This Week: Uber & Lyft Are Ramping Up Efforts To Promote Yes on 22

Welcome back to This Week in RIdeshare news. Here’s the latest headlines for rideshare, Gig Economy and food delivery apps this week:

• ‘A totally different ballgame’: Inside Uber and Lyft’s fight over gig worker status
• Right-wing news sites, PR firms, and an online ‘cultivated troll army’ are all reportedly helping Uber and Lyft’s push for Prop 22, which would classify drivers as contractors
• Postmates is hiring regional organizers to fight employee status
• DoorDash Has Completely Bungled Its Caviar Takeover, NYC Restaurateurs Say

Welcome back to this week in Rideshare News. My name is Cecily and here are the latest headlines for a rideshare, gig economy, and food delivery apps news this week.

Uber and Lyft are aggressively ramping up efforts to promote Proposition 22. Yes, they are. They are doing this with the help of right-wing news outlets, social media mobs, and public relations firms, according to this report that I’ve shared below. There’s also a growing online network of Facebook groups, pages, websites, Twitter, and Instagram accounts, oh, and YouTube channels trained on condemning AB5 per this report. One expert told this outlet these PR firms are resorting to what seems to be targeted harassment. As a service, to get the job done, many of these companies actually list social media as part of their skillset, so you hire these people to harass folks. But it’s really effective. Everywhere that you look right now, there are ads, there’s commercials, there’s social media posts, and that they appear to have the drivers’ best interest at heart. Even go as far as to say that 70% of drivers support this initiative. And I’ve noticed it, as I look for articles and things like that to share with you, that people are getting attacked when they respond favorably to AB5 or any none 22 stuff.

Now these companies, Postmates, Uber, Lyft, they’ve all dumped 100 mil into this proposition, so I’m sure that money is going to go a long way. So if you’re attacked online, it’s probably a part of this effort. Postmates is hiring regional organizers. These are folks that are going to execute the grassroots advocacy campaigns to support local and national legislative initiatives basically to fight employee disputes in California, Washington, parts of the Southwest, New York and in DC. Lyft was said to hire similar employees a few weeks ago in San Francisco. These people would be dedicating their time and energy to educating people about the benefits of Prop 22. So yeah, if you start seeing people in front of your local grocery store talking about it, that’s what this is. But the part that gets me, they’re hiring employees to address employee classification disputes.

New York City restaurants are having issues with Caviar orders following the DoorDash Caviar integration. The food delivery giant has been dropping orders, mistakenly delisting restaurants from the app, and showing incorrect menus to diners, all this costing the restaurants thousands of dollars loss in sales. Now, according to several restaurants on the platform, they say this was not a good time. They started to migrate the systems earlier this month, and this past week I even received an email that said everything had been switched over completely. Well, these restaurants said this is the worst time to even approach a project like this, and that is costing them thousands of dollars. My thoughts are that this might be causing problems not only in New York City, but all over the country. Anyone that’s on either platform, let me know if this is an issue for you as a delivery driver. A Lyft driver pulls a woman out his car by her sweatshirt on the highway. Watch this video and tell me what would you do?

So I just got in from out of town. A Lyft driver comes to pick me up at the airport. He gets out of his car and he gives me two squirts of hand sanitizer to put on my hands, and he gets my bags, he puts it in the trunk. He’s like, “I’m sorry to be so strict about this but my dad died two weeks ago from COVID and it’s not a game.” I was like, “I understand.” I get in the back of his car. We’re riding. He has all the windows down on the streets. So we approach the 405. He gets on the 405, and I have on a hoodie. So imagine being in the back of a car, somebody going 75 on the highway and you have on a hoodie. So I politely roll my window up. And I was like, “Sir, it’s hot. Do you mind rolling the windows up and can we just do air conditioning? Because I have on a hoodie and we have a 30 minute drive.” He was like, “No, I need air to be circulating because my dad had COVID.”

So he rolls my window back down, and then mind you all the rest of the windows are down. So we’re going a little bit further on the 405, and I just politely roll my personal window up. And he was like, “Oh, you think I’m playing with you?” So mind you, he’s all the way to the left in the carpool lane. He swerves in front of two cars and all the way to the … What is it called? The lane that if you get into a wreck, you pull over. I think it’s called the feeder lane. He swerves into the feeder lane. He stops the car. He gets out. He’s like, “Get the fuck out of my car.” I was like, “No.” He was like, “Get the fuck out of my car.” I was like, “No. Can you just at least take me to an exit?” He was like, “No, I told you my dad died of COVID and you think it’s a game.” So he goes to his trunk, he takes both my bags, he throws them on the feeder road. Mind you, I’m on the 405 on a highway.

And he’s like, “Get out of my car. I’m going to call the police.” I was like, “Call the police, because I’m not getting out of the car on the highway.” He picks me up by my hoodie and drags me out of his car. He throws me on the side of the highway where my bags are and he drives off. Luckily enough, I was able to get his license plate number. And so then I’m literally on the side of the road, waving at cars, trying to hitchhike a ride. This nice family picks me up on the side of the road, super nice people. Thank God. I just had to go with my gut on that one. I got in their car. Mind you they’re strangers, don’t know them. I’m on the side of the 405. The lady was like, “My husband saw you waving and then we just couldn’t leave you there, so we just made the U-turn and came back to pick you up.” They dropped me off safely at my house.

Okay, so there’s two sides to every story. I just don’t know what would possess someone to pull someone out of their car on the freeway, especially if he was concerned about death and that his father passed. I’m thinking at least veer to the right shoulder, let the girl out so she can walk to the nearest exit. The 405 is no joke. Even if this was during the day and she was in the diamond lane, there’s tons of people that speed, cyclists, it’s just a very dangerous situation. So I don’t know what would make me so mad to put somebody out there like that, but let me know in the comments. Anyway, thank you so much for watching. If you would like to send me a tip, you can on my Facebook, which is Drive Girl Drive, or on YouTube, which is also Drive Girl Drive. Thank you so much for tuning in. I’m here every single Saturday, early in the morning. Appreciate you guys and all you do. Please be safe and I’ll see you next week. Bye.