CHICAGO (WBBM NEWSRADIO) — Rideshare drivers staged a protest outside Uber’s offices on the Northwest Side Thursday, as they joined others across the country with a number of demands from Uber and Lyft.
An Uber driver since 2015, Jocilyn Floyd, who’s been an Uber driver since 2015, said there’s a labor crisis and a safety crisis at Uber that boils down to this: lower pay, no protection.
“Uber prefers to call us partners, but they treat us like indentured servants,” Floyd said. “After slavery, Black people were forced to work at white-owned lands, enduring low wages and brutal conditions, entrapping us in unbreakable cycles of debt. This was called sharecropping, and it’s still happening today, except under the name, ‘the gig economy.’”
Floyd said they were asking for fair pay, for safety, and to not be “deactivated without any due process.”
Another driver said pay went from 75% to about 40%. If a passenger pays $31, they said, the driver gets about $14.
Floyd said she will be making a presentation during the Uber shareholder’s meeting next week.
Beyond Chicago, drivers demonstrated in New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Denver and Seattle. In a press release, the demonstrators wrote that “at least 31 drivers were murdered on the job in 2022.”
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