As Uber Moves Support To India And The Philippines In Search Of Profitability, Has The Bubble Finally Burst???

Is the dream over...has the house of cards lost it’s footing....has the ride share, instant hail app bubble, finally burst?

Uber has closed another customer support office, this time in downtown Los Angeles, laying off another 80 employees.

It looks like Uber are closing down offices in cities and moving operations to countries where the wage bill will be slashed. 

Without any advance notice, staff in LA were informed last Thursday their jobs were no longer available and would be shifted to a large customer support office, the company maintains in Manila -according to sources who asked to remain anonymous for fear of losing their severance pay

Uber manager Ruffin Chevaleau, has acknowledged that a meeting was called on short notice before delivering the news.

“We have decided to close the downtown L.A. office and we will be moving to our Manila C.O.E., where we can continue to support the business as it grows", she said using an abbreviation that means Center of Excellence, (the in-house term for customer support hubs). 

“I know that this is a shock. This meeting is to inform you all that today is the last day in this office.”

The employees were mostly customer support staff on zero hour contracts, who were paid hourly, with tasks such as processing documents, resolving account issues and explaining incentives and promotions. (Uber considers both drivers and riders its “customers” not employees, and supports them out of the same department.) 

“This is not easy news to deliver,” said Chevaleau, who is a lead at the company’s Phoenix customer support office, “It was important for me to be here in person.”

In the months since going public, the ride-hailing company has made a series of cutbacks to its corporate workforce totaling more than 1,000 workers, including in its marketing, self-driving and engineering departments. 

Uber have moved up their timeline to turn a profit to the forth quarter of 2020, as up till now they have only shaken loses, sometimes in the billions. The unrealistic goal towards profitability, is alleged to be a bid to appease their investors.

Uber has been through several rounds of restructuring since the early days. Originally, support operations were run out of local city offices, but the company transitioned to a workforce of largely remote hourly contractors in the U.S. and have now moved to contractors in places like the Philippines and India. 

Because of their extremely poor security when it came to hiring drivers, they have been dogged by scandal after scandal from passengers who were raped and sexually assaulted by drivers, plus many hundreds of thousands customer accounts were hacked and sold on the dark we. 

In July 2017, in response to a social media campaign known as #deleteUber fed off the public scandals and eventually culminated in management upheaval and a new chief executive, the company made an effort to improve relationship with its drivers. 

But despite efforts to improve the scandals have just escalated.

In London alone, Uber suffered 600,000 complaints in the first 6 months of 2019. 

TAXI LEAKS EXTRA BIT : Ola Closes Brighton Office

Also in the news this week, new kid on the block, Indian instant hail app Ola have closed their operational centre in Brighton as they thought the local market was completely saturated from cars coming in from surrounding areas such as Lewis. Ola, considered a rival to Uber, had been granted an operator’s licence for just one year in May last year by Brighton and Hove City Council.

The Indian minicab firm, which presently operate in Merseyside, Reading, South Wales, the South West , West Midlands and now London, has told the council that it no longer has plans to operate in the Brighton licensing area.

Ola was recently banned in Southern India's high tech centre, Bangalore, when it was found to be blatantly flouting regulation by operating an unapproved Taxi bike service. 

It appears that these online high tech, parasitical, predator pricing apps have a major problem complying with government legislation and current regulation. 

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