From its founding through its very public reckoning in 2017, Uber completely upturned how tech platforms interface with the real world, in particular labor. They were so successful that uber became a stand-in for the glib euphemism “gig economy” and a spate of “Uber for X” (where x could be dogwalkers, grocery shoppers, or dry cleaners) startups followed in its toxic wake.

To Silicon Valley boosters and VCs, this was some kind of bold new re-imagining of work and they (once again) appropriated the language of progressivism to sell their story of worker empowerment and freedom. To anyone with an understanding of how capital has historically exploited labor, it looked like the same ole’ arbitrage exploiting weakened labor laws and the desperate austerity of the post-Global Recession economy, gilded with ascendent mobile platforms.

Uber is now an eleven-year-old company that has since replaced its awful founder CEO, gone public, expanded into other complementary services like food delivery, made a big acquisition, and generally avoided the drama that plagued the company just a few years ago.

They also hired one of their biggest critics¹, author and labor researcher Alex Rosenblat, to head up “marketplace policy, fairness and research”. Brody Ford first reported about Rosenblat’s hire for Bloomberg:

Rosenblat is best known for her 2018 book, “Uberland: How Algorithms Are Rewriting the Rules of Work,” for which she interviewed hundreds of drivers about their working conditions. The book highlights driver stories of pay disparities, pervasive surveillance and the lopsided power dynamics in algorithm-mediated work.

As an Uber employee, Rosenblat said her responsibility is to “get the company to take into consideration the experiences and point of view of drivers, especially at the product level” and that her work will be informed by past research.

The cynical take is this is a move to silence a detractor, or maybe just good PR, but I don’t think that’s quite it. Most of the more egregious claims against Uber’s labor relations — like stiffing them on tips or surveilling them — aren’t a requirement for Uber to succeed today; they were just as likely extensions of the wholly toxic culture that was bred from top of the company. There’s enough obvious stuff for Roseblat to address that she’ll be busy for months if not years.

The bigger question facing Uber, like so many platforms, is how to actually succeed as a business without exploiting the conditions that made them so successful. It’s clear the labor grift was meant to be a stopgap on the way to driverless cars, but Uber’s given up on owning that space outright and the dream of robot drivers remains out of reach for the foreseeable future.

The situation for Uber is less dire than, say, Facebook’s business model of surveilling their users, but Uber has also struggled with profitability since going public. I’m convinced it’s possible to build a ride hailing app that treats the drivers with respect. Probably not with the returns venture capital demands, though.