This is quite standard actually, and there's a long common law tradition around this (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Respondeat_superior).
The question here was whether Uber could claim the drivers were not, in fact, employees.
(edit: A commenter correctly explains that no employee relationship is necessarily required; I should have stated that this was one part of Uber's defense, in addition to the driver having agreed not to assault riders and having undergone a safety screening)
According to the article you linked to, a similar case was already tried in 1838, when a boy fell off a wagon, and the master was not guilty of the behaviour of the wagon driver.
Is that the legal standard here? No.
How can you even think another way? Only the rapist is guilty of rape. Any other thinking is apologizing for heinous crimes.
Are you trying to imply that the driver was not instructed by Uber to pick the woman who was raped?
> How can you even think another way? Only the rapist is guilty of rape. Any other thinking is apologizing for heinous crimes.
The company is responsible for sending a rapist to pick up the woman that was raped.
Sure. If Uber was convicted of the crime of rape here, that'd be weird.
They were found civilly liable. Because of things like this:
> Over three weeks, jurors weighed the harrowing personal account of Ms. Dean as well as testimony from Uber executives and thousands of pages of internal company documents, including some showing that Uber had flagged her ride as a higher risk for a serious safety incident moments before she was picked up. Uber never warned her, with an executive testifying that it would have been “impractical” to do so.
https://www.courthousenews.com/in-sexual-assault-trial-uber-...
> When matching drivers with riders, Uber uses an AI-powered safety feature called the safety ride assistant dispatch, or SRAD. SRAD gives potential driver-rider matches a score from 0 to 1 based on potential for sexual assault and aims to make matches with the lowest risk.
For example a company can instruct a truck driver what time he needs to have the goods delivered, then the company is also to blame if he has an accident because the schedule was unfeasible while following safe driving practices.
Or a company which is dumping harmful chemicals into the environment.
A cab driver raping a passenger is unfortunately not an isolated happening, it's not particular to Uber.
The article goes on to explain that the 1838 view has been adjusted over time, and the linked source discusses this in better detail.
https://scholarship.kentlaw.iit.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?refe...
There’s almost always a contract that spells it out, but in the situation where there is no explicit contract, I’d expect that we’re still liable.
My electricians are W2 employees and not contractors, and it’s possible that construction has different laws regarding liability than a ride share company that uses contractors, so they’re not equivalent, and I am not a lawyer.
From the article:
> internal company documents […] showing that Uber had flagged her ride as a higher risk for a serious safety incident moments before she was picked up. Uber never warned her […]
Uber actually had a whole project that produced systems that determine the risk of incidents happening. Could they make rides safer but chose not to? That’s at the core of these lawsuits.
Mind you, these companies work very hard for us to not know how they match A to B, usually so we don’t notice things like their disregard for safety.
>....including some showing that Uber had flagged her ride as a higher risk for a serious safety incident moments before she was picked up. Uber never warned her, with an executive testifying that it would have been “impractical” to do so.
as well as some
>...suggesting that Uber resisted introducing safety features such as in-car cameras because it believed these measures would slow corporate growth.
I would probably have not been included on the jury because I think uber is run by some of the biggest scumbags in the corporate world but if the article is to be believed it's not an unreasonable verdict unless you think no company should be liable for anything that results from their choices and actions.
If Uber wish to be seperate from those drivers, they need to provide the customer the chance to choose the driver, and have an appropriate review system.
Pwntastic•2h ago