Hello, friends,
Imagine if you got assaulted on the job and your boss never called and your company stopped paying you, leaving you to fend for yourself with thousands of dollars in medical and other bills.
That’s the reality for the drivers who are paid by Lyft and Uber and who are being killed and maimed in carjackings at alarming rates, according to an investigation we published this week in The Markup.
In the latest installment in our Working for an Algorithm series, reporter Dara Kerr painstakingly tracked down police and news reports from across the U.S. to identify carjackings that involved gig workers.
Other outlets, most notably Wired in February and NBC in April, had noted that ride-hail drivers were often victims amid a nationwide surge in carjackings. Kidnappings and carjackings of ride-hail drivers have also been documented around the world, including in Brazil and Mexico.
But hard data about the prevalence of driver carjackings was elusive. As reporter Aarian Marshall noted in her Wired article, “No one collects national data on carjackings; local departments often group carjackings with other auto thefts or violent crimes. Grubhub and Uber say they keep track of crimes targeting drivers, but they declined to share any details. Exact numbers, then, are difficult to come by.”
At The Markup we like to quantify and measure the impacts of technology—even when the data is difficult to obtain. So Dara scoured public records at five police departments and filed information requests at about a dozen more. She also pored through local news for mentions of carjackings, sorted through Reddit threads and GoFundMe campaigns, and canvassed community advocates to find victims. She eventually identified 124 incidents, with source documentation for all of them available in our GitHub repository. There have likely been many more gig worker carjackings we haven’t yet captured.
Dara found that 11 drivers died as a result of the assaults and dozens more were severely or permanently injured. The majority of the attacks tracked by The Markup happened after drivers were paired with their would-be assailants by Uber’s or Lyft’s algorithm.
The Markup Found 124 Carjackings of Gig Workers in the Last Year and a Half
And these are only what our reporting uncovered. There were likely many more
The individual stories Dara unearthed were even more disturbing than the raw numbers. The drivers told her how after surviving violent crimes, they were victimized again when they were abandoned by the companies they worked for.
Consider the story of Tommy Cross, who was shot six times during a carjacking in Oklahoma City, leaving him partially paralyzed and barely able to speak.
Cross had agreed to pitch in to do a few rides for his wife, who was trying to meet a 5 a.m. deadline to earn a Lyft bonus. He was attacked by his three passengers and found lying in the middle of the road bleeding with gunshot wounds. His car was nearby, crashed into a garage.
He spent more than a week in the hospital and underwent six surgeries, including the reconstruction of his right shoulder and side of his face. He lost several teeth and some of his tongue, making it difficult for him to speak. His right arm is permanently paralyzed.
Sheryl Cross, Tommy’s wife, said that the day after that attack someone from Lyft called and she demanded help. She said she never heard from anyone at the company again.
Sheryl has set up an online fundraiser to try to raise money to buy a new vehicle so that she can start working again in food delivery, despite the risks. “I just want to have a vehicle,” she told Dara, “so we can make some money and work.”
Lyft didn’t respond to requests for comment on Tommy’s carjacking and the company’s lack of assistance after the attack. Ashley Adams, a Lyft spokesperson, told Dara that the company is continuously working to find ways to protect drivers “to help prevent these incidents from happening and support drivers if they do.”
Uber spokesperson Jodi Kawada Page, in response to Dara’s story, said, “What’s been reported is extremely concerning,” and said that the company has sent safety information to drivers and was working with the police on their investigations.
The ride-hailing companies are explicitly set up so that they have no obligation to their drivers. Gig economy companies including Lyft and Uber famously spent more than $200 million to pass a ballot initiative in California that exempted them from state law and let them classify drivers as “independent contractors”—not employees—allowing them to sidestep requirements to provide medical benefits, sick leave, and workers compensation.
Drivers provide their own cars and insurance, which guarantees they take on all the financial and personal risk of the ride-hail model, even though everything drivers do, from being assigned a ride to which passengers they pick up, is directed by a company algorithm.
The ride-hail companies are so eager to enforce this system nationwide that they are lobbying in multiple states to pass similar laws to the one in California. Last month, Dara and investigative data journalist Maddy Varner revealed that Uber and Lyft were setting up complex PR schemes in several states. They funneled tens of thousands of dollars to Black and Latino community groups to lobby on their behalf with the aim of persuading lawmakers that drivers should not be classified as employees.
The companies argue that workers enjoy the “independence” and “flexibility” of contract work. But as Dara’s reporting has revealed, denying employee status to workers also means that drivers are being cast aside at the worst moments of their lives.
The question I have after reading all this is: Is it worth it? Is it really necessary to leave workers with no protections in order to get a convenient ride to the airport? I hope that our reporting helps shed some light on the choices that voters and lawmakers will be making on worker classification legislation across the nation in the coming months.
As always, thanks for reading.
Best,
Julia Angwin
Editor-in-Chief
The Markup