Uber Drivers Union and Why they should Unionize

uber drivers network

Uber drivers are going Union

• Why the Uber drivers want to Unionize – The reasons the drivers list for their desire to unionize are very similar to most workers who join unions; exploitive practices by employers, including unfair pay, arbitrary firing policies, and in the case of Uber drivers claims of racial discrimination.
Another major concern of Uber drivers everywhere is liability insurance. Currently, Uber requires the drivers to bear the responsibility  and expense) of liability insurance. This is a big deal financially since regular personal  liability does not cover a driver or vehicle being used in a rid-for-hire situation. The cost for commercial liability insurance is typically 3-4 times as much as personal liability insurance, forcing some drivers to choose between quitting Uber or driving around under insured or even not insured at all.
The driver rating system has also come under fire. Uber drivers get rated by their passengers, which is normally not a problem. The thing is, the current system does not allow drivers to challenge bad reviews, such as negative reviews from drunk passengers who file inaccurate, and undeserved, negative reviews. It has also been said that unscrupulous drivers will sabotage other drivers’ ratings by having bogus negative reviews submitted either by themselves or by people they hire to ride in and negatively review other drivers’ performance.
By unionizing, the drivers hope to be able to address, and correct, many of these issues.

• The Teamsters Union is lending a hand – The International Brotherhood of Teamsters is one of the largest, most powerful , and well known unions in the world. With their immense resources and vast experience, they will be a formidable adversary for Uber to do battle with.  A recent demonstration by over 500 Uber drivers  in front of the Santa Monica CA Uber offices made headlines throughout California and throughout the rest of the country as well.

• Ubers response to the drivers efforts to Unionize – Uber claims that the drivers are not employees but rather are software licensees, and thus do not constitute a legal bargaining unit and so are not eligible for membership in the Teamsters, or any, union. This sleazy tactic has been used before by slave driving, selfish companies who don’t seem to care about the happiness or welfare of their drivers or employees.
 An Uber spokesperson recently told a reporter from VentureBeat that “If an Uber driver wants to make a change they can talk to us directly- they don’t need a bogus organization like this to do that”.   It is exactly this kind of arrogant, selfish attitude which is rapidly eroding the public image Uber presents and causing drivers to unite and unionize. Exploitation of this type has been attempted, and declared illegal many times in the history of labor relations in the United States. It often happens that rival companies in the same trade will emerge with a business model more favorable to the workers and drive companies like Uber out of business entirely. If that should happen to Uber it will be exactly what they deserve for so blatantly and greedily disregarding the rights of the very drivers who have put them in the position to be valued at billions of dollars. The day of the capitalistic robber barons has long passed, and it is high time that invasive parasites like the people running Uber are made to conform to the law of the land just like every other business in America is required to do.  California Lawsuits – A number of lawsuits currently pending in the California legal system will help to determine the future of the drivers’  union status, and the future of Uber  itself; California Assembly Bill 2293, for instance, addresses the liability insurance issue and is being steadfastly opposed by Uber. With an estimated value exceeding 18 Billion dollars, Uber can and does retain powerful legal guns to oppose these court challenges. Only time will tell who will prevail- justice and fairness or money and clout. Hopefully Uber will be forced to adopt practices that are both legal and ethical and begin treating their drivers more fairly in the future. This would include addressing issues such as job security, liability insurance, false promises made to recruit new drivers and all of the other topics which have garnered Uber negative headlines all across the nation.

Conclusion – With the powerful Teamsters union on their side, and the spate of legal challenges cropping up in California and elsewhere across the nation, many feel  that it is only a matter of time until the drivers prevail against Uber and get accepted as a union organization.  Historically the courts in California and in other states as well have sided on the side of the employee (A district court in Frankfurt Germany even went as far as to ban Uber from operating anywhere in Germany for infringing on the operation of legit, legal cabs. After nearly a month an appellate court eventually lifted the ban due to a legal technicality). If this prediction of redemption for the drivers and unions becomes a reality, it will undoubtedly change the playing field, and force Uber to play fairly or get out of the ride for hire business altogether. There is little doubt that Lyft drivers are soon to follow with lawsuits and unionization attempts of their own if the Uber drivers prevail in their attempt to be treated fairly. I for one cannot wait for this day of reckoning to come!

