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More Than 20 Employees Fired at Uber in Sexual Harassment Investigation (cnbc.com) 72

Posted by msmash from the fixing-things dept.
More than 20 employees have been fired from Uber as part of an ongoing sexual harassment investigation, according to Bloomberg. From a report: In an explosive blog post earlier this year, former Uber engineer Susan Fowler alleged the company failed to act on sexual harassment and gender discrimination complaints. CEO Travis Kalanick called for an urgent investigation into the claims, led by former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder. That investigation, with Holder at the helm, has given its own recommendations to Uber's board, according to Bloomberg. But Uber's 12,000 employees have been given an assessment of a separate investigation, led by an attorney in at Perkins Coie LLP, according to Bloomberg, who cite an anonymous source. Perkins Coie examined 215 claims, Bloomberg said.
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More Than 20 Employees Fired at Uber in Sexual Harassment Investigation More

More Than 20 Employees Fired at Uber in Sexual Harassment Investigation

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  • Rare hatred for a company (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Drewdad ( 1738014 ) on Tuesday June 06, 2017 @02:57PM (#54562025)

    Rarely have I hated a company as much as I hate Uber....

    Ignoring and violating local regulations
    Violating labor laws
    "Greyball" tracking
    Interference in local politics
    Toxic culture

    What did I miss?

    • Re: Rare hatred for a company (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      look in your iPhone under "Location Services" and you will see that the only options Uber has are Always and Never. "While using the App" is notably missing. That was like reason #326 for me to delete their App. (fwiw, Lyft has all 3)

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      The brainwashing required to accept all of these things as facts without evidence?

    • What did I miss?

      Alleged racial discrimination [howstuffworks.com] against customers, though to be fair, traditional taxi services have the same problem.

      • In many cases that is one of the things that taxi companies have to promise in order to hold a "medallion" (license); that they will serve all the neighborhoods that it covers.

    • > Rarely have I hated a company as much as I hate Uber....

      Uh, SCO ?

  • That's about right in my experience. 90% whiners, 10% actual issues.

    They should have disciplined the whiners too.

    • How did you arrive at those numbers? Was it just based on the statements of "more than 20 employees" and "examined 215 claims"?

      If that is the case why are you assuming that the 215 claims were against 215 different employees?

      The article doesn't seem to say, and i certainly don't know it for a fact myself, but i would suspect that many of the people who committed harassment serious enough to get fired probably harassed more than one person, and thus were the focus of more than one claim.

    • They should have disciplined the whiners too.

      . . . and here I thought that they handled of the complaints of sexual harassment by firing the 20 folks who filed complaints.

      . . . does TFA make it clear that those fired were accused, and not accusers? I RTFA, and it didn't seem "perfectly clear" (in the Nixon sense of the phrase), that is what happened.

    • Lots of people don't want to ruin their career by suing their employer. Maybe you number is inverted?
    • I think it's wildly naive to suspect the people fired weren't mainly "whiners" rather than the source of the problem.

      There may have been one or two dudes fired who did harass. Fired of course for not realizing they weren't high up enough to get away with it like their bosses.

  • Official press release from Kalanick (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 06, 2017 @02:59PM (#54562037)
    We at Uber have all been very disturbed by these allegations that our corporate culture has created an environment in which women feel unsafe and harassed. After a very thorough investigation, and in order to make sure situations like this never happen again, we have taken the step to fire all those involved in reporting this harassment. We want our employees to feel safe knowing we have a zero tolerance policy regarding reports of sexual harassment.

  • Blame upper management. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Management sets the pace. I'be worked for great management teams that allow room for a bit of fun but aren't afraid to fire shovenist jerks, and I've worked for managers who were shovenist jerks. The team behavior was makibly different on these teams because of the expectation. I'm a guy so I can't speak to how it looked or felt to the women in both situations but I can imagine which one they liked better.

    Fire the leadership and hire respectful professionals.

  • I love Uber (not a troll) (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    I'm not trolling, and I'm not disregarding the important issue of sexual harassment (which is horrible) and the behavior of Uber's CEO.

