JC has been a driver for Lyft in Chicago for seven years. He started the job to supplement his income—he’s a domestic violence counselor by training—and to help support his four children, but he’s grown to feel unsafe on the platform.
On one ride last year, JC (who chose to go by his first name for privacy reasons), picked up a single male rider who he says seemed like a teenager. Over the 30-minute ride, the rider became aggressive, asking for JC’s phone (the rider’s mom had reportedly called the Lyft for him) and harassing him. At one point, JC pulled over and asked him to leave, but realized “there’s not much you can do to eject someone from your car if you’re a driver,” he says. He got the rider to calm down a bit, but when they arrived at their destination, the man hit JC over the head from the backseat, before getting out and throwing a brick at the back of his car.
JC isn’t alone. Two-thirds of Uber and Lyft drivers say have been threatened, harassed, or assaulted while on the job—in the last year alone—according to a survey out today conducted by the Strategic Organizing Center (SOC), a coalition of three labor unions (Service Employees International, Communication Workers of America, and United Farmworkers of America). Rideshare drivers across the country aren’t unionized, but as part of its work to expose unsafe job conditions, SOC wanted to investigate the experience of those drivers.
JC reported the incident to Lyft, but he says the only outcome was that the company said they wouldn’t pair him with that rider again. “It was really a no-win situation,” he says. Not only did he fear the rider could get even more aggressive, but that they might give him a low rating that could cause him to be deactivated. “I was in fear for my job,” JC says. “There’s really no way for the rideshare company to determine what’s true and what’s false.”
That survey, conducted in March, asked more than 900 rideshare drivers across 35 states and the District of Columbia about their experiences with safety while working. Of the drivers who said they’ve experienced some violence or harassment in the last year, 52% said they were verbally abused, 40% said they experienced damage to their vehicle, and 32% said they were called a racial, ethnic, or religious slur. Drivers also reported being sexually propositioned, threatened with physical harm, and grabbed, groped, or hit (27%, 26%, and 14%, respectively).
Drivers of color experienced incidents at higher rates, with 72% reporting that they experiencing some type of threatening, harassing, or violent behavior compared to 63% of white drivers, and with 86% reporting being called a racial, ethnic, or religious name or slur. Drivers of color were also three times more likely to have been shot or stabbed than white drivers in the last year, per the report.
“We kind of understood that there were hazards, and you see stories of incidents . . . but the degree and scale, and how frequently workers are experiencing harassment and threats and assaults, was eye-opening,” says Joan Moriarty, director of research and campaigns at SOC. “And our survey only covers the last year, so this isn’t the full experience of workers.”
Uber and Lyft have both conducted their own safety reports, and both say that safety incidents are rare, with more than 99% of rides completed without any safety reports. SOC, however, says these reports are slow to come out—Uber’s 2019–2020 report came out in 2022, for example—and fail to provide data on certain kinds of safety incidents. Lyft has only released one such report, though just last week a group of shareholders called on the rideshare company to publish annual driver safety reports, as well as more driver protections. In October 2022, Uber did announce new driver safety features, including the ability to take encrypted dashboard recordings on drivers’ phones.
More than half of drivers reported that they accepted trips they felt were unsafe because they fear getting negative reviews, which can lead to the driver being deactivated, and 83% said they’re concerned about deactivation in general. A majority of drivers (three-fourths) said that if they were able to cancel rides without fear of negative reviews or deactivation when they felt threatened or uncomfortable, it would make them feel safer while working.
Uber’s tips to drivers note that “if you feel unsafe you can end the ride at any time,” and Lyft tells drivers that there are a “number of [safety] concerns that are perfectly acceptable if you need to cancel a ride,” including “your passenger makes you feel uncomfortable.” But both companies still have consequences for frequent driver cancellations. On that same web page, Lyft notes that “if you cancel 15 or more of your last 100 accepted rides—not including passenger no-shows—your account could be at risk, so it’s important to choose carefully.”
“This report really reveals how dominated workers can be by the unchecked power of these ridesharing apps,” Moriarty says. “People are yelling, they’re belligerent, they’re drunk, and you let them in your car anyway. That really says something about the power these companies have over their workers.”
Driver safety as an issue has been getting more attention lately. A 2021 story by The Markup reported on Uber and Lyft carjackings, and a 2022 follow-up detailed stories of driver assaults and killings. In June 2022, Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley, Senator Ed Markey, and Senator Elizabeth Warren wrote an open letter calling on app-based companies, including Lyft, Uber, and Doordash, to prioritize their driver safety, after a series of worker deaths. In early 2023, President Joe Biden signed a bill into effect, which requires the Government Accountability Office to submit reports to Congress on studies of “fatal and non-fatal physical assaults and sexual assault” on rideshare drivers by passengers, as well as on passengers by drivers.
The SOC survey comes ahead of Uber’s annual shareholder meeting in May in which shareholders will vote on a proposal to prepare an “independent third-party audit on driver health and safety.” Uber’s 2023 proxy statement notes that the company’s Board of Directors “recommends a vote against” that proposal, saying that the company already reports on safety and is currently undertaking an “independent third-party civil rights assessment” it says covers “many of the same requests.”
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