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Text a Taxi St Petersburg FL at Discount Taxi

Please Include your address or name of the place where you need to be picked up and time of pick up. 
To Text 4 Taxi you can also use phone number 727-490-9164

St Petersburg Discount Taxi Company Hits Hi Tech Home Run

– A breakthrough development in the taxi cab business is taking the St. Petersburg Florida area by storm! An innovative, forward thinking entrepreneur down there has come up with a unique combination of traditional taxi service and high tech dispatching; it is called Text4Taxi and its advantages are many:

·       With this new service, there are none of the pitfalls of traditional over-the-phone dispatching.

·       There are never any annoying, time wasting busy signals.

·        There is never any need to worry about miscommunication or misunderstood directions due to spotty cell phone reception and garbled voice messages.

·        No crabby, impolite dispatchers answering the phone sounding grouchy and tired and talking to you as if they were angry with you, or sounding like they are doing you a favor by sending you a cab.

·       When special, detailed instructions for pickup, or complicated, hard to follow directions are part of the scenario, Text4Taxi really shines. There is no comparing the exact, precise details that can be obtained via text communication and the haphazard, hit-or-miss nature of verbal order taking.

·       Text4Taxi also provides the perfect method for positive verification and communication directly between the driver and the customer…"I am on my way, I should be there within 5 minutes" or "I am in front of the club in white Toyota Prius". Neither traditional phone dispatching, nor even the newly arrived taxi dispatching applications developed for smart phone users can achieve this level of accuracy and post contact verifiability.

·       Another tremendous advantage of texting vs. verbal contact is the ability can request a cab in noisy locations like concerts, sporting events or busy nightclubs without fear of your message being unintelligible or misunderstood. Additionally, Text4Taxi is also great when you need to be low key and unobtrusive such as when attending church, the symphony, at weddings and funerals. No need to whisper furtively into the phone while hoping no one hears you or notices you, and no more interrupting the proceedings and rudely exiting the room to call a cab. Text4Taxi eliminates the need for all of that.

·       Since texting provides a built in written record of all the details of the communication between driver and customer, there is never a problem for either party relying on faulty human memory to store vital information about who, when and where the taxi is going to show up.

Text4Taxi is also superior in many respects to its high tech counterpart taxi dispatching apps in that it provides a level of detail and ability for future ride booking that many apps are incapable of providing. Text4Taxi also allows the customer to pose detailed inquiries such as “how much would cost to get from downtown St Pete to south Tampa?”

Yes, there can be no argument that this clever taxi company’s ownership has hit a home run with their Text 4 Taxi concept. It is a winning combination of technology and outstanding customer service. Cab companies around the world are sure to follow suit and adopt this innovative new dispatching process.

UBER BANNED IN TAMPA BAY

  Hopefully, this will force Uber to comply with all the Tampa Bay taxi regulations like getting commercial insurance for all cars, pay city taxes, DO REAL Background checks for drivers, do regular inspections on cars, stop lying to drivers about possible income, stop lying to customers about "tip is included policy", stop lowering rates on a whim with disregard for drivers livelihood, etc.

Hillsborough decides uber just like cabs


"TAMPA — Uber has lost a battle Wednesday in its fight for open competition on streets as Hillsborough County's Public Transportation Commission decides that the ride-sharing company is a taxi company and faces the same regulations as other such firms.

The hearing was a continuing appeal process of five tickets inspectors wrote to Uber drivers for two violations: operating a for-hire service without a proper permit, and allowing or causing drivers to operate a public for-hire vehicle without the proper driver's license, according to the Tampa Bay Times........"


>>> Please Read More


University of Tampa Bans Uber and Lyft because of students safety concerns.

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Uber,- Insurance and Integrity Problems

Uber is up to it's old tricks again, advertising 'facts' that are not even close to being 100% factual. In this case Uber claims that they perform background checks that exceed the checks performed by conventional taxi companies, and they also  claim to have 1 million dollar per incident liability insurance. A recent NBC investigative report from a San Francisco TV station exposes the fallacy of these claims.

  It turns out that when you ride in an Uber car, you are typically not covered at all, neither by the drivers personal insurance nor by any insurance whatsoever from Uber. If you incur any injury while riding, or crashing, in an Uber car, you or your family will be stuck paying the entire medical bill yourself. This type of expense, potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars, could of course bankrupt even a well to do person. 

The insurance that private drivers carry does not cover the car, or the driver, if the car is being used professionally to provide transportation for hire. This kind of coverage requires commercial insurance, the type required by law in conventional taxi's and limo services. This commercial insurance is
significantly more costly than standard personal coverage, and to purchase this kind of insurance would render the driving of an Uber car economically unfeasible.

