The Supreme Court has ruled that a group of private health be treated as a rising,
sharply criticising decision means entire country meeting on Friday, the 18th of February.
The Supreme Court announced its judgement on the case, Uber vs. Atlant,
rejecting UVAs appeal and declaring that two of its drivers, Yasseen Aslam and James Farrar, must be classified as workers.
This was the end of five years of legal challenges, with Uber taking its appeal to the highest court in the land for Yasseen Azlan.
It was seven years in the making, and he finds it hard to articulate his thoughts and emotions that day.
I mean, it is a long, hard day. Even though, like the whole state, like since we won in 2016, I was always confident we're gonna agree.
Yeah. But in the back of the head, like you still there's still a bit of uncertainty what's going to happen.
And this Supreme Court will make or break it like you're gonna win or we're gonna lose.
And if we lose, we're you know, we're done. You know, it is you know, it puts us back to square one.
Like, this is seven years of my life. I mean, it's just so hard to describe.
Everything happened so quickly and so fast. But I still remember, like, when they were playing and watching outside and the justice said, appeal this.
Misbah up to then I was my mind was preoccupied. We were kind to be getting calls coming in from media and I wanted to keep myself occupied.
You know, like I said, if we average people, it's all about emotion. Everything I wanted to sing is never show weakness.
And even though we had our ups and downs, it always seemed.
So my way around that would think about it and try and work. But the minute that we heard appeal dismissed unanimously dismisses as appeal.
I looked at James quickly, like, you know, like. And then. Yes. You know, there is yes.
And we're just like, yeah. But yeah, I mean, yeah, I it's just I thought I just can't find a word to describe it.
I'm Rowby Waran and this is the Fair Work podcast. A dive into the life of the people working within the gig economy.
This episode looks at contracts and in it we hear from Yasseen Aslam,
the former Uber driver who successfully took them to court over his classification as a self-employed independent contractor.
A ruling that has implications for the gig economy around the world.
Interviewed for this episode took place in two parts. One before the final ruling on one immediately after.
In it, we hear Yasseen personal account of war is like taking on a multinational corporation organising gig workers in the UK.
And what made him do it? My name's Yasseen Özlem, so I'm one of the claimants against which will fall in 2015,
so I actually come into this industry back in 2006 when I was made redundant in my I.T. job.
Uber arrived in the UK in 2012. That's when I first registered with them.
Yes, he was one of the first 100 drivers to sign up for the Uber platform when it first came to London.
And at the time, he and many other drivers just didn't think it would work.
It was like we just didn't understand how they're going to do it without a human.
How it does not work.
But many drivers were excited about the potential impact that these new technologies held and their ability to make the distribution of work fairer.
One of the problem we have at the traditional cab office was that there was a human like a controller who would dispatch jobs to you.
There's a favoured in system. And what we find in this industry, there's a lot of discrimination.
One thing that really attract people to Uber was the fact that there is no controller.
And you just, you know, like you just turn up on you work when you want.
You call home when you want. So it's that element of flexibility and the freedom, you know.
So I didn't really face too much problem at the previous cab office, but there were a lot of drivers that, you know,
had a hard and you'll get a lot comptrollers where they request to try and buy them cigarettes by them, Madonna, Kabab or something.
And, you know, so if you weren't doing that, they will just make your day hard.
They'll give you [INAUDIBLE] jobs, you know, they'll, you know, like so.
So the point was, if you could get the controller onside and you're willing to feed the controller,
you know, you will get look at where when you come over to Uber is a completely different system.
There's no favouritism and stuff like that in the beginning.
Yasseen didn't fully grasp the implications surrounding Uber, the use of technology, nor its potential impacts on the private market.
But, yeah, I mean, the point is, when we first started and yeah, it just clicked.
So for me it was nothing different. It was just another Campbell is just give me work to do.
That's the way I saw it. But the good thing about this was I was in control.
I didn't have to tell them that I'm coming to work at this time or I want to go home at this time or,
you know, like someone ringing me saying, put your foot down. We're running late.
We've got so many jobs waiting. Hurry up, you know, like that kind of stuff.
