‘Stop or I’ll fire you’: the driver who defied Uber’s automated HR

theguardian.com:

A lexandru Iftimie, a 39-year-old who came to the UK from Romania seven years ago, was just about making ends meet as an Uber driver during the pandemic when he got an unexpected message from the ride-sharing app.

“I received a warning: ‘We detected some fraudulent activity, therefore you have to stop otherwise I have to fire you,’” he recalls.

“I said: ‘It has to be a mistake, I know I haven’t done anything.’ But two weeks later, I received another one: exactly the same message, with the difference that this time they were saying: ‘It’s the last warning. One more time, you’re done.’”

When he called Uber’s driver support line in an effort to understand why he had been flagged, it was a frustrating experience. The problem seemed to be that he had taken an unexpected route, though he insists he had not charged the customer extra for doing so.

“Can you imagine how difficult it was to explain to an Uber operator – I don’t know where he was – that the Blackwall tunnel was closed during a trip, and so I had to take a long detour?” he says. He was unable to get an unequivocal explanation of why he had been flagged as “fraudulent” by Uber’s systems.

“At that time my main concern was: ‘It’s my only source of income, there’s a pandemic outside, there’s a lockdown. If I lose that, then what?’

“In a normal company, you would have an HR department and this kind of issue can be solved in one way or another – not necessarily in your favour, but you would have a specialised team,” he adds.

With the help of his union, the App Drivers and Couriers Union, he went on to request the data Uber held about him; but what came back left him little wiser about what he was meant to have done wrong.

With the help of Worker Info Exchange and his union,