Uber’s Leadership Says the Company ‘Must Change’ After Scandals - TIME Business

Uber’s Leadership Says the Company ‘Must Change’ After Scandals

Posted: 21 Mar 2017 03:05 PM PDT

Uber representatives vowed Tuesday that the company was in the midst of an overhaul, following a pile-up of scandals and shake-ups that have plagued the company for the past several weeks — including allegations of sexism and mismanagement, the departure of the company’s president and a flare-up by CEO Travis Kalanick caught on an Uber driver’s dash camera.
“Uber must change,” said board member Arianna Huffington, “if it is to be as successful in the next decade as it has in the last seven years.” The sole woman on Uber’s board repeatedly emphasized that, going forward, there would be “zero tolerance for anything but totally respectful behavior in an equitable workplace environment.”

Huffington hosted a call with reporters along with the company’s new chief HR officer, Liane Hornsey, and Rachel Holt, who heads Uber’s business in the U.S. and Canada. All three issued full-throated admissions that the company has big problems that are being rooted out in various areas, including Kalanick’s leadership, the way the company operates internally and how the company treats its drivers.
When asked repeatedly if the board had considered asking Kalanick to step down — and whether he would step down if asked — Huffington dismissed that as a hypothetical, saying “It hasn’t come up and we don’t expect it to come up.” The Uber representatives also said that Kalanick, who has been as famous for his brash style as for spearheading the growth of the ride app industry, is changing “almost week by week.”
“Going through what we’ve gone through over the last few weeks,” said Hornsey, who was a longtime Google employee before taking up the HR reins at Uber, “it’s absolutely something that would cause individual and personal change. So I think Travis is going to be hugely collaborative going forward.”
Hornsey added that Kalanick has accepted responsibility for bringing company to this point and has acknowledged his mistakes. Earlier in March, Kalanick admitted he had to “grow up” after a heated argument with a driver was caught on video.
Among the changes that they floated as cures for what ails the company was a search for a new chief operations officer. While the search is ongoing — Kalanick, they said, was not on the call because he was interviewing COO candidates — they described the position as one that would provide balance to Kalanick in a “true partnership.”
Though Huffington said that she had personally spoken to hundreds of employees who demonstrated “real appetites for change internally,” she said she is not formally investigating the company’s problems. The ultimate judgment of whether issues such as sexism and lack of diversity are “systemic problems,” she said, would be revealed through an investigation led by former Attorney General Eric Holder.
His team is collecting information through interviews and anonymous tip lines, with findings expected at the end of April. Huffington vowed that the company would honor the report from Holder’s law firm, whatever it might contain, and make those findings public.
The Uber representatives said that the company is meanwhile using other means to oust any toxic elements of the company culture: holding one hundred listening sessions, training employees on “how to be a good ally,” updating recruiting descriptions to eliminate “unconscious bias” and pushing back against a “cult of the individual” that had come to define the working environment. Hornsey promised that the company’s first report on diversity would be forthcoming.
Holt, the operational expert on the call, described steps the company is taking to be more responsive and fair to drivers — given that many of those relationships are “frayed” — such as communicating with that vast network in a “more human” manner. She also emphasized that despite the PR problems and loss of riders who chose to #DeleteUber earlier this year, Uber has continued to experience growth: both attracting new riders and seeing existing riders take more trips.
Still, she repeated the overarching theme of the call along with her colleagues. “We know we have a long way to go, she said. “Everyone at Uber, including Travis, knows that we must change.”

Donald Trump: America's Marie Antoinette - CNN

(CNN)On Thursday, Donald Trump released his budget for 2017, which proposes slashing programs that help some of our nation's most vulnerable citizens, including the poor and the elderly. And then Trump, in his own "let them eat cake" moment, jetted off 24 hours later to spend another weekend at his luxurious private country club Mar-a-Lago, a place described as akin to the Palace of Versailles.

Trump's opulent Mar-a-Lago is an estate that Marie Antoinette would have felt right at home in. It boasts 16th century Flemish tapestries, lavish oriental rugs and a Louis XIV-style ballroom added by Trump that includes $7 million in gold leaf on the walls.

Dean Obeidallah

Dean Obeidallah

Now if Trump were simply spending his weekends at Mar-a-Lago on his own dime, that would be one thing. But he's not. You, I and every other taxpayer are the ones paying for the five trips Trump has taken there since being sworn in as President.

In other words, instead of spending money on those most in need, Trump is wasting taxpayer dollars on a lavish lifestyle he is seeking to maintain.

What's the cost? Politico has estimated that we pay $3 million each weekend that Trump travels to his palatial country club. That means Trump's five getaways have cost taxpayers in the neighborhood of $15 million for expenses associated with Secret Service, Air Force One, etc.

And that doesn't even include the nearly $1 million in local tax dollars spent by the Palm Beach County Sheriff's office to protect Trump when he stays at Mar-a-Lago.

Too many Trumps for the Secret Service?

Too many Trumps for the Secret Service? 02:35

But that's not the end of the costs we bear for the personal choices of the Trump family. In late January, the President's son, Eric, traveled to Uruguay for a Trump Organization business meeting. The cost for private security was close to $100,000 -- and of course his meeting had nothing to do with the governance of the country.

Then there are the additional costs we pay for Melania and Barron Trump to live in New York. While Trump's wife and son certainly have the choice of where they want to live, you and I -- not "billionaire" President Trump -- are the ones paying for this personal choice. Though estimates vary, it appears New York taxpayers are saddled with approximately $146,000 per day in security costs. That's over $4 million a month!