I didn't have all that, so I was in. So that was to me was a good element.
And that's what attracts a lot of drivers to it. But what we found is over time is all those things.
The control element started changing. We then started seeing the other side and that was like, look, you know,
we were running away from all these humans, but we're now being controlled by technology and all these algorithm.
So, for example, when I picked up a passenger, you know, he would rate me five dollars.
So in order to stay on the platform, I have to maintain a high rating.
So just to give you an average example, to stay on Uber X platform, you need to have a rating of four point four.
You know, like we we were getting drivers getting deactivated because someone left them a bad feedback.
So we're now being we're now at the mercy of the rating system so that like a pressure on us indirectly, which we didn't realise.
I've seen off was what we saw. So although we are running away from the human controller saying this is better,
what we're now seeing is a hidden human behind the app controlling us and doing things to make us work a certain way.
This creeping sense of control and the power that the app played in shaping the lives of workers would lay the groundwork for a subsequent legal case.
Yasseen says there were numerous points where it became increasingly prevalent that the freedom he felt had limits.
One evening on a busy night in London, Yasseen received a request at one a.m. to pick up free men outside a bar.
Now they were quite drunk. Soon they got into the car and made some kind of a racist comment towards me and I sort of,
because I got this experience of driving and dealing with customers.
You saw 10 and I'd rather not go ahead if I could, you know, cause cause I mean, it's sort of like a gut feeling.
So I knew this gonna escalate. So anyway, I just was very polite to those guidelines that look.
Yes, if you could, I'm happy to drop you off from wherever you go.
It just needs to be polite and that's it. So as we are driving towards Fullam High Street, they just don't give giving me abuse one after another.
So I knew that if I carry on driving badly once we get out, you know, like this built up area.
And if it did, if something did kick off or something happen, you know, I will you know, I was all alone in my car alone with three people.
And there's no one to help me in any shape or form.
So it's always best to end the journey and stop it in an area where least I could get some help if I needed to.
So I stopped on the high street because you got cameras everywhere. So, you know, you're being watched and everything is OK.
So I told these guys that, look, I'm I'm not going to I'm refusing to take you because of their behaviour.
And I go out my car and they wouldn't leave. Yes.
Include the police and the men finally left, after which he contacted Uber to tell them about the incident and why he cancelled the trip.
Uber didn't come back to me saying, you can't do that. You can't.
Basically, what they're trying to say is I kicked people out of my car and if I ever do it again, I would be dismissed from the platform.
So there's me, like potentially trying to, you know, limit my damage and, you know, and I'm getting worn for, you know,
for or doing something that potentially could have, you know, I could have got beaten up or something bad could have happened.
But I just done what my gut feeling was, was refused to take them further and they were welcome to book another cab and carry on from there.
But I'm getting worn for doing that.
As Yasseen became aware of the issues that many drivers were facing, he started to actively campaign for the rights of him and his fellow drivers.
Forming an association of drivers in 2014 before joining GMB union in 2015 by his actions, didn't go unnoticed by Uber.
One day in 2015, as he began to drive from his home in High Wycombe into central London,
he reached for his phone and open up, as he had done countless times before.
And I try to log on and they wouldn't let me. So I thought maybe it might be a problem or a glitch or something.
So I carried on driving all the way into London. Then I stopped again and tried again.
And I kept on trying, trying. And then I stopped like once I got to central London.
It didn't work. Also, I like technically an hour wasted. And my e-mail was saying, look, I can't log on what's happening.
Yeah. So then I drove back home again. But, you know, like in my head, I was thinking, like, you know, I need the money.
I needed the money. That week I took three days off and I was back to work for a day, but I wasn't told that I'd been blocked from the app.
You know, I got deactivated when I first got the act, which I didn't do anything wrong.
I got to activate it for my campaign. So, you know, like it put a US financially.
Know, I needed money and feeds us. Like what? Why can't log in.
What do I do? What was I doing wrong? Did the customer make a complaint against me?