As for Ubers claim regarding extremely thorough criminal background checks, it seems that Uber is not being totally honest with their claims in this area either. They are clearly not more exhaustive than those required for legitimate taxi companies, and there is some question as to whether Uber performs any criminal background checks at all. NBC reports that they found drivers with criminal histories not only in San Francisco, but also in LA and Chicago. These drivers, some of whom were still on probation, had past convictions that include burglary, assault, and drug trafficking charges.  NBC even went as far as to have undercover felons apply for employment, and Uber hired them without question.

 Given these facts, I would not want my wife, child, or other loved ones to ride in an uninsured car
with a convicted felon which may very well be the case with an Uber ride. I'll stick with the traditional taxi companies who are required, by law,  to have proper insurance and also required by law to conduct a thorough background check performed by an accredited agency.

The truth about UBER,- video

Four Myth’s That Uber is Spreading

Myth #1 – Uber is a Tech company

Uber is nothing more than a new way to dispatch taxi cabs. All of the “ride sharing” propaganda is just that;the fact is when you order a ride for an agreed upon price to a specific destination, you are acting as a taxi cab. Simply calling your taxi service a “ride sharing service” does not make it  a new and revolutionary product. As the classical wisdom says “ If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck” then it is most likely a duck. Uber’s claim to be a tech company providing a software service is just a very transparent attempt by the billion dollar company to avoid acting like a responsible business instead of a shifty, fly by night outfit. Uber is using this flimsy excuse to bilk local governments out of millions of dollars in revenue while lining their own pockets with Billions of dollars in ill-gotten profits. One day soon the hand of fate will deal the crushing blow to Uber, and I for one think it will be fitting and proper when it does finally happen! Uber has been making profit at the expense of honest, hard workibg people long enough and it is high time that it stops.

Myth#2- Uber and it’s drivers carry adequate insurance

Time and time again Uber drivers have been involved in accidents, including accidents that involve serious injuries and deaths, and Uber has consistently denied any responsibility or liability in these cases. Their claim of fully insured cars and drivers have been proven false time and time again as Uber drivers are involved in accidents and left to fend for themselves when it is time to appear in court. More than one Uber driver has had their lives ruined because of the company’s refusal to stand behind their drivers when the chips are down. A drivers personal insurance will not cover any injury or damage that occurs to the driver, his car, or the other party’s car or occupants because their personal policy specifically excludes any situations where the car is being used for commercial purposes. This has been the unanimous opinon of every sing insurance company involved in such a case, and has also been unanimously upheld by every court these cases have come before. Once again, it is the driver, and sometimes the other party’s in the accident, that end up paying the sometimes heavy price for Uber’s total disregard for decent and responsible corporate behavior. If you drive for, or ride in, an Uber car you are taking a very serious risk that could result in millions of dollars of debt as well as serious personal injury or even death. Do not be mislead by the outright falsification Uber presents regard the insurance issue, they have proven over and over again that they do not stand behind anyone and are only out to make a quick , and dishonest dollar.

Myth#3- Taxi laws do not apply to Uber ?

 – Despite Ubers claims of “not being in the transportation business” , and thus exempt to the rules and regulations governing the taxi industry, lawmakers across the country are realizing exactly what Uber is up to and are enacting laws to force Uber to play fairly.The fact is that Abe Lincoln was right when he said “ You can fool all of the people some of the time, or you can fool some of the people all of the time, but YOU CAN’T FOOL ALL OF THE PEOPLE ALL OF THER TIME. Uber has been playing their little game of legal cat and mouse for too long and in too many places and their house of cards is begging to rapidly fall. In the end of course it will be the drivers who suffer for Uber’s reprehensible tactics, just as it always has been their drivers who bear the brunt of the punishment for Uber’s transgressions. This abhorable, cheating organization will get what it deserves in the end, of that we can be certain.

Myth#4-  Uber drivers are thoroughly screened ?

- Murders, rapists, and undesirables of every description have been able to find employment with Uber. Apparently Uber’s “thorough screening” process is just like their “adequate insurance coverage”, a deliberate and brazen lie concocted to allow them to take unfair advantage of the legitimate, established taxi and limo companies by usurping the spirit, and the letter, of  local laws and regulations. Little, if any, screening of applicant is done, and certainly nothing even close to the rigorous and thorough legal screening required for taxi companies in virtually every municipality in America. If you are a shady character with a long criminal history, you need look no farther than Uber for your next job. Uber drivers have been accused, and convicted, of every crime you can think of, including sexual offenses, assault, and even murder. The shame of it is that it is Uber’s unsuspecting customers that ultimately pay the price for Uber’s disregard for their safety.