Uber to Pay Restitution to NY Drivers

In mid-May, Uber conceded it underpaid its New York City drivers by improperly calculating the company’s share of passenger fares, and will pay out an average of $900 per driver in restitution, costing tens of millions of dollars.

The back pay could run at least $45 million, based on the approximately 50,000 drivers the Independent Drivers Guild says work in New York City.

The ride-hailing company has previously misled drivers about how much they could make and miscalculated fares. In this case, Uber was taking its cut of fares based on the pretax sum, instead of after taxes and fees as stated in its terms of service.

The issue was also raised in a lawsuit against San Francisco-based Uber filed by the New York Taxi Workers Alliance. In March, Uber acknowledged that it had underestimated drivers’ pay in Philadelphia by millions of dollars.

In other Uber news, the company has fired Anthony Levandowski, VP of Technology and the lead engineer steering the company's self-driving vehicle efforts, the New York Times reports.

Levandowski's ousting, effective immediately, comes over his involvement in a legal battle between Uber and Alphabet's Waymo, the firm's self-driving unit. Waymo alleges that Uber is using trade secrets stolen from Google to expand Uber's self-driving vehicles, a plan supported by Levandowski, a former longtime Google employee.

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