Uber drivers organise as gig economy takes root

A collective legal action in Amsterdam accuses Uber of exploiting drivers’ data to shift financial risk onto workers while increasing the platform’s commissions. Since 2020, Uber’s pay model has gradually moved away from fixed rates based on journey time and distance towards highly variable payments determined in real time. The parameters used to calculate these payments remain undisclosed, preventing drivers from understanding how their earnings are calculated or how they relate to the amount paid by passengers.

Although Uber now provides some information about its average commission, comparisons between passenger fares and driver payments have reportedly revealed the platform taking more than 50% on some individual journeys. Uber says the system optimises the balance between supply and demand, improving its service while maximising drivers’ opportunities to earn. Drivers, however, report unpredictable incomes, longer periods of unpaid waiting and growing inequality within the workforce.

The legal claim seeks to reform Uber and receive compensation for about 241,000 drivers in the UK, the Netherlands, and other European countries.

Uber was founded in San Francisco in 2009, initially offering an app-based luxury car service. It subsequently raised billions of dollars from investors while recording years of losses and expanding rapidly into cities around the world. This expansion provoked protests from taxi workers, regulatory battles and disputes over safety, employment status, taxation and data use. Uber went public in 2019 and has since become profitable.

When Uber arrived in the cities, drivers were attracted by the promise of decent earnings, better cars, flexible hours and work without a boss. The removal of cash also offered greater protection from robberies and assaults. The model attracted people shut out of more secure employment, many of them migrants or from migrant backgrounds. Some drivers say they could initially earn a living by working four days a week, for eight to ten hours a day. Many now report working twelve-hour days, five days a week, to make the same money.

The supposed freedom of gig work depended on workers carrying most of its costs and risks. Drivers supplied the cars and paid for fuel, insurance, licensing, maintenance and repairs, while Uber controlled access to passengers and increasingly determined the price of their labour.

Uber has also faced accusations of wage theft. Following an eight-and-a-half-year campaign by the New York Taxi Workers Alliance, the New York attorney general secured a $328 million settlement with Uber and Lyft in 2023. The agreement provided compensation and introduced new protections for drivers.

As consumers become increasingly dependent on Uber and similar platforms in gentrified urban areas, drivers could no longer escape exploitation by simply abandoning these platforms. And while drivers may own their vehicles, they do not control the digital infrastructure through which their income is generated. The conventional boss may have disappeared from view, but management has been transferred into the app and hidden behind claims of technological complexity.

According to the legal claim, artificial intelligence and machine learning have enabled Uber to intensify workplace surveillance. Its real-time decision-making systems seek not only to predict driver behaviour but to influence and manage it.

The gig economy forms part of a transformation of capitalist production that accelerated during the 1980s with the spread of information technology. The bosses adopted digital systems to bypass organised workforce demands, reduce labour and supply-chain costs, intensify production and increase profits. Artificial intelligence deepens this process. It allows management to become more intensive, personalised and invisible while concentrating control of data and infrastructure in the hands of multinational companies.

Platform services are also becoming embedded within supposedly green and prosperous urban centres. Their appearance of frictionless convenience conceals the low-paid labour, energy-intensive data infrastructure and extraction of minerals and other resources on which they depend. The social and ecological costs are displaced onto workers and communities, many of them outside the wealthier cities where the services are consumed.

The gig economy promised autonomy from the conventional workplace and frictionless convenience. Instead, it created a workforce of precarious operators while deepening dependency on the big tech corporations.

In Britain, the Supreme Court ruled in 2021 that drivers were legally “workers” entitled to the minimum wage and paid holidays. Uber subsequently introduced a National Living Wage guarantee, holiday pay and access to a pension scheme. Nevertheless, unions continue to challenge the company over pay, unpaid waiting time and algorithmic management.

Uber drivers staged a strike and demonstration in Peterborough on 15-17 August 2025. This followed a strike by drivers in Newcastle in November 2024, protests by drivers in Bristol and a coordinated shutdown involving several UK cities on 1 May 2025.

UK Uber drivers also joined a nationwide log-off on 12 January 2026 in protest against falling earnings, deteriorating conditions and the company’s dynamic pay system. Many reportedly remained online, however, hoping to benefit from the increased demand—and potentially higher fares—created by the action.

This exposes one of the central difficulties of organising within the gig economy. Drivers work alone, rarely meet their colleagues and may be unable to sacrifice even a few hours’ income. By raising prices when the supply of drivers falls, the platform can turn the conditions created by industrial action into an incentive to break it.

While drivers’ hope for the short term is reform, these actions could also signal the gradual development of class consciousness among a workforce that the platform economy has deliberately fragmented and isolated. Protests and legal action can expose how the system operates and secure compensation, but it cannot substitute for effective anti-hierarchical organisation making use of strike funds, local groups, multilingual meetings and communication networks. Drivers need demands decided locally and collectively, and horizontal structures capable of linking struggles across towns and countries.