Fairness on demand

Uber’s workforce scored overdue change with the ride-hailing behemoth’s announcement this week that its app will soon give riders coast to coast the option to tip their drivers. Please give generously — especially because a legal standoff leaves business between the nearly $70 billion privately held company and its drivers far from finished.

Uber’s tipping U-turn, let’s be clear, is no ethical awakening, but part of a campaign to recover from a prolonged public-relations cataclysm.

That included: rampant sexual harassment tearing through the corporate suites, revelations that it used a tech tool called Grayball to deceive law enforcement, and dashboard video of CEO Travis Kalanick blaming a driver who dared complain about plunging fares dictated from the top.

So desperate were investors to stop the bleeding, that Kalanick is now out of the company he founded.

Surely, some drivers are happy sitting behind the wheel for Uber, getting the chance to earn cash with their own vehicles and on their own schedules. Others, perhaps especially in cutthroat New York City, feel used and abused by the company’s coldly efficient practices. Tips are, well, the tip of the iceberg. This month, in a ruling with potentially large ramifications, a judge with the New York State Department of Labor ruled that three drivers who parted with the company unwillingly were employees, not independent contractors as the company claims, and therefore entitled to unemployment insurance.

So too, said the state, were all drivers “similarly situated” — their work lives were so closely entwined via smartphone app with Uber’s intricate job rules, dictating behavior moment to moment, that it rendered them under company control. Let Uber prove otherwise. Meanwhile, under pressure, Uber last month ponied up millions of dollars to drivers that the company admitted it had withheld in error, by taking the company’s 20%-plus commission before deducting taxes and fees from the bill.

That outrageous skim should never have happened — and drivers are still in court demanding much more money they contend they’re due.

Tips are one battle won in a far larger war over fairness in a seductively shiny sector of the economy that has taken too many workers for granted for too long.