I don't like all that kind of sort, but I can't remember. It's hard to explain that emotion, but it's like you just suddenly, you know,
like you went to work and the door's locked or the chain to lock at your workplace and you can't get in.
So I then arranged to meet one of the managers. So I went back into his office a week later.
So the whole week I couldn't work. So I went into his office at a good long chat with the manager saying, look, come on.
What does to wrong?
And it is more like a way of trying to intimidate me to say, look, what you're doing is you're making good money, you're doing anyway.
So why are you causing problems? You know, you should just get on, put your head down on work and you'll be OK.
But if you're going to do you know, you're going to be concerned about other drivers and stuff like that, you're gonna lose your access.
Yeah. And I didn't like the way they talk. Threatened me and their way to sort of send me a strong message.
Yeah. So if anything, when I walked out that meeting, not more than I was even more motivated to do was doing, you know, to help close the gap.
I just didn't like the way they tried to bully me alongside the friends he received from Uber.
Yes, he was spurred on by what he saw around him and the stories he heard from other drivers.
He so many of his friends be deactivated and lose all or part of their livelihood.
But what really home with a massive imbalance of power between drivers and the platform and the total
lack of protections afforded to drivers in the face of countless cases of passengers beating drivers?
What really concerns me, which was close to heart rheumy, was there's a lot of racism attack towards drivers and abuse.
So in a nutshell, you could see in my car, call me a, you know, like P.S. call me whatever you want to refer to my skin colour.
Give me as much as you want.
And then at the end of the journey, you couldn't put a one off and write a comment saying this was the worst driver ever and I want a full refund.
Yes. And there's me that suffered all this abuse from you, maybe even physically assaulted by you.
And then you was telling me, I'm not going. We'll have to give a refund to this customer because, you know, he made a complaint.
You know, I had no. And that was like to me, like, look, this can't be right.
One particular story sticks out to Yacine.
When he got a call from a driver, he knew we'd been physically assaulted and he drove around his house to pay him a visit.
So I went to see this guy is six years old, got assaulted by a passenger late night.
And the police did come on to the scene and he's reported to the police. But then Uber sort of failed to cooperate with the police.
And when I spoke to the driver again, I went to see him again down his house, swollen up.
I asked him what was happening and he said, look, the police can't get out of the passenger because you haven't given him the details.
Yeah. So I just don't have the time to go and chase up. The police answered, look, come on, this is not right.
I'll go with you unless report.
Let's push the police and try and get something done because you can't have a person assaulted and then get away with it.
I mean, it's not it's not right. But he turned around and.
Well, I and they still see in my head the way he said and he said it in our language.
It's the same guy, a Pakistani guy. And he called me like son.
He referred to me as Sunny, said, son. This is part of my job, you know.
So we're going to get punch and abuse, you know, the way he said it.
And it still fits my bed. Like, look, you know, this is not our job to get assaulted.
It's not something we should be putting up with. Yeah.
And that's my like a lot of people sort of lived with that assumption, thinking it's okay to receive abuse,
it's OK to get physically attacked in their job and it's OK, but it's not OK.
And the reason they have that mindset is the lack of support from the police,
lack of support from operators like Luber so that they're happy to turn a blind eye to that.
So they're happy to allow that kind of abuse. And that's what we've been highlighting.
And that my passion really about this that got me really eager.
So I didn't thought it every time I heard of a driver out right.
To Uber saying, look, what action are you taken against this rider?
And they would never come back. Yeah, but the point was they didn't really care.
And that was the tipping point for me. Because its drivers, partners, independent operators who run, but judges in London.
They are the company's workers with rights, including the UK minimum wage as well as sickness.
In 2016, Yasseen and his co claimant, James for our launched a case in the employment tribunal arguing that they should be classed as workers.
A landmark case which they would go on to win.
Yasseen had already been trying to campaign for workers that had reached a point where he thought legal action was the only way forward.
There were issues like I was actually trying to do what I can to big to fail.
We were just talking to a brick wall.
And like I said, it come to a stage where all the drivers was that we had so gave up thinking there's nothing we could do.
But the actual circumstances surrounding the cases conception were largely due to a series of chance encounter.
