Politics: Uber Exploits Drivers says Union Boss

Mick Rix, of the GMB Union, was at the Labour Party conference in Brighton to highlight the union’s campaign to improve wages and working conditions for taxi drivers, including many Uber drivers. Here, he tells Felix Magazine why he is at the conference:

“I am the national officer for the taxi and private-hire tribe in our GMB Union. We have over 10,000 members and we have a lot of members in Uber and organisations like that. We are gaining strength in the taxi industry.

“We are at the heart of this present series of disputes in London. We have been campaigning for years for Uber to put in workers’ rights. The App that they use, it controls their work, it dictates their work and there are a lot of excessive working hours taking place – we have campaigned against that.

“Uber have saturated the market with so many drivers that their drivers are having to work outside of their licenced areas. And basically when the Tory government brought in the deregulation act, the taxi industry developed into a wild-west situation. There are people out touting for business and they are not regulated anymore, so there are some real problems within the industry.

“The belief that the Mayor’s ban on Uber is a bad thing because Uber has kept prices down is not exactly true. Firstly prices in London for the Hackney carriage are regulated by Transport for London (TfL), it’s the regulators that determine what the prices are. However, those drivers are legitimately able to reduce their prices, if they want to.

“The real problem is not that prices are going to go up, it’s that there are over 350,000 drivers in the country now and it’s just one cake. And there are thousands of licences that are added on a weekly basis. So drivers are doing 80 to 90 hours each week, just to eke out a living and many of them are under the national minimum living wage.

Crocodile Tears

“We took Uber to court just over two years ago to obtain for our members a worker’s status, which meant they would get sick pay, holiday pay, and would be above the national minimum wage. Uber have resisted that, so when they have said this week there will be 40,000 job losses in London because of TfL’s decision they have really been crying crocodile tears.

“Our argument is Uber have smashed good paying jobs by introducing low pay and long hours working and now they are investing over £300m in this country in driverless technology. So they are going to put these drivers out of business anyway, so that’s why it is crocodile tears.

“We’ve come down to the conference because most of us are members of the Labour Party. We managed to persuade the party at the last election to support a manifesto commitment on taxis throughout the country to have them properly regulated again and to put the customers first. It means making the customer safe again and the taxis properly regulated again.

“The party made a very good manifesto commitment to that. So we are not here campaigning against the Labour Party, we are here to urge them to carry on with promoting those principles.

“There are MPs like Andy McDonald, the Shadow Transport Minister, Lilian Greenwood, the chair of the transport committee, Wes Streeting, they are all coming out of conference to be photographed with us and to support our cause. So we’re here to support them as well on that journey.

“I think Jeremy Corbyn gives everybody hope. Many of us are not into popularity contests, politics is not about personality contests, it is about offering people hope. And JC and quite a lot of the leadership of the Labour Party give genuine hope to ordinary working people.

“I think he will make a good PM. I think he will be different with an ethical foreign policy again and policies that will benefit working people, not just rich multi-nationals that are trickling out the money to somewhere like the Cayman Islands.”

 

by Bob Graham

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