Uber chief in hot seat for driver’s grilling over pay and safety
Taxi app’s UK boss gets behind wheel to hear how life on road can be a rough ride.
Getting stopped by the police wasn’t what Uber’s UK chief Andrew Brem imagined when he got behind the wheel to collect passengers one rainy night in London.
He wasn’t pulled aside because of his driving skills (he insists he has a five-star rating on the app). Instead, the police were after the pair in the back seat, following a fight with their Uber driver just moments earlier.
The incident, which has not been Brem’s only uncomfortable journey since he started picking up fares a year ago, gave the executive a flavour of how tense a shift can feel for drivers.
Drunk assaults and irritable customers are so commonplace that the ride-hailing app once ran an experiment with a Bop It children’s toy to see if the noisy game could distract drunk passengers from misbehaving.
“Drivers are front line and I take my hat off to them,” says Brem, who joined the tech giant from British Airways in April. He arrived just after the app secured a two-and-a-half-year licence to operate in the capital and a year after it started giving drivers holiday pay, pensions and minimum wage after losing a long legal battle.
The 55-year-old wants London’s black cabs to stop viewing Uber as an enemy and partner up. It is offering a £400 sign-on bonus but a union for drivers has made clear that there is “no interest” in mending ties and pointed to concerns about workers’ rights.
The tech giant is a well-oiled PR machine but speaking to its drivers suggests that life on the road is hardly smooth. Adam (not his real name), the Uber driver taking me across London to see Brem for lunch, reels off a list of grievances when asked what questions he’d like me to put to the country head. For a start, our six-mile trip is costing £19.50, but he will only receive £11 of that. That morning he says he rejected a journey because Uber offered to pay him just £26 to drive 19 miles.
“When you see that sort of pricing, you don’t even want to get up in the morning,” Adam adds.
Brem defends Uber’s pricing, arguing that it is now “smart” and no longer based on the 25pc commission. A rainy Saturday night in central London will make a driver much more than a sunny Monday morning. It’s all about the “level of demand in that specific area at that specific time and the number of drivers at that time”, he says.
“We want to win every ride, and we want every driver to accept that trip. There will be trips where we make a 40pc profit margin, other trips where we make zero.”
The pricing swings can frustrate drivers as well as passengers. Uber’s chief executive Dara Khosrowshahi was blindsided over the summer when a journalist showed him his receipt for a 2.95-mile Uber ride in New York that cost $51.69 (£40.80), including a tip.
“Oh, my God. Wow,” Khosrowshahi was quoted as saying, having guessed it would cost $20. Ramping up prices at busy times can also raise questions about ethics. Uber refunded users who were charged surge fares after the London Bridge terror attacks in 2017.
Still, surge pricing has caught on after being pioneered by Uber. Stonegate, the UK’S largest pub chain, unveiled plans in September to charge as much as 20p more per pint when footfall matches are on.
Uber claims its pricing strategy is not putting off drivers. The app says its number of UK drivers has grown by 85pc since March 2021 to well over 100,000. Father of four Brem puts the surge down to the “extraordinary” amount of freedom it offers. However, thousands of drivers also abandoned the service during Covid lockdowns.
Uber wants to keep signing up new drivers. But it may struggle if Adam’s issues are typical.
Adam signed up to drive for Uber two years ago after ditching his job for the council where he worked for 18 years. Having done hundreds of journeys, he admits to missing the reliability of his former lifestyle and is ready to spend less time on the road.
He’s fed up with the pricing, sitting in traffic and feeling threatened by drunk and aggressive customers as well as angry people in a rush who want him to break speed limits.
Brem claims that “most people sit at the back on their phones” in an Uber. He adds that drivers receive virtual “de-escalation” training and have “total choice about when and where they drive”, although the latter isn’t quite right in practice given that a Saturday night in central London is going to make the most money.
Adam hopes to get another job within the next month, but says he has come across “wonderful people” while being a driver and will likely dip in and out of the app due to its flexibility.
Brem is under no illusion that many others feel the same. “We welcome more part-time driving,” he insists.
Brem is eager to steer Uber UK away from any drama after a turbulent first decade. The company has fought to draw a line under its conflicts with Transport for London, as well as its own drivers. Its London licence is up for renewal next year, having in the past been denied because of “public safety and security implications”. The company clearly still needs to work at becoming an attractive place to work.
Brem, who has lived in Camden for two decades, says he will be taking an Uber home for his journey back from the theatre tonight. He would do well to ask the driver some questions.
‘We want to win every ride, and we want every driver to accept that trip’