I was speaking to a Guardian journalist at the time because he is talking to me about he's more interested in how we're organising Lubert roads.
Yet an appeal board meeting. And I told him, well, I've got to activate it.
So when I come out, you know, and the one thing I mentioned to you that time in that meeting with they had a problem with front.
They weren't checking doctrine. So there was the issue in terms of like, you know, like, you know, like TFR where TFA was turning a blind eye.
So I highlighted that. I said, look, you shouldn't be concerned about me,
be concerned about what your licence is to make sure that you're adhering to your licence condition.
And they laughed at me. They laughed at me. So anyway, when I come out and I speak into this Guardian journalism, I mentioned to him that, look,
if you you could upload a blank piece of paper and you insurance document and no one cheques it the computer, you would think, yes, that's OK.
You uploaded a piece of paper that will Shoeb. That's your insurance document and you continue to it.
So he then went and done his own independent research and they made their own insurance company called Free Now Cover,
and they managed to get a driver upload it. But I was involved in that and I got deactivated for that.
So Lubert and reported me to counsel for London Transport for London and point me to the police.
And I got arrested for it. I was only a whistleblower at the time.
So I went into the police station. I competitive. I said, look, I didn't do anything wrong.
I had genuine insurance at the time. I had everything, you know, if any fraud were committed or any crime was committed, committed by Uber.
But anyway, they decided to drop the case after six months. No charges were ever brought.
But that's where the case started because I was already speaking to James Farrow and we were talking to
lead a plea day is the law firm who would go on to represent James Yasseen throughout their legal case.
We were talking to lead a at that time of how we claim what could we do to make us look at it?
And they looked at it. Look, there's something here. You definitely need to.
The best thing to do is launch a case for the worker status.
Now, you know, like when I when we looked at this worker status, he answered all our problems.
Now, there's a bit of confusion about workers that are slight.
Drivers don't tend to understand it. So you have self-employed, then you have the employees and then we have a limbo worker.
So a self-employed person would be someone that has more control, like a plumber, electrician.
You could set your own beds. You don't have any rights.
But, you know, you could subcontract your work on your act is running your own business as an employee.
You have many rights. Like, for example, you get sick pay, maternity, paternity pension, you know, unfair dismissal, all that kind of stuff.
We're in the middle. We have a limbo status within UK employment law.
Lamby worker status is where an individual is classed as self-employed but is involved in running someone else's business.
He operates at a halfway house, allowing workers to access some of the privileges afforded to contracted employees.
Now, what the limpy work does for us, unless a boob buddies accept the law and decided to obey the law and classify us as Lamby worker is decreasing.
One is we have the right to under minimum wage. B we get holiday pay and C trade union recognition.
That's all it is. Or what it unflustered. It put a floor on the market.
Now for me as a driver, I don't care whether Uber has one million global workers.
I don't care whether they charge Tempy a mile or whether this child or Copano my old, what I care about, what goes into my pocket, what I do,
what I know and assurance I want to get is when I go out to work, knowing that I'm gonna come home with something,
not just go out all night, be sleeping in my car and coming back with no money.
I. See how it felt that first day going into court?
Believe me, that was a nightmare for me because by this time everyone had left us.
More or less, you know, people sort of thinking we're just stupid people trying to fight a lost battle.
Yeah. And nothing ever going to come out of this loop is going to bite the judge and all kind of stuff.
And that was the time when I actually the June 2016, I actually went into depression and breakdown.
You know, mentally I was not well, financially, I had no source of income.
I live in Iowa, comes out to go into London, is a whole week trial where I have to go in.
I was cross-examined by Lubas barristers, you know, and it wasn't easy, was it?
I mean, at that time of thinking, you know, did I really have to get myself into this?
Why that why am I doing this? You know, like all those kind of question. But, you know, we did it.
I mean, I had Jane. Jane had me.
And so there's two working together, trying to fight the same cause, which really worked and help because if I'd known, maybe I would've done it.
Maybe I'd have walked away. Long time ago. But, you know, because we took such.
Because we suffer so much financially, mentally, you know, all kinds.
