Uber has fired more than 20 employees after a law firm investigated complaints of sexual harassment, bullying, discrimination and other violations of company policies. The recent firings included both managers and lower-level workers, some of whom retaliated against employees after they complained about bad conduct…
Uber has fired more than 20 employees after a law firm investigated complaints of sexual harassment, bullying, discrimination and other violations of company policies.
The recent firings included both managers and lower-level workers, some of whom retaliated against employees after they complained about bad conduct at the ride-hailing firm, said Bobbie Wilson, a Perkins Coie partner involved in the investigation.
Uber Technologies retained the firm after former engineer Susan Fowler wrote a blog post in February about sex harassment at the company. Fowler wrote that on her first day at work her boss propositioned her in a series of messages.
The Perkins Coie probe is separate from one being done by former Attorney General Eric Holder. He is expected to make broader recommendations on how to change Uber’s culture when his report is released publicly next week.
Separately, Uber has hired two women as senior executives — former Apple executive Bozoma Saint John as chief brand officer and Harvard Business School Professor Frances Frei as senior vice present for leadership and strategy.
Saint John ran global consumer marketing of Apple Music and iTunes. Her role at Uber will be to burnish the company’s image. She will be Uber’s highest ranking black executive.
Frei told tech news site Recode that her goal is “to make this a world-class company that can be proud of itself in the end, rather than embarrassed.” Frei is the author of “Uncommon Service: How to Win By Putting Customers at the Core of Your Business, ” and plans to commute from Cambridge, Mass., to Uber’s San Francisco headquarters.
After Fowler’s blog post, Uber set up a 24-hour hotline to take complaints from employees, and hired Perkins Coie to investigate them. The firm checked into 215 complaints, and 57 remain under investigation. The hotline will remain in operation.
The probe into Fowler’s complaints is still under way, and Wilson wouldn’ t say if any of those fired, or 31 other employees placed in counseling, were involved in that.
Wilson said Uber gave her law firm “unfettered access” to people and documents that were needed for the Fowler investigation.
Problems at Uber are not unusual in the technology industry, given the company’s size of more than 14,000 employees, said Wilson, whose firm has done similar work for the biggest tech companies in the nation.
The firings, and the hiring of Saint John and Frei, are big steps in Uber’s trek toward repairing its image, which has been tarnished by harassment complaints and a number of management missteps.
In its ascent to becoming the world’s most valuable startup, Uber took Silicon Valley’s penchant for sexism and cutthroat, unapologetic competition, and a distaste for government regulation, and kicked it up several notches.
It grew into the No. 1 ride-hailing company in the country and is valued at nearly $70 billion. But this year, Uber’s aggressive corporate culture and its 40-year-old CEO’s self-admitted need to “fundamentally change and grow up” has caught up with it.
Uber is the target of lawsuits, boycott threats and a federal investigation into claims that it has used a fake version of its app to thwart authorities. It’s also been accused of corporate espionage by Waymo, formerly Google’s autonomous vehicle arm. Uber’s former chief self-driving car researcher took confidential documents from Waymo before his startup firm was purchased by Uber, according to a Waymo lawsuit.
Uber also is searching for a chief operating officer and chief financial officer as it prepares for a possible public stock offering.
Bloomberg News
contributed to this report.
