This Week in Rideshare: EVs, Prop 22, and Amazon

EVs by 2030, Prop 22 hurts drivers and Amazon’s dangerous game. LegalRideshare breaks it down.

MONDAY 9/19/22

An Amazon driver goes viral after quitting due to long hours and excessive work. Daily Dot added:

He claims that if drivers don’t finish their delivery routes as fast as other drivers, in 12 hours, the app will kick them out. Resing says Amazon’s dispatch team sent his assignments to his personal cell phone on top of asking him to log out of the app.

He claims the company wants to keep him in the same role, overworking him without promoting him.

At the end of his video, Resing adds that he’s tired of being forced to skip breaks and “p*ss in bottles” for a job that doesn’t even help him make ends meet.

TUESDAY 9/20/22

If you want to keep driving for Uber, you’ll need an EV by 2030. Benzinga reported:

Uber is committing to becoming a zero-emission platform in U.S. and Canadian cities as well as in major urban centers around the world, by phasing out all gas-powered vehicles by 2030.

The company said that switching to electric cars will reduce air pollution in congested cities, and it’s encouraging gas-powered vehicle owners to make the transition.

Uber is starting the Green Future program, giving its drivers access to $800 million worth of resources to aid in the switch to electric vehicles (EVs) by 2025.

WEDNESDAY 9/21/22

A new study suggests Prop 22 is hurting drivers. Wired reported:

The study by PolicyLink, a progressive research and advocacy organization, and Rideshare Drivers United, a California driver advocacy group, found that after rideshare drivers in the state pay for costs associated with doing business — including gas and vehicle wear and tear — they make a hourly wage of $6.20, well below California’s minimum wage of $15 an hour. The researchers calculate that if drivers were made employees rather than independent contractors, they could make an additional $11 per hour.

The report published Wednesday suggests California rideshare drivers are worse off now than they were before the law passed, under the state’s previous gig economy law, though the pandemic and high gas prices have contributed to their distress. It appears to be the first study to use data collected without cooperation of rideshare companies to evaluate driver wages since Proposition 22 went into effect last year.

THURSDAY 9/22/22

Reports of sexual assault continue to plague Uber. Bangor Daily News reported:

A woman who accused her Uber driver of sexually assaulting her in Bangor in early June gave the region its first exposure to a problem the ride-hailing giant has faced nationally — and been sued over — in recent years.

Though this is the first reported case of an Uber driver sexually assaulting a customer in Bangor, according to police, thousands of the ride-hailing app’s drivers and passengers have reported being sexually assaulted or raped over the past several years, according to safety reports the company began publishing in 2019.

FRIDAY 9/23/22

Amazon is under fire for hiring dangerous trucking companies. The Wall Street Journal reported:

They include one company whose driver was found with a crack pipe after running an Amazon trailer into a Minnesota ditch. He was convicted of driving while high. Another driver hauling Amazon freight was involved in a fatal accident in Kansas after losing control while braking — two months after his employer ignored a police order to fix the truck’s brakes, police reports show.

All three companies received unsafe driving scores that raised red flags at the U.S. Transportation Department, a Wall Street Journal analysis of government data found. Between February 2020 and early August 2022, more than 1,300 Amazon trucking contractors received scores worse than the level at which DOT officials typically take action, the Journal found. DOT scores are a widely used industry standard for assessing trucker safety.

Trucking contractors that worked frequently for Amazon were more than twice as likely as all other similar companies to receive bad unsafe driving scores, the Journal analysis found. About 39% of the frequent Amazon contractors in the Journal’s analysis received scores at that level.

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