Get me an Uber!

Photo by Thought Catalog on Unsplash

An interesting story today about industrial action being taken by taxi drivers working for Uber. The action is taking place in the USA and in cities across the UK (including Glasgow). It is designed to draw attention to working practices within the company before it lists its shares on the New York Stock Exchange.

Quite a few of my previous blogs have looked at employment status and the steady increase in the number of individuals who provide services to organisations but, critically, not under the traditional employment contract model.

Section 230(1) of the Employment Rights Act 1996 contains the definition of who precisely is an employee i.e. someone who has a contract of service. If you don’t have this type of contractual arrangement (you’re not an employee), you may well be working under a contract for services. This is one of the most important distinctions in employment law in the United Kingdom.

Those individuals working under a contract for services – precisely because of their lack of employment status – are often denied access to the sorts of legal rights which employees routinely take for granted e.g. unfair dismissal protection, redundancy protection, family friendly rights, rights to information and consultation etc.

Admittedly, employees will not acquire these rights from day 1 of their employment, but the critical difference in relation to people working under a contract for services is that they have the potential to obtain employment rights (by completing the requisite period of continuous service e.g. 2 years’ continuous service for entitlement to protection against unfair dismissal and for entitlement to a redundancy payment.

There’s now a growing awareness on both the part of the UK Government (The Taylor Review) and the European Union (the forthcoming EU Directive on Transparent and predictable working conditions) that people on contracts for services deserve greater levels of work-place protection.

The industrial action being taken by Uber drivers today is principally an attempt by these types of workers to secure better contractual terms and conditions. The law does now appear to be recognising that individuals working for organisations such as Uber (and Lyft) are not genuinely self-employed persons. Rather they should be categorised as workers with an entitlement to a basic level of legal protection (see the English Court of Appeal’s decision in Uber BV & Ors v Aslam & Ors [2018] EWCA Civ 2748 on appeal from UKEAT/0056/17/DA).

A link to the Aslam judgement can be found below:

https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/uber-bv-ors-v-aslam-ors-judgment-19.12.18.pdf

A link to an article on the BBC website about the industrial action can be found below:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-48190176

Copyright Seán J Crossan, 8 May 2019