software, an independent contractor running a tiny business. Regulators and drivers spent the next decade arguing that this was a job.
The argument is the history. In some countries and some American states, courts or laws have required Uber to treat drivers as employees, with the costs that word implies. In others the contractor model survived with modifications, minimum pay, or a third category that satisfies nobody completely.
A payroll the company denied
Uber's direct employees build the app, run local operations, and lobby. The drivers, who are the service, were kept off the books so the company could expand without hiring. Algorithms set the price and the destination. A driver who cannot set the fare or refuse enough rides without penalty looks, to a labor board, like an employee. The company's response has been legal, political, and product-shaped: change the button, change the classification.
Still dispatching
Uber is a public company and still operates. It also delivers food, which added another contractor workforce on bicycles and in cars. The 2010 chapter uses Uber as the firm that made piecework look like an app. That description remains accurate wherever the law has not forced a different one.
The work it organized
- Driver
- Operations manager
- Support agent
- Courier
On the timeline
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