Court orders Uber to reintegrate five drivers excluded from the platform services by automated process

The district court of Amsterdam ruled that Uber should reintegrate five British and one Dutch driver, given that the decision to exclude them was only based on automated processing. The drivers alleged that they had been accused of fraudulent activity based on wrong information from Uber’s software. One of the drivers said he was dismissed after working for Uber for 6 years and he only got a message from the platform announcing his contract was cancelled because of security concerns related to account sharing. The driver insisted that no evidence was provided by the platform.

The director of Worker Info Exchange James Farrar, a non-profit organisation dedicated to helping workers access and gain insight from data collected from them at work, believes that the drivers accused of fraudulent activity are victims of bad technology. Farrar considers that the case should raise the attention to the fact that the gig economy abuses of its surveillance technology to illegitimately manage workers with algorithms.