Taxi-hailing organization, Uber, has been undergoing through tough times in the recent past thanks to its internal squabbles and gender discrimination/sexual harassment issues. The issues escalated so much that an investigation had to be conducted to substantiate the claims and put the matters at rest. As it turns out, part of report’s recommendations (based on the investigation) hint that Uber’s CEO, Travis Kalanick has to take a leave of absence, in addition to termination of the Emil Michael’s tenure who serves as the firm’s senior vice president of business.
According to an email, one of Uber’s spokesperson, Uber’s board wants to actualize all recommendations as spelled out in the report. In fact, the board voted to adopted the suggestions on June 11.
“The Uber Board met today with Eric Holder (former AG for USA) and Tammy Albarran. The Board unanimously voted to adopt all the recommendations of the Holder Report. The recommendations will be released to the employees on Tuesday,” said the spokesperson.
True to the rumour’s, Emil has left the company amid multiple ugly cases. To begin with, it is Emil who floated the idea of digging dirt on female journalists who criticized Uber. To him, this was a ‘fair game’ because Uber had to fight back against negative press. Although Emil defended his behaviour by arguing that he was frustrated and the outburst was merely theoretical, it was ascertained that Uber did access the travel details of a BuzzFeed reporter.
“The remarks attributed to me at a private dinner — borne out of frustration during an informal debate over what I feel is sensationalistic media coverage of the company I am proud to work for — do not reflect my actual views and have no relation to the company’s views or approach. They were wrong no matter the circumstance and I regret them,” regretted Michael.
That’s not all. While on a business trip in South Korea and together with CEO Travis Kalanick and some male Uber employees in a karaoke bar, Emil picked female escorts (fancy name for high-end prostitute) out of a lineup. A female member of the team reported the incident to Uber’s HR. Nothing was done – in fact, Emil stepped in and tried to make those present at the event lie about it.
The next top executive to leave the company was Eric Alexander (president of business in the Asia Pacific) who got his employment terminated a few days ago. What did he do again? Well, he dug up medical records of a rape victim in India (who had been raped by a Uber driver), which is a violation of one’s right to privacy. What’s more, he shared the medical records with multiple Uber executives, including you know who, Emil. Eric was fired together with other 20 employees for good measure.
We are not done here yet. Amit Singhal, a senior vice president of engineering dropped his working tools after Uber discovered he was not entirely truthful about his former job at Google. Apparently, Amit left his job at Google due to sexual harassment accusations from an employee.
In March, the ride-hailing giant’s President Jeff Jones tabled his resignation, which was motivated by leadership wrangles with CEO Kalanick, supposedly. In the same month, the organization’s vice president of growth, one Ed Baker had to step down after investigators were notified of his sexual relations with one of Uber’s workers.
ed resigned voluntarily. investigators were not notified of ‘sexual relations’. an anon email to an uber board member said ed was seen ‘making out’ with a fellow employee in a 2014 event. there was no suggestion of se x or sexual harassment.
These terminations have been brought to light thanks to a blogspost that was published Susan Fowler, a former site reliability engineer at Uber. Susan gave a comprehensive account of alleged sexual harassment at her workplace, a complaint that was backed up by other women at Uber. To add salt to injury, Uber’s HR department frustrated her, which does not come as a surprise based on how much complaints it has led slide away. Furthermore, the company pinned the DeleteUber campaign on her famous blogpost. It is estimated that more than 200,000 Uber accounts were deleted at that time.
It is inevitable to assume that Uber is inherently hiring executives who have questionable morals, or the work environment at Uber favours unwanted conduct, which synonymous to workplaces that have no policies and rules to deal with and prevent harassment.
