The satire writes itself these days. For the past 16 months, ever since voters said No to the EU, the supposed liberal set has been signalling its virtue over migrant workers. These Remainer types have filled newspaper columns and dinner-party chatter with sad talk about foreigners losing the right to travel to and work in Britain. Yet now these same people have chortled as London mayor Sadiq Khan and his pen-pushers at Transport for London (TfL) have refused to renew Uber’s licence in the capital. Which means 30,000 people will lose work. Many of them migrants. They cry over migrant workers one day, and laugh as they lose their livelihoods the next.
Anyone would think their overriding concern is less with migrants’ right to work than with their own insatiable need to engage in political posturing. And right now, when it’s trendy to be anti-capitalist, to sneer at Silicon Valley fat-cats who make apps that employ people in far from ideal conditions, the posture that guarantees one’s spot in liberal circles is to be Uberphobic. Sticking it to Uber, making a spectacle of one’s haughty disdain for the vagaries of life in 21st-century capitalist society, takes precedence over concern for workers themselves. Welcome to 2017, where it’s cool to be anti-capitalist but not pro-worker.
You don’t have to be a naive fanboy of Uber to be worried about TfL’s bureaucratic clampdown. I use Uber, as do millions of Londoners, because it is cheaper than taking a black cab and it is cashless and convenient. But this doesn’t mean I think Uber is perfect, or even all that good. It isn’t very innovative — having merely invented an app that exploits truly innovative breakthroughs like telecommunications and the motor-car — and it doesn’t reward its drivers well enough. Drivers’ expenses — car hire, car insurance, petrol — plus Uber’s 20 per cent commission mean some drivers in the UK earn a pretty low wage. And through classifying its drivers as self-employed, Uber has avoided having to pay them sick and holiday pay. (This was challenged at a UK employment tribunal this year, and now Uber must cover the pay of drivers who have logged more than 500 journeys if they are ill or injured for more than two weeks or if they’re called up for jury duty.)
And yet whatever Uber’s failings, what Khan and his cronies have done is wrong, and harmful. They have forgotten that good intentions — let’s be generous and presume their intentions were good — can be dangerous. In this case, the removal of Uber’s licence on the basis of public safety — TfL’s key concern is with Uber’s ‘approach to reporting serious criminal offences’ and the methods through which it vets its drivers — has had the consequence of turning upside down the lives of Uber’s largely migrant workforce. Just like that, with the swipe of a bureaucrat’s pen, the work they did will soon no longer exist. Anti-Uber apologists for the state’s effective sacking of 30,000 drivers are saying: ‘Well, they weren’t workers, just self-employed people, and they can now self-employ themselves elsewhere.’ Such a cavalier attitude to people’s lives. However you look at this decision, the fact is people who had work will no longer have that work.
And who are these people? They’re the less well-off. Many are migrants. They are people taking their chances in the so-called gig economy because the ‘real’ economy has nothing for them to do. They are people like Pal Singh, 61, who told the Financial Times: ‘I need this job for living. I have bills to pay… Who is going to give me a job now?’ Mr Singh is proud of his recent weekly earnings: £1,050, £897, £841. That’s a lot of money to lose. They are people like Mohammed Nizam Jearally, who lost his job with the NHS and turned to Uber, where he now earns more than his NHS wage. It is a chilling bureaucracy that would end such work without a second thought, and a foolish left that would cheer it on as a blow against capitalism.