(cross post from Truth on the Market)
Uber is currently facing a set of plaintiffs who are seeking class certification in the Northern District of California (O’Connor, et. al v. Uber, #CV 13-3826-EMC) on two distinct grounds. First, the plaintiffs allege that Uber systematically deprived them of tips from riders by virtue of how the service is presented to end-users and how compensation is given to the riders in violation of the California Unfair Competition Law, Cal. Bus. & Prof. Code § 17200 et seq. Second, the plaintiffs claim that Uber misclassified its drivers – all 160,000 of them in California over the last five years – by failing to give them the legal definition of “employee” and, following from this, deprived said “employees” of reimbursement for things like mileage, gas, and other wear-and-tear on their vehicles (not to mention the shadow of entitlements like benefits and worker’s comp).
Essentially, claim one is based on the notion that Uber informs passengers that gratuity is included in the total cost of the car service and that there is no need to tip the driver. However, according to the plaintiffs, Uber either failed to collect this gratuity, or by failing to differentiate between the gratuity and the fee for the ride, and then collecting its own 20% cut of the total fee, the company improperly retained some of the gratuity for itself. In truth, it’s not completely clear from the complaint exactly how the plaintiffs are calculating allegedly withheld tips. Uber does a good job in its motion to defeat certification of pointing out, on the one hand, that there is no such thing as a “standard tip,” and, on the other hand, that the assessment of the tip issue would require so much individualized examination — from figuring out whether drivers were told that they could be tipped or not, to figuring out if drivers actually were consistently tipped — that the common issues proper to class examination would be overwhelmed.
The real meat of this case, however, and the issue with the most effect on both Uber’s bottom line as well as on the future of sharing platforms generally, is whether the drivers should be classified as employees or not.