Is Uber ripping off its drivers? The woman who beat Starbucks and FedEx in court says yes.

[FrodosPet]

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/12/uber-lawsuit-drivers-class-action-shannon-liss-riordan

By Hannah Levintova
January / February 2016 Issue

In early 2012, on a visit to San Francisco, Shannon Liss-Riordan went to a restaurant with some friends. Over dinner, one of her companions began to describe a new car-hailing app that had taken Silicon Valley by storm. "Have you seen this?" he asked, tapping Uber on his phone. "It's changed my life."

Liss-Riordan glanced at the little black cars snaking around on his screen. "He looked up at me and he knew what I was thinking," she remembers. After all, four years earlier she had been christened "an avenging angel for workers" by the Boston Globe. "He said, 'Don't you dare. Do not put them out of business.'" But Liss-Riordan, a labor lawyer who has spent her career successfully fighting behemoths such as FedEx, American Airlines, and Starbucks on behalf of their workers, was way ahead of him. When she saw cars, she thought of drivers. And a lawsuit waiting to happen.

Four years later, Liss-Riordan is spearheading class-action lawsuits against Uber, Lyft, and nine other apps that provide on-demand services, shaking the pillars of Silicon Valley's much-hyped sharing economy. In particular, she is challenging how these companies classify their workers. If she can convince judges that these so-called micro-entrepreneurs are in fact employees and not independent contractors, she could do serious damage to a very successful business model—Uber alone was recently valued at $51 billion—which relies on cheap labor and a creative reading of labor laws. She has made some progress in her work for drivers. Just this month, after Uber tried several tactics to shrink the class, she won a key legal victory when a judge in San Francisco found that more than 100,000 drivers can join her class action.

"These companies save massively by shifting many costs of running a business to the workers, profiting off the backs of their workers," Liss-Riordan says with calm intensity as she sits in her Boston office, which is peppered with framed posters of Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren. The bustling block below is home to two coffee chains that Liss-Riordan has sued. If the Uber case succeeds, she tells me, "maybe that will make companies think twice about steamrolling over laws."

~ snip ~

[Agnosticsherbet]

1. They are the Walmart of Taxis.

So my answer would be yes.

[msongs]

2. much worse. most walmart work environments in the US are at least clean and safe nt