Uber Squeezed Europe’s Taxi Drivers. Now It Wants to Hire Them

After spending five years as an Uber driver before retraining to drive taxis during the pandemic, Hubert does not believe that Uber would give him access to more customers. The clientele using Uber and taxis are completely different, he says. “Uber is a low cost service compared to taxis. Uber customers will not agree to pay more for a taxi knowing they have cheaper rides on the same app.” His wages are also higher now that he drives taxis. Over one year driving for Uber, his hourly pay averaged out at €17 (or $17), he says. Now he makes between $25 and $30 per hour.

Drivers like Hubert might be skeptical of Uber’s deals, but within some unions there is real hostility toward the company. “We don’t expect anything from Uber. It is a predatory multinational that cares little about workers, little about its customers, and tries to impose its rules by force on the states where it operates,” says Karim Asnoun, a former taxi driver and the secretary of labor union CGT Taxis. “It does not respect anything, and the cab is only a pawn in its strategy.” Conditions on platforms like Uber are very unfavorable to drivers because their commissions are very high, he adds.

But Uber is trying to overcome their suspicion by offering aggressive incentives to encourage taxi drivers in Paris to sign up. “Today there is no commission charged for cabs in Paris,” says Asnoun, who adds taxi drivers have been offered a €1,000 (or $1,004) bonus to join the app. Uber declined to provide details about how long these incentives would remain in place. Incentives are a normal part of Uber’s service when launching a new feature, says Diaz. “We obviously incentivize … drivers to get into the app, to try it out and see the benefits it brings for them.”

Those same conditions have not been extended to all the markets where Uber has made deals. In Belgium, where Uber Taxi also launched this month, Uber takes a 10 percent cut of new drivers’ earnings, says Tom Peeters, deputy federal secretary of BTB-ABVV, a road transport and logistics union that struck the EU’s first union deal with Uber in October. Italy’s largest taxi dispatcher IT Taxi, which also struck a deal with Uber in July 2022, did not reply to WIRED’s questions asking what commission their 12,000 drivers pay to Uber or how the deal has affected their earnings.

Taxis can already be ordered using Uber in 225 cities around the world, says Diaz. Since September, New York’s yellow cabs have been available on the app. In the EMEA region, taxis are available in 70 cities in 17 countries, although an Uber spokesperson declines to list which ones. Diaz hopes to keep expanding Uber Taxi into new markets, including in London, the company’s largest European market. “Incorporating black cabs into our app in London would be an ideal scenario for us,” she says.

Yet there is still animosity between the UK capital’s black cabs and Uber, after years of competition and court battles. “Uber tried to destroy us,” says Grant Davis, chairman of the London Cab Drivers Club, who has been a black cab driver for 35 years. “We don’t need Uber, we’ve got other apps such as Free Now, we’ve got Gett, and there’s another new app coming onstream that has no commission and is owned by cab drivers.” These services take around 10 percent commission, he adds.