Uber’s partnership with UN Women didn’t last long.
Earlier this month, Uber announced that it was teaming up with UN Women, a United Nations organization focused on creating global gender equality. Uber also said it would “create 1,000,000 jobs for women as drivers on the Uber platform by 2020.”
However, it appears the partnership was short-lived. UN Women spokesperson Nanette Braun told GeekWire on Friday that Uber is sponsoring a UN Women’s event to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the Beijing Platform for Action “Planet 50-50 by 2030: Step It Up for Gender Equality”.
But now, the sponsorship appears to be the extent of the partnership.
“Beyond this event, we have not discussed opportunities to engage with Uber, including in the context of their commitment to create 1 million jobs for women in the next five years,” Braun said. “At this point, we do not plan to expand the collaboration.”
In a YouTube video uploaded on Wednesday by trade union federation Public Services International, UN Women Executive Director Phumzile Mlambo told a crowd at the UN that her organization “will not accept an offer to collaborate on job creation with Uber,” followed by applause from the audience.
We’ve reached out to Uber about the partnership status and will update this post when we hear back.
The International Transport Workers’ Federation (ITF), which represents 700 unions and more than 4.5 million workers around the globe, wrote today that unions and NGOs had complained about the Uber partnership.
“There was an immediate rejection by unions and NGOs of this idea of a million jobs that we knew were likely to be insecure, ill paid, and potentially unsafe,” Brigitta Paas, ITF vice president, said in a statement.
In an interview with Buzzfeed earlier this month, Uber general counsel Salle Yoo said that Uber was going to collaborate with UN Women, noting that “we are going to learn from them.”
“They will teach us how to get our message out there,” Yoo told Buzzfeed. “I believe women will tell other women [about this] as they see how this impacts their lives and we will have that virality.”
This news comes as Uber and Lyft face lawsuits over whether their drivers should be considered employees, not just contractors.