I just felt that I had to fight.
If I walk away, it asked me, you know, I waited my life for the last three, four years or two years for doing what I'm doing.
You know, I need to see it to. So it wasn't easy.
It was really hard. But anyway, since when we got the verdict dumb, you know, that's when everything changed.
Her number five. After three, four.
Don't forget, like when we were in court all week, it took about two or three months before we even got the wording.
So, yeah, so it just everyone was happy.
It's not just like every single driver get a message from everyone and saying, well, you know, it was like finally we managed to take on lube.
So we were the first people to technically without any resources to go in there, you know, and win.
And then there's who. But they had like their policies, everyone telling them what to say.
We're just my average guys with no money, just enough money to get on the tube,
walk into the tribunal, sit there, get cross, but stand our ground and then grin.
You know, it just is just amazing. It's amazing. But it's hard to describe that.
But but what was sad today is, no, not immediately said they're gonna appeal it.
So it wasn't like. Yeah. I mean, it's just just like we are really happy.
But at the same time, it was like saying, look, this is not the end of it. It's just the start of something big.
Being afraid my body might get hurt.
I love stand up for your rights. Thank you, everyone.
Yasseen and James would end up going through four separate court cases as Uber worked its way through the appeals process.
But finally, in a unanimous decision, the Supreme Court ruled that within UK law,
James and Yacine should be classified as Limn B Workers Club of Yasseen a few days after the Supreme
Court verdict and asked him about what it was like hearing that they had finally won their case.
And how he felt knowing that was finally over. So, yeah, it's just dominated like shock.
But to be honest, I was. Even though, like, I was happy.
Overjoyed. But it's sort of like the next day are still. It's like it didn't really sink in, you know, like we won.
You don't like it, just like it just seemed like it didn't happen. Know, because I don't know.
I can't find a word because we went through [INAUDIBLE] and back overseas and it's just like subnets see justice,
you know, it just seemed like it never you know, it's just like move that suddenly happens.
But the main thing is, look, you know, we won. We've done it. Yeah.
And it was worth it is worth it because it means I could now look to him, my kids, I know my family.
You know, I went through a phase where I suffered depression, severe depression, 2016, you know,
like I suffered financially, you know, and I constantly in my seven years into this cause.
And it wasn't a waste of time. But at the same time, it's just there's nothing better than knowing that you have something shoki.
And that is the most important thing.
So it's like, you know, like you go into a fight, you train, you train and you train before you go into the fight.
You don't know if you're gonna win unexcelled, but you train your hardest. And that was us.
We trained we won every round and we knocked them out. We knocked out.
That's the main thing. You know, there were times two in the last seven years where I was down and I did question myself, like, why am I doing this?
Don't forget, I left straight and why am I doing this?
But then again, I owe it to the driver's community because even though I started this myself back in the days,
you know, they're the ones that were behind, you know, it's the people within ADC, you, ADC, you.
It's the name of the union started by James Yasseen last year to represent private high drivers and curriers.
You know, it's the people within ADC you that join because everyone talks about drivers not being organised, because they isolated whatever.
But we actually smashed that apart.
And since Friday, since we won, you know, we just like signing people like like like as I mentioned to you earlier on, when he impune people and they,
you know, and that shows up, people are no longer afraid and workers finally know that, look, normally, Adam, and you are willing to fight.
Is there is justice. Thanks to Yasseen Aslam for sharing his story.
A key question surrounding this case is what are the potential ramifications of this ruling for Uber drivers and workers in the entire gig economy?
Kelly Housen is a postdoctoral researcher at the Fair Work Foundation.
I think there are a few implications and to a certain extent, we need to wait and see how things are going to play out with it.
You know, Erga can do one of two things now. They can give the drivers more control over their rights of pay, their working hours.
They contracts in order to actually make the the criteria for being self-employed
or they need to comply with the regulations and protections for work.
And my understanding is that there are a lot of driving cases pending now.
So there is something like fifteen thousand cases where drivers waiting for compensation for that.
Now, this ruling has been made. So Uber is in a position of potentially having to pay.
