A court case filed in Amsterdam could decide how far a company may go in letting software manage its workforce.
Because Uber runs its European operations from the city, a claim brought on behalf of roughly 241,000 drivers across the EU and Britain lands here, and the question at its centre is blunt: when a computer decides what a driver earns and which rides they are offered, who answers for those decisions?
The drivers’ side argues that Uber profiles its workers automatically and lets that profile steer their pay and their trip offers, which they say European data protection law does not permit.
The organisation coordinating the claim, Worker Info Exchange, is run by James Farrar, the former driver whose earlier case ended at the UK Supreme Court with drivers recognised as workers.
Europe’s trade union confederation describes the new claim as collective legal action on a scale not tried before.
What angers drivers most is that the system cannot be inspected from the outside. Two drivers may be offered different money for near-identical rides, and no one can tell them why.
The claim links the arrival of variable pay in Britain in 2023 to a fall in annual driver income of about £5,000; the same pay system reached the Netherlands this year.
The drivers want compensation, and a ruling that stops the practices they consider unlawful, including what they describe as the training of Uber’s models on their data without permission.
Uber disputes all of it, saying a driver’s history plays no role in pricing a trip and that flexible pricing can make unattractive rides pay better.
The company is contesting Dutch regulators on another front too: an 825 million euro fine, issued in August over automated account deactivations, is under appeal.
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