The Ethical Issues Surrounding The Uber Company

Uber: An Unethical Company

Over the past couple of years, one particular company has seen more than their share of scandals. Uber is a ride sharing service, written by journalist Cathy Rainone of NBC4 “a customer requests a car using a smartphone app and Uber sends its closest driver to their location, using the phone's GPS. The fare is charged directly to your credit card.” The famous modern taxi cab company has been in unethical scandals ranging from sabotaging other ride sharing companies to their drivers sexually assaulting their customers. What has Uber done about this? Not a whole lot. Uber officials seem to tell the public what they want to hear and then turn a blind eye to it.

Sabotaging

Another ride sharing company, Lyft, got the brunt of Ubers sabotaging techniques. Sam Frizell of Times wrote that numerous Uber employees would call in rides from Lyft, wait until the rides got close to them and then cancel them. This technique would cause the Lyft drivers to have low availability, waste gas and then more than likely allow the customers to call Uber instead for a ride (Frizell).

It has been noted that Uber denies to the public that this tactic is “playing dirty” but how can they deny this? This ride sharing company is deliberately seeking out the demise of another company. Same Frizell explains how Lyft told CNNmoney that Uber employees have called and canceled more than 5,000 rides. After this analysis Uber’s credibility has been shot in my opinion. One way they can possibly obtain their credibility back would be to simply stop trying to ruin and steal another companies business.

Sexual Assaults

Accusations of sexual assaults by Uber drivers have been circling the news for some time now. The website Who’s Driving Who explains “uber’s process for onboarding drivers is dangerously negligent….and Uber doesn’t even bother to meet with drivers in person before allowing them to ferry passengers.” This is the part that outrages me. Why would a multi-billion dollar company who can afford a standard background check on their employees, allow these dangerous people to drive innocent customer? Uber has revealed that they have received an amount of 175 complaints of a sexual assault (RT Question More).

Uber has made numerous ‘bogus’ statements since this information was leaked by one of their own customer service representatives. Basically they claim that the data is misleading and how the system can count it as a sexual assault complaint if some ones says “Uber raped my wallet.” A woman was raped by her Uber driver in India and the CEO Travis Kalanick doesn’t do much about it and explains how it’s just a ‘growing pain’ (Linshi).

Why are the rapes of so many women just a growing pain? Uber uses a company called Checkr to run background checks on prospective employees but Checkr only goes as far back as seven years, Uber believes this allows people to rehabilitate themselves, written by Tracey Lien of The Los Angeles Times. In my opinion, Uber allows some of their drivers to ‘rehabilitate themselves’ at their customer’s expense.

Conclusion

Not every company, ride sharing or not, is ethically perfect. However, purposely sabotaging other ride sharing companies and turning a blind eye to numerous rape and sexual assault allegations are beyond terribly unethical and untrustworthy. Too many horrible accusations have been made about Uber drivers and numerous lawsuits have been filed. My hope is that Uber starts to take the safety of its customers seriously and provides stricter background checks on its employees.