Apple had a lot of money as a result of this ruling. Even though Uber is claiming that this ruling only applies to a small number
of workers who were directly involved in this case and which Uber in 2016,
it's pretty clear that it has much broader implications for Uber drivers now and beyond that for other workers and the gig economy at large.
You know, there are many, many gig economy companies in the UK who have very similar models to that,
where they classify their workers as self-employed.
And that extends beyond that, like taxi and a helping sector to domestic work can work and even remote and remote work done via Web based platforms.
So a lot of workers in those industries might not be looking at the outcome of this case
and be encouraged to bring similar litigation against the platforms that they work for.
So I think a lot of large economy companies in the UK, including deliverers,
who has been the subject of similar litigation in the past, will be looking at this and considering the implications for them.
But in terms of the immediate implications of classifying workers and classifying Uber drivers as workers or forcing it to address the
misclassification of workers is that those drivers will now be subject to really important basic protections that should characterise or work.
And those include minimum wage and holiday pay.
And the unanimous decision that the Supreme Court made in favour of, say,
its drivers is a huge step forward and providing very basic but very important protections for Uber drivers and potentially for other representation.
However, the flip side of this judgement is the uncertainty surrounding how Uber itself will respond.
Well, we've seen some commentators arguing that this signals the legal end of the road for roupas Labour's labour practises.
But I think that it's really important to be a bit cautious about making those kinds of claims,
because around the world we've seen about deploying very innovative strategies to evade regulation where
it has which they have been subject to regulation that that serrations to undermine their business model.
We've seen two quite recent examples of this. One is their response to the A five legislation in California,
which introduced a higher statutory test for what constitutes an employee and what have classified Uber drivers and other gig workers as employed.
In response, Uber, alongside a few other gig economy platforms, including left, introduced a ballot measure, Proposition 22,
which represented a kind of intermediate regulatory ground where gig workers weren't subject to the same level of protections as employees,
but had some concessions, some limited benefits.
And so this was a way of enshrining the end into contract status.
And growth has put a lot of money behind that campaign, a huge amount of lobbying,
a huge amount of resources in order to get that ballot measure passed.
Now, the European Commission is launching a consultation just this week on regulating platform work to try to address
some of the unfairness and vulnerability and precariousness that platform workers have been subject to.
And this is this has been really starkly highlighted by the Cove at 19 pandemic.
So ahead of the launch of this consultation, Uber released a white paper about regulation in Europe, regulation of platform work in Europe.
Sensually arguing for a similar thing to what they did in California.
The white papers framed Gin's as building a partnership for a FERA futurist platform.
But what it's really arguing for is a new new regulation,
which would again kind of enshrine and codify this model of independent work and create a class of workers.
Well, the class of workers is already being created, but perpetuate the race to the bottom of labour standards.
A century.
So this is a really significant decision, which might optimistically be a tipping point for addressing unfair practises in the platform economy.
And sure, encouraging more and more workers to stand up against misclassification and other sectors and in other countries.
However,
the other possibility is a doubling down of platform companies attempts to lobby to change regulations in order to continue their business practises,
which leaves more and more workers worldwide kind of dependent on these precarious situations and
dependent on platforms which have all the control over the working conditions and over their livelihoods.
And that's really what the Supreme Court identifies. And they're rolling.
Thanks to Yasseen, Athlone and Kelly Houssam.
At Fair Work, we believe that all work can and should be characterised by fair pay, fair conditions, fair contracts,
fair management and fair representation platforms ultimately have the power to improve standards and the ability to choose, too.
In the UK, the vast majority of gig workers across the self-employed independent contractors,
meaning they have no access to basic rights like minimum wage, sick pay and holiday pay.
Platforms can improve the work they provide by providing the basic provisions such as minimum wage,
sick pay and union representation that we believe should characterise all work regardless of its legal classification.
We're actively campaigning to improve the conditions for gig workers around the world and whole platforms to account.
You can find out more at Fair Don't Work.
This episode was written and produced by Robbie Waran with composition by Louis Borlase, an additional composition by Rowby Schwerin.