Free Paper Example on Uber's Troubled Journey: From 2017 to Date

Introduction

From the year 2017 to date, both Uber and President Donald Trump continue to be entangled on more scandals, almost every day. On several occasions, Uber has been the highlight of the news due to involvement with President and sometimes due to internal culture. Uber is a globally renowned brand; however, facing a lot of crisis. The company has excellent technology, but unlike other companies such as Google, Amazon, and Facebook, its technology has not made it difficult for new entrants to venture into the ride-sharing business. Uber has dozens of competitors globally. In the US, Lyft has closed the competition gap and owns the same market share as Uber.

Is your time best spent reading someone else’s essay? Get a 100% original essay FROM A CERTIFIED WRITER!

Save 25%

Mess at the Executive Level

In 2017, Uber made the majority of headlines due to mess at the executive level and particular CEO Travis Kalanick. On January 28, Uber became subjected to Hashtagivism "#deleteUber movement." Though Travis claimed it was misdirected criticism, the movement saw a protest from Taxi drivers protesting Trump's travel ban at the John F. Kennedy Airport in New York. President Trump had banned travels targeting nationals from seven Muslim countries. Most of the customers saw Uber taxi drivers' decision to continue picking customers at the JFK airport as an attempt to profiteering. More than 400000 accounts were deleted, and Uber experienced a 10 percent drop in rides, whereas competitors Lyft had a 60 percent increase in the number of new users.

Amid the JFK protest, Uber CEO Travis Kalanick had to step down from Trump's advisory council as he faced a lot of criticism. Kalanick had agreed to join President Trump's advisory council, which included Tesla chief executive Elon Musk and several other executives. Most criticisms questioned Kalanick's role in the secret council, especially after Trump imposed a travel ban. After stepping down, the CEO wrote a memo claiming that entering the special advisory council did not mean endorsing Trump's policies.

Second Wave

On February 19, the second wave of second #deleteUber movement resurfaced after Susan Fowler published an essay damning the company's policies and cultures. In her post, Fowler detailed years working as Uber engineer, and reported on sexual harassment and sexism ignored by officials. Uber reacted immediately to these allegations and claimed to launch an investigation, hiring the former Attorney General Eric Holder's to lead the investigations.

On February 23, Uber was handed a lawsuit from Google's self-driving car, Waymo, preventing the company from progressing to launch self-driving cars. The lawsuit accused Anthony Levandowski of downloading more than 14000 files from Google self-driving before leaving Google and developing his own self-driving truck company, later acquired by Uber. Though Google is investors in Uber, the relationship between the two has grown to be increasingly competitive as they intend to dominate the mainstream of self-driving automobiles. However, Uber refuted the claim saying that Google was trying to slow down the competition.

Conclusion

The management crisis continued after a video of Uber CEO Kalanick, went viral online berating an Uber driver on fare. In the video, Kalanick was recorded conceiting how he pushes employees to work hard and blaming the driver for failing to take charge of his income. Later in March, reports surfaced, showing that Uber was using a tool known as Greyball to evade official investigators.

Referencing List

Bhuiyan, J., 2017. Everything You Need To Know About Uber’S Turbulent 2017. [online] Vox. Available at: https://www.vox.com/2017/8/20/16164176/uber-2017-timeline-scandal> [Accessed 13 July 2020].

Del la Cava, M., 2017. Uber has lost market share to Lyft during crisis. USA Today. Available at:
https://www. usatoday. com/story/tech/news/2017/06/13/uber-market-share-customer-image-hit-string-scandals/102795024/(Accessed: 15 Sept 2017).

Miller, K.E. and Kendall, M.C., 2018. Blurred (Identity) Lines: A Content Analysis of the# deleteuber Crisis on Twitter. Journal of International Crisis and Risk Communication Research, 1(2), p.4.

Powell, B., 2017. Identity crisis: the misclassification of California Uber drivers. Loy. LAL Rev., 50, p.459.