New documents reveal how far Uber executives were willing to go to grow their business

Judy Woodruff:

The ride hailing company Uber is under scrutiny after a whistle-blower leaked more than 100,000 documents detailing the company's aggressive tactics as it expanded abroad, including efforts to curtail laws and regulations.

Stephanie Sy has our report.

Stephanie Sy:

Judy, the Uber files consist of e-mails, text messages, memos and other records that purportedly show, among many questionable tactics, that Uber used technology to cut access to its internal systems from regulators and law enforcement using a kill switch, and that the company used violence against its drivers as a P.R. tool to win public sympathy.

Doug MacMillan is a corporate accountability reporter for The Washington Post who has been covering the story and joins us now from Washington, D.C.

Doug, thank you so much for joining the "NewsHour."

So I want to dive right into these findings, one of the main ones being about how then CEO Travis Kalanick allegedly exploited the anger directed against Uber drivers. This was in Paris in Europe around 2016. Can you explain what was discovered about what Kalanick did and why it was so egregious?

Doug MacMillan, The Washington Post:

Yes.

So, everywhere Uber expanded, there was a tension with the local taxi industry, where these taxi drivers who have been — some invested their whole their whole lives and their whole careers in having these taxi jobs saw Uber as a threat to their livelihoods. And, in some places, they reacted with physical violence against Uber drivers.

And we saw this across Europe, and particularly in France. We saw a moment in time where there were a lot of attacks against Uber drivers, and where the executives of the company were starting to look at these attacks and look at the possibility of not focusing on how do we protect our drivers and how do we keep them safe, but potentially using these incidents of violence for Uber's own political gain.

And so the text conversation we saw, which kind of is the most striking document in all 124,000 documents in this trove of Uber files, was that Travis Kalanick was looking at this possible — possible demonstration where his drivers would be put at physical risk, and said: I think it's worth it. Violence guarantees success.

So this kind of, like, reframing violence against his own drivers, the people who kind of built his service on, I think, is kind of shocking to a lot of people who expected kind of more interest in promoting and protecting the safety of these people.

Stephanie Sy:

And for his part, Kalanick's spokesperson issued a statement and this is what it said: "Mr. Kalanick never suggested that Uber should take advantage of violence at the expense of driver safety. Any accusation that Mr. Kalanick directed, engaged in or was involved in any of these activities is completely false."

Are any of the actions in the Uber files, including the supposed exploitation of the violence that was already occurring between taxi drivers and Uber drivers, criminal? Was it illegal?

Doug MacMillan:

There's no indication that Uber has broken any laws here. I'm sure people will be looking at that and studying that as we look at these Uber files and these documents.

But kind of the main takeaway for me was that the story of Uber and Uber's growth as an aggressive, kind of hardball tactics company that took kind of very aggressive measures to get a foothold in markets around the world, it's kind of surprising the disregard sometimes that the managers of this company show for some time sometimes their own drivers and their own employees, the disregard sometimes they show for law enforcement.

There's one particular episode which was stuck out, which they were — in which Uber is using a software system they developed called the kill switch. And this is in the lead-up to a potential law enforcement raid on Uber's Amsterdam headquarters.

Travis Kalanick, the former CEO at the time, says to his managers in Amsterdam, hit the kill switch. And by that, he meant cut off access to all data on our computers, potentially to prevent law enforcement investigation of that data.

And so here we have a company that's actually developing software for the express purpose of trying to evade law enforcement efforts to hold them accountable.

Stephanie Sy:

Yes. And Uber has said that was to protect intellectual property, for their part.

Why did the whistle-blower, who ends up being a former company lobbyist named Uber Mark MacGann, want to reveal these details?

Doug MacMillan:

Mark MacGann said that he was worried that Uber had sold a lie, that the people that Uber had recruited to its service, a lot of low-income people that it recruited to be drivers of the service, were told this vision of, if you drive for Uber, you are going to build a better life for yourself, and we're going to empower you to be an entrepreneur.

And Mark MacGann is saying this message didn't sit well with him in the years since he's left the company, because what ended up happening to a lot of these people is they didn't improve their lives. A lot of these people ended up in debt to rental car companies that they owed money to.

And some of the people in our reporting in The Washington Post showed ended up with threats to their physical safety. Sometimes — when Uber implemented cash payments in its app in South Africa, for example, that generated a lot of criminal activity of Uber drivers being targeted for crime on their app.

So a lot of times these drivers were sold this vision of, Uber is going to help you improve your life, and they actually did the opposite. It did not help them improve their life. And I think the source of these leaks has been kind of worried about that. And that was part of his motivation for coming forward with these documents.

Stephanie Sy:

And we should say that Uber today says this is all in the past. They have had new leadership for the last five years.

We will have to leave it there.

Doug MacMillan of The Washington Post, thanks for joining the "NewsHour."

Doug MacMillan:

Thanks for having me.

Judy Woodruff:

And thank you, Stephanie.