Valued at close to $70 billion and operating in more than 70
countries, Uber was giving traditional taxi companies a ride for their money in
early 2017 when it came to light just how Hobbesian the company’s culture had
become. In February, an engineer who had left the company two months earlier “detailed
a history of discrimination and sexual harassment by her managers, which she
said was shrugged off by Uber’s human resources department.”[1]
Crucially, she claimed that “the culture was stoke—and even fostered—by those
at the top of the company.”[2]
Interviews with other employees and reviews of internal emails, chat logs, and
tape-recorded meetings revealed incidents typified by one manager groping a
woman coworker’s breasts at a company retreat, a director shouting an anti-gay
slur at a subordinate during an argument, and another manager threatening to
beat an underperforming subordinate’s head in with a baseball bat. The
operative question is whether anything can be done about the accepted
pathology.
The full essay is in Cases of Unethical Business, which is available at Amazon.
1. Mike
Isaac, “Inside
Uber’s Aggressive, Unrestrained Workplace Culture,” The New York Times, February 22, 2017.
2. Ibid.
