Friday December 9, 2016
Abdurzak Hadi, whose 10-year-old son has leukaemia, is struggling to make ends meet but feels he has nowhere else to go
Abdurzak Hadi has worked as a minicab driver for 10 years and as an Uber driver in London for nearly three. He came to the UK as a child refugee from Somalia in 1992 and now has a young family but is struggling to support them. His low pay is, like that of many Uber drivers, topped up by the state with working tax credits. His 10-year-old son has been receiving treatment for leukaemia and he hoped that being an Uber driver would allow him the flexibility to arrange his work around collecting his other children from school and hospital appointments, sharing the caring with his wife, but he says the reality has been very different.
He regularly works about 40 hours a week for Uber. He says most of the drivers he knows work much longer hours to make ends meet but his children’s needs prevent him from doing that. Last week, after paying Uber 20% commission, he earned £557 before costs for a full working week; some weeks it has been much less. Newer drivers have 25% deducted.
He estimates that his costs for hiring his vehicle, paying public hire vehicle insurance, fuel, his licence fees, car cleaning and phone hire are about £285 a week, so his hourly earnings fell below the statutory national living wage of £7.20 per hour, if it applied.
In his previous job he could ask the operator to give him local jobs when he needed to come to the end of a shift but he says he is unable to do that with Uber because he is penalised by being logged out if he turns down jobs that are too far away. “If I am self-employed I ought to be able to take jobs I want or not, but you don’t even know where the passenger is going.”
Hadi is one of 19 drivers who took Uber to tribunal and won a ruling that they are not self-employed, but workers entitled to basic rights including the national living wage. Uber is appealing against the decision.
Although he has worked for different operators in the past, he says they have been undercut by Uber and so are no longer recruiting, and he has nowhere else to go.
“At the beginning the money was really good because fares were higher but now they have cut them and flooded the market. Sometimes I have to wait well over an hour for a job. It’s taxpayers like you who are funding Uber at the moment because we are not earning enough and having to go to the government to ask for benefits.”