Uber changed the world dramatically and irrevocably. The company’s main breakthrough is not in the idea of cars on call, and not even in the technology itself, but in the accelerated restructuring of the American workforce and rethinking the future of the concept of work. In the wake of a major crisis that was widely publicized this spring, Uber has been hard at work on a corporate culture that both workers and outsiders describe as aggressive, brutal, and demanding. One of the major ethical problems of Uber is the lack of control over the drivers’ licensing. Anyone can become a taxi driver through the mobile application. As a result, the company’s executives cannot control drivers’ competency, putting the passengers’ safety at risk. The ethical risks are directly related to the lack of legal procedures in the company’s activities.
Moreover, the combination of employee dissatisfaction and weak ethical culture can be mentioned as a vital moral issue of Uber. For Uber, employees are expendable, and the workday has no beginning or end (Ferrell et al., 2019). Everyone is responsible for their financial success, and the company achieves maximum capacity without compensating for downtime (Ferrell et al., 2019). In other words, the company lacks Human resource management and lack a corporative employee-centered culture. Treating employees as the mechanisms is unethical, contradicting all the existing holistic business leading models. Such an attitude causes a significant level of employee dissatisfaction. These two primary factors (the lack of human resource management and weak ethical culture) and legal issues bring substantial risks for the company. Uber authorities and executives should consider developing the model, including the ethical and legal procedures. The higher instances should address the ethical problems in the ideology of Uber.
Reference
Ferrell, L., Ferrell, O., Fraedrich, J. (2019). Business Ethics: ethical decision making and cases, twelfth edition. Cengage Learning.