Imagine for a moment how Trump would've responded if the Obama family were costing US taxpayers an additional $4 million per month because Michelle and one daughter wanted to remain in Chicago. Or how Trump would have reacted if Obama had traveled to a luxurious private resort five times in the first two months of his presidency, costing millions in taxpayer dollars. Keep in mind Trump blasted Obama when he sporadically went to play golf.

Ten of Trump's budget's cruelest cuts

Ten of Trump's budget's cruelest cuts

In fact, over the eight years Obama was President, the cost to taxpayers for his eight annual family vacations to Hawaii was a grand total of approximately $85 million. In contrast, Trump has rung up nearly $15 million going to Mar-a-Lago in just his first two months.

Even putting aside Trump's hypocrisy, the most despicable aspect of this is that Trump is spending our taxes on himself, while at the same time advocating policies that slash the budget and hurt so many vulnerable Americans. For example, Trump has callously called for cutting funding for the Meals on Wheels program, which is a critical lifeline for nearly 2.4 million senior citizens and disabled Americans. Five-hundred-thousand of the people who receive Meals on Wheels are veterans, the group Trump keeps telling us he cares so much about.

Trump is updating the "let them eat cake" line to "let them starve."

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The Trump/GOP health care plan would also hurt the most vulnerable Americans, namely the disabled and children. The American Health Care Act would even punish Trump's supporters, because it would negatively impact older Americans and those in rural areas, two populations that favored Trump in the election.

It's becoming increasingly clear that Trump -- like Antoinette -- is a person more concerned with living a lavish lifestyle and less with helping those most in need. The question is, will Trump's base continue to support him once they feel the pain of his policies? Or, like the French did to Antoinette, who continued to live an extravagant lifestyle while they suffered, reject him? Trump's political survival turns on the answers to this.

Lawmakers Want to Boycott Companies That Help Build Trump’s Border Wall - TIME

Lawmakers Want to Boycott Companies That Help Build Trump’s Border Wall

Posted: 23 Mar 2017 11:23 AM PDT

As President Trump pushes forward with his promise to a build wall on the U.S.-Mexico border, local officials in cities and states around the nation are proposing creative solutions they hope will stymie its progress.
In San Francisco, a measure introduced this week by Supervisor Hillary Ronen would consign companies that help design or construct the wall to a kind of blacklist, forbidding those firms from bidding on city projects. The city councils of Bay Area neighbors Oakland and Berkeley have already approved similar measures, while Democratic legislators have introduced their own versions of financial penalty bills in states including New York, California, Arizona, Illinois and Rhode Island.

“Corporations will see it’s bad for business and bad for their image,” says Illinois state Rep. Will Guzzardi, who has proposed that certain state pension funds––with assets he estimates to be around $15 billion––divest from any company that aids in erecting a border wall.
Some of these proposals stand virtually no chance of becoming law. In places like Arizona, where Republicans control both chambers of the legislature, the measures have little hope of even getting a committee vote. In the deep blue Bay Area and New York, such bills have a much better chance of taking efffect.
More than 700 firms around the country have expressed interest in helping to construct the border wall, responding to notices posted by the federal government in late February and early March. Trump’s budget plan asked for $1.5 billion in immediate funding to start planning and building the wall. But several large companies with the resources to tackle a project meant to span a nearly 2,000-mile long border, such as Raytheon and Boeing, are not to be found on the list of interested vendors. Some have cited practical concerns about the scale of the project, while others have acknowledged the PR problems associated with the controversial structure. Still, the list of potential vendors keeps growing, hitting 723 firms as of Thursday.
It’s not clear what effect the local measures will have on the thinking of potential contractors. Multiple firms in the Bay Area that have worked with the city of San Francisco in the past and expressed interested the the border wall project did not respond to requests for comment. When contacted by a local news outlet, one San Francisco contractor expressed dismay about the local blacklist proposals. “Why are taxpayer dollars being spent to hold committee meetings to boycott local companies that employ local workers?” James Flanagan told ABC News. “That’s a little on the radical side and basically, our taxpayer dollars are being used against us.”
Oakland city councilman Abel Guillén, who proposed the measure that will forbid his city from “entering into new or amended contracts” with businesses that have contracted to provide goods or services in connection with building the border wall, says the bill is not discriminating based on political views but is “putting companies on notice.” He believes that building a wall does nothing to solve California’s infrastructure or immigration problems and that local funds should not directly or indirectly support the project.
“I can’t direct how the federal government uses their resources,” Guillén says, “but I can influence how tax dollars are used in Oakland.”
Though such politically motivated financial strategies have been used in the past — by states boycotting companies that have boycotted Israel or pulling money out of investments in South Africa during apartheid — the new proposals could face legal challenges.
Ronen, the San Francisco supervisor, acknowledges that possibility. “With any piece of controversial legislation you always anticipate that there might be legal challenges,” she says. “We have to legislate based on what we think is right.” So far, two of her colleagues have signed on as co-sponsors. The bill will be assigned to a committee in the next month before getting an initial vote.
Just as Trump has suggested that his administration will starve sanctuary cities of federal funds, many of these lawmakers see promise in the persuasive power of money. “Corporations by their very nature put the bottom line first, that’s their job,” says Guzzardi. “And we can pull on the financial levers to change the incentive structure.”