A collective action has been brought against Uber in Amsterdam on behalf of approximately 241,000 drivers across the EU and the UK. The claim alleges that Uber has unlawfully used automated decision-making, including profiling, in dynamically setting pay and allocating work. It is backed by Worker Info Exchange, whose founder James Farrar secured the UK Supreme Court ruling that Uber drivers have worker rights.
The legal theory is the news
This is not an employment-status case. The pleaded cause is data protection — the GDPR's restrictions on automated decision-making and profiling — which is why it is in the Netherlands, where Uber's European entity sits, and why the relief sought includes an injunction on the processing rather than reclassification of the drivers. The reflex of assuming any Uber case is a gig-work case gets this one backwards.
The numbers, and whose they are
Drivers claim dynamic pay-setting has operated in the UK since 2023, pushing down annual incomes by about £5,000, and that the system was introduced in the Netherlands this year. Uber categorically rejects the allegations: it says it does not adjust the price offered for a trip based on an individual driver's behaviour, and that fares are calculated from real-time trip attributes.
What the common framing gets wrong
Three corrections. The £5,000 and the commission claims are allegations from the claimant side, not findings — the supporting research is disputed. 241,000 is the number of drivers the claim relates to, not the number who have signed up; the campaign is still recruiting, and those are routinely conflated into a headline. And what is verifiably dated to 2 September is the public launch of the action; the underlying court filing date is not independently established, so "announced" is the accurate verb, not "filed."
Why the theory travels
If algorithmic pay-setting is attackable as unlawful automated decision-making, the exposure is not specific to ride-hailing. Every system that sets individual compensation or allocates shifts by model — in warehousing, delivery, and increasingly in scheduled retail work — inherits the same question. That is what makes an Amsterdam privacy claim about taxi fares worth reading as an AI story.