It is an unprecedented dive into the black box of lobbying. The world and its partners were able to access more than 18 gigabytes of internal data – emails, presentations, meeting minutes – from Uber. These data, transmitted to the British daily The Guardian, were analyzed by more than 40 newsrooms around the world under the supervision of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ). They include in particular the “hottest” period of Uber: the years 2014-2016, during which the company is established in particular in France, against the backdrop of violent demonstrations by taxis and questions about its model without an employment contract.
This gigantic quantity of documents details, by the menu, the way in which Uber used, in France as elsewhere, all the strings of lobbying to try to change the law to its advantage. The company did not content itself with establishing contacts at all levels of politics and administration. She also wrote “turnkey” amendments, sent to parliamentarians sympathetic to her cause; hired agencies with questionable methods to carry out influence campaigns; paid academics to write carefully framed studies to benefit them; appeals to the resources of American diplomacy; or even secretly helped to create an “independent” organization for the defense of VTC drivers whose action she actually controlled.
Taken end to end, these games of influence depict the extent to which large companies can multiply the angles of attack to circumvent national legislation.
These games of influence are not illegal. And that may be a problem: taken end to end, they depict the extent to which large corporations, fueled by almost infinite budgets raised from major investors in the United States, can multiply the angles of attack to circumvent national parliaments and regulators. Transparency registers, in France and at European level, only offer a tiny window into the actions of these lobbyists.
The “Uber Files” also reveal a completely unknown part of the history of the “start-up nation” wanted by Emmanuel Macron. They demonstrate to what extent the current President of the Republic, then Minister of the Economy, struggled to support, against the advice of his majority and without the knowledge of his government, a company targeted by multiple investigations. legal and fiscal. Emmanuel Macron acted, in the shadows, as a true partner of Uber, getting personally involved on many occasions in a file for which he officially had no responsibility.
The “chaos strategy” deployed everywhere
At the time, however, there was no need to have access to internal data from Uber to know that the company was sulphurous. Travis Kalanick does not hide it: his company follows the “strategy of chaos”, which consists of setting up in countries in defiance of national legislation, increasing the number of jobs and users, and negotiating only a times in a strong position. This employment blackmail has been theorized and applied by Uber in dozens of countries – in France, the company will maintain its UberPop service for several months, which allows everyone to improvise as a driver, when they have been ruled illegal on several occasions.
The “Uber Files” show how the company tried, on six occasions, to hinder the action of French investigators during searches of its offices
At this time, respect for the law, in its letter as in its spirit, is not the priority of Uber. The “Uber Files” show how the company tried, on six occasions, to hinder the action of French investigators during searches of its offices. But also the way in which it was able to aggressively “optimize” its taxation, through its Dutch subsidiary, with the complicity of the Dutch authorities. Or the complex contortions used by the company to justify the hiring of former European Commissioner Neelie Kroes, held in theory by ethical clauses preventing her from joining a company she previously supervised.
“I joined Uber ten years ago, at the start of my career. I was young and inexperienced and too often took instructions from superiors with questionable ethics., recognizes today Pierre-Dimitri Gore-Coty, at the time manager for Western Europe, today boss of the powerful meal delivery branch Uber Eats. Uber claims to have changed, after the departure of Travis Kalanick, replaced in 2017 by the more consensual Dara Khosrowshahi.
The heavy price paid by the drivers
Of which act. But the “Uber Files” only lift the veil on a very small part of the lobbying which targets, in France as elsewhere, parliamentarians, ministers, mayors of large cities or European commissioners. In Uber’s influence campaigns, other American players in new technologies also appear intermittently – in this small lobbying milieu, the agents of “public policy”, as they modestly describe themselves, all know each other and often navigate from one company to another.
Uber advocates will no doubt object that the company, despite its flaws, still helped shake up the taxi industry, which itself was lobbying heavily at the time, and created many jobs. This last argument would be more audible if the VTC drivers of the time had not been those who, precisely, paid the heaviest price for Uber’s “chaos strategy”.
Sometimes attacked by taxis, often instrumentalized by the company, which encouraged them to demonstrate against restrictive measures, the first Uber drivers were also the hardest hit by the price reductions decided unilaterally by Uber in 2017. drivers who had sometimes fallen heavily into debt to buy a luxury vehicle, without any particular qualifications, having to work ever more hours for ever less money. Less than ten years later, most have given up – and moved on.