Uber used in several countries, including Portugal, the strategy of taking advantage of the violence of taxi drivers against Uber drivers as a way to promote the company’s image and obtain concessions from governments, reveals a journalistic investigation.
The plan began to be designed in 2015When the strategists of the North American company perceive that they could benefit from the acts of violence against Uber motorists, gaining sympathy from public opinion, reveals the investigation Uber Files, conducted by the International Consortium of Investigation Journalists (ICIJ, in the acronym in English).
The investigation revealed this Sunday quotes one of the company’s lobbyists, Christian Samoilovich, in a message sent to a colleague in March of that year, where he acknowledges that the Uber could use violence against company drivers in its favorafter an advisor to the European Commission wrote on the social network Facebook that an Uber in which he had traveled had been attacked by taxi drivers.
This week, Four Uber drivers were attacked on the same night by taxi drivers in the Netherlands who protested against the benefits that the North American company was benefiting from, which led Niek van Leeuwen, manager of the organization for that European region, to report the situation to the then CEO, Travis Kalanick.
With the approval of the company’s general management, Leeuwen made his reaction of outrage at these cases to the Dutch media, feeding the case in the media and making an internal report in which he advised: “We have to maintain this narrative of violence” .
From there, the Uber has started advising drivers to stand up to violence from taxi driversreminding them that this was the best way to protect the interests of the company they worked for.
Kalanick appears in several posts advocating for Uber drivers to confront taxi drivers, even despite the risk of being physically assaulted, advising that “the narrative of violence” be maintained.
A spokesman for the former CEO told the consortium of journalists that these statements are out of context and that Kalanick never wanted to put the lives of Uber drivers at risk, but current company officials were outraged by these practices.
One of the examples presented by the ICIJ investigation –cited by The Washington Post, one of the media partners in this investigation– took place in Portugal, in 2015, when taxi drivers committed “acts of violence” against Uber drivers in several occasions, injuring several of them and causing one of them to be hospitalized.
The response to the Uber service in Portugal, and the lack of regulation of its activity, was accentuated throughout the first half of 2015, culminating, at the end of June, with the confirmation of an injunction, presented by the National Association of Carriers Roads in Light Cars (ANTRAL), with the Central Court of Lisbon, for the suspension of the activity of the technological platform.
The actions of the Portuguese taxi drivers followed one another throughout the second quarter and gathered force again in September and October, with demonstrations that were held simultaneously in Lisbon, Porto and Faro.
At that time, Portugal was on the eve of legislative elections, which led to a change of government.
The regulation of technological platforms for passenger transport will come into force in 2018.
According to The Washington Post, which places the action in July 2015, Rui Bento, at that time manager of Uber in Portugal, quoted in an email to colleagues as saying the company was “considering” submitting information about the attacks and injuries to the local media, at a time when ANTRAL, the largest taxi drivers’ association in Portugal, sought to counter Uber’s expansion strategy.
In Rui Bento’s version, in the messages, the idea behind the dissemination of information about the attacks by taxi drivers against Uber drivers was “to create a direct link between the public declarations of violence by the president of ANTRAL (Florêncio Almeida) and these actions, to degrade their public image”.
In response to this message from Rui Bento, Yuri Fernández, Uber’s communication manager, proposed investigating Florêncio Almeida’s past: “To see if we have something ‘sexy’ for the ‘media’,” according to the documents cited by the investigation.
The Washington Post newspaper says that Bento and Fernández did not respond to requests for comment on this case.
The ICIJ investigation presents similar cases in other countries, such as Switzerland, where a violent attack by a taxi driver in Geneva against an Uber driver with the potential to obtain benefits from the Government of Bern was analyzed.
Source: Observadora
