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Uber loses appeal against drivers' work status
Minicab app Uber has lost an appeal over a landmark ruling that their drivers are workers and not self-employed. The ride-hailing firm had attempted to overturn employment tribunal findings which have paved the way for tens of thousands of its drivers in the UK to receive the national minimum wage and paid holiday.
At the Court of Appeal in London senior judges ruled by two to one that the original ruling was "plainly correct."
Master of the Rolls Sir Terence Etherton, with whom Lord Justice Bean agreed, said the tribunal was "not only entitled, but correct" to find that each of the claimants was driving for Uber as a "worker". Dismissing Uber's appeal, he added: "As to the reality, not only do we see no reason to disagree with the factual conclusions of the (tribunal) as to the working relationship between Uber and the drivers, but we consider that the (tribunal) was plainly correct."
Lord Justice Underhill, dissenting, said drivers should only be treated as working from the moment they accept a trip. He said the issues raised in the appeal were matters of policy which Parliament was "better placed" to consider than the courts. He added: "The whole question of whether and how to adapt existing employment law protections to the development of the so-called gig economy, and in particular to the use of service-provision platforms such as Uber, is under active review by the Government at present."
Sir Terence allowed Uber permission to appeal to the Supreme Court.
Yaseen Aslam, one of the drivers involved in the case, said: "I'm delighted with today's ruling, but frustrated that the process has dragged on for over three years. "It cannot be left to precarious workers like us to bring companies like Uber to account and, despite the personal price we have had to pay, we are the lucky ones.
"We know of many that are under such hardship that it would be unimaginable for them to take a multi-billion pound company to court. "It is now time for the Government and the Mayor of London to act and stop letting companies like Uber take them for a ride."
In November 2017, the Employment Appeal Tribunal (EAT) dismissed Uber's appeal against an earlier tribunal ruling that former drivers Yaseen Aslam and James Farrar were "workers" at the time they were operating for Uber. But, at a hearing in October, the company's barrister Dinah Rose QC said the finding that Uber drivers were workers ignored the fact that its relationship with drivers was "typical of the private hire industry".
Uber was not "unusual" because of the relationship between it and its drivers, "but because the Uber app enables it to operate on a much larger scale than traditional minicab companies", she argued. The initial employment tribunal found Uber's agreements with drivers contained "fictions, twisted language and even brand new terminology", and that the contracts "did not correspond with the practical reality".
However, Ms Rose said that the contracts "reflected the true relationship and terms of the agreements between the parties". She added that both tribunals had "erred in law" in concluding that the pair were workers, submitting that they had "wrongly disregarded the written contracts in which the parties' agreements were recorded".
Jason Galbraith-Marten QC, for Mr Aslam and Mr Farrar, said there was "no express agreement" by which the claimants appointed Uber "to act as their agent and setting out the nature and extent of that agency". He said that the tribunals' task was therefore to "determine the true nature of the (implied) agreement" between drivers and Uber.
Mr Galbraith-Marten said the tribunals were "entitled to ask whether the claimants are genuinely in business on their own account" or whether they were "providing their services" to Uber. He added that, if Uber was not acting as the drivers' agent, "the purported driver-passenger contract is indeed a fiction".
Before the October hearing, hundreds of "precarious workers" attended a demonstration organised by the Independent Workers Union of Great Britain (IWGB), which represents Mr Aslam and Mr Farrar. IWGB general secretary Jason Moyer-Lee described the demonstration as "the articulation of the legitimate rage of the precarious workers and the exploited workers of the UK".
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