    However, the almost universal disparaging of Uber here (and elsewhere) when they are mentioned -- even in this case, when Uber took some proactive measure to reduce a problem prevalent in many Silicon Valley ventures -- compels me to state the obvious: that Uber has saved thousands of lives (from reducing drunk driving), and has saved countless hours (from transportation ine

    • The politics are amazing.

      A lot of people hate on Uber here, largely because Uber is a different form of organization due to being a different form of service provider and people can't differentiate. Uber allows you to essentially operate as an independent taxi (if that), supplying the value-add of connecting the customer to the service provider, as well as providing additional insurance while you operate, so long as you follow their ToS; people identify Uber as an employer and a taxi service, rather than

      • A lot of people hate on Uber here, largely because Uber is a different form of organization due to being a different form of service provider

        If it were that simple, then why isn't there a similar level of hatred toward the likes of Lyft?

        Based on what I've read here, the hatred toward Uber is primarily rooted in the fact that the company behaves terribly.

        • Nobody gives a shit about Lyft. How often do you hear about some county trying to sue Lyft for something about taxi laws or whatever? How often do you see anything about Lyft employees being contractor or employees depending on who's making the argument? They're basically the same kind of service, and yet Uber gets all the negative press.

          It's not because Uber did something; it's because nobody gives a shit about Lyft. You call the Uber while Googling for a good mechanic when your car breaks down--even

    • Uber may well provide valuable services, but it doesn't excuse what else the company does. If I were to produce numerous masterpieces of art, and only murdered a few people here and there, I'd be in prison for a long time.

  • In a company full of dudebros there was a problem with how they treated women? nooooooooo, do tell!

  • Still f**king over the drivers (Score:4, Insightful)

    by LaughingRadish ( 2694765 ) on Tuesday June 06, 2017 @03:49PM (#54562501) Journal

    Now maybe they can get to the business of stopping the abuses of the drivers? (playing games with payments, hiding exactly how much they take out of the fare, telling passengers one price and telling the drivers something else, driving fares down for no good reason, etc, etc)

    • driving fares down for no good reason

      Isn't the reason pretty clear? Cheaper rides lead to greater marketshare and mindshare which they'll eventually start monetizing with self-driving cars or higher fares (or so goes the business plan).

  • Were any of them in management? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Or was is twenty recently hired worker bees?

  • Shouldn't they wait until results happen, accusers are met, and so forth? Or do they not want to even make up a kangaroo court?

    • Workers have no rights. Accusation is guilt.

    • Or do they not want to even make up a kangaroo court?

      Since the employees were not hanged, drawn and quartered, just fired, “kangaroo court” is not hardly applicable. From what I have heard, in USA firing doesn't need a reason. If during the investigation they found things that would normally warrant dismissal of employee without “a court”, then why shouldn't they do that in this case?

      However, if the Uber publishes the list of employees they fired exactly because of harassment claims, then those employees could have a case of slander.

      • So you know the standards of process I'm talking about. Good. I disagree with your disagreement of my use of terminology, and double down on my previous.

        It's my opinion that people shouldn't be fired on the basis of complaint alone, because this amplifies the damage that a serial false accuser would do -- both to the company and the employee. In practice investigations happen to the standard of covering the company's ass in court, from both the accuser's and the accusee's directions. This, while shooting qu

  • attorney in at Perkins Coie LLP

    IIRC, that's the same firm connected to former Reddit CEO Ellen Pao.

  • Yee-haw, Uber's having themselves a good old fashioned witch hunt! The big money femini$ts are going to make damn sure the work environment there is VERY hostile for straight men. Remember, next time your commute is delayed by yet another suicide on the Caltrain tracks - thank feminism!

    Whatcha wanna bet that 100% of the witches found & fired, for the horrible crime of acting like healthy human beings, were working class "nice guy" engineersâ and paper pushers? And 0% were gropey douchebag managem

  • It's a start. Let's hope the firings continue until the entire horrible company goes out of business.

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