Uber, Lyft, and the optics of opposition
The Verge reports on a startling setback for Uber, the world’s most valuable private company. On Sunday, for the first time, the…
The Verge reports on a startling setback for Uber, the world’s most valuable private company. On Sunday, for the first time, the ride-hailing app slipped below rival Lyft in that day’s total downloads on iOS devices in the US.
The timing is not coincidental. Saturday saw the emergence of a campaign to #deleteUber, following suggestions that the company had broken an hour-long strike by New York City taxi drivers protesting Donald Trump’s notorious executive order.
This might, in fact, have been a public relations effort gone wrong. The allegations of strike-breaking, or “scabbing” — in British slang — emerged in response to Uber’s promise to suspend its (in itself controversial) surge-pricing, which can raise the price of rides in response to higher demand, to and from JFK airport.
In more charitable interpretations (presumably including its own), such a gesture on Uber’s part might have been viewed as an act of solidarity with the thousands of ordinary New Yorkers descending on JFK to protest — almost like subsidizing modern-day, metropolitan Freedom Riders.
Uber’s grandiose delusions were dashed, however, by the negative reputation it has already cultivated for itself. In particular, its involvement in years of litigation around its controversial definition of its drivers as “independent contractors” (removing the need to provide several statutory benefits reserved for full employees) made its breaking of a strike a little bit, as it were, rich. Uber’s stated relentless focus on customer experience (read: keeping the cost of rides low for the end-user) makes it undoubtedly popular but this has come at the cost of driver satisfaction, a metric at which it trails Lyft, according to surveys.
Uber was also left especially vulnerable to this sort of backlash by the participation of its CEO, Travis Kalanick, in President Trump’s panel of economic advisers, and his strident defence of it, in an internal memo obtained by BuzzFeed. But whatever the rights and wrongs of the flak coming Uber’s way, the controversy is an early case study in the communications and policy challenges that tech firms will face under the Trump administration. Firms like Apple, Google and Facebook are immensely — and increasingly — powerful forces in American society.
Ironically, if Trump hadn’t managed to make himself so unprecedentedly unpopular so early into his term, he might have been in a position to politically profit by targeting the globalized nature and globalizing impact of big tech, on issues like job automation, off-shore tax dodging, and increases in cost of urban living. Instead, he’s chosen the more extreme path of targeting the refugees and valid visa holders who, like Steve Jobs and Sergey Brin before them (Syrian and Russian emigrés respectively), will power America’s growth and nurture its soft power over the next few decades. For tech companies dealing with Trump, Uber’s experience suggests that — for the time being at least — outright opposition is the cheapest deal in town.