This is the english translation of an text published in Junge Welt newspaper. A more complete german version with full documentation has been published on the website.
On 3 September 2025, the Regional Court of Cologne prohibited SafeDriver Ennoo CGN GmbH, which acts as a general contractor for Uber journeys in and around Cologne, from arranging journeys via the ‘Uber X’ app. The competent chamber justified its ruling (Cologne Regional Court, 84 O 15/25) on the grounds that it contravened the Passenger Transport Act for the bookings not to go through the control centre but to be sent directly to the drivers. If the company continues to use the app nonetheless, it faces fines of up to 250,000 euros, or alternatively up to six months’ imprisonment, for each booking.
Legal action was brought by a member company of the Cologne taxi cooperative Taxi Ruf. However, the taxi drivers were soon disillusioned: the ruling will not be enforced. On the one hand, the court has demanded a security deposit of 100,000 euros from the plaintiff taxi group for enforcement, should Uber prevail in the next instances. On the other hand, Uber has modified its app and now claims that the lawsuit is therefore moot. In the face of powerful multinational corporations, the judiciary proves, as so often, to be toothless: It is as if the ruling had never existed. [1]
Class perspective
Such legal skirmishes between big business and small business owners are usually of little interest to workers. Their main concerns are working conditions and pay, as the income from working as a taxi or hire car driver on a 40-hour week must be enough to support themselves and their families. This has been virtually impossible for many years, particularly in metropolitan areas such as Berlin, where the cost of living is skyrocketing along with rents. Yet the solutions to both the income and the Uber problem are obvious: the key lies in labour law.
Monitoring and enforcing the statutory minimum wage among the company’s partners is technically entirely feasible. The entire Uber system could thus be corrected at the grassroots level, where the profit is generated by the drivers. This would have a knock-on effect on the entire industry and create fairer competitive conditions, under which even small taxi companies could thrive. The regulatory authorities would need do no more than identify breaches of labour law by automatically cross-checking working hours and wages paid – both of which are data that can be accessed online in real time. Bans on operating for companies caught out would put a definitive end to wage dumping.
This proposal actually made it into a draft bill by the governing coalition in the Berlin House of Representatives (Abgeordnetenhaus) in 2023, but was then dismissed by all the authorities consulted as irrelevant or falling outside their remit. It seems there is no desire to enforce drivers’ rights, and consequently court rulings have no consequences. In any case, the Uber system is designed in such a way that it provides effective protection for the corporation and its agents against legal sanctions.
Old hands are aware of the fact, often glossed over by the capitalists, that Uber has simply copied a business model from the taxi industry. The manipulation of turnover and wages that was common in the Berlin taxi industry prior to the introduction of the fiscal taximeter. Manipulation has been perfected, automated and scaled up to an industrial level within the Uber system. This machinery of exploitation has been conceived and is protected by a whole phalanx of top-tier lawyers.
The introduction of the statutory minimum wage on 16 August 2014 did little to change the appalling working conditions in the taxi industry. That is why, until 2017, it seemed as though Uber could not possibly capture market share through further wage and thus price dumping, as if Uber would have to go bust first. Drivers could not even imagine pay that was even worse than in the taxi industry. They thought that at some point the dumping offers would have to stop, because even the richest and most powerful global corporation could not do without profits forever. [2]
As long as you can earn more in any other job, no one will get behind the wheel of a taxi or an Uber, the drivers told themselves. Only the old hands, who love their work unconditionally, would continue to work as drivers under the given conditions. Without decent wages, neither Uber nor taxi companies would find new, young drivers. And without drivers, there would ultimately be no Uber service either. Yet it all turned out to be a mistake.
Complete deregulation
To turn the tide and generate a profit with its accomplices, Uber – like many newer monopolists – needed time, a fair number of corruptible politicians and a few unfortunate coincidences from which to capitalise. A prerequisite for this was, and always remains, tacit support from the state, namely the inaction of the relevant regulatory authorities.
The war in and around Syria, which has been ongoing since 2011 – a catastrophe of world-historical proportions – forced millions of Syrians to flee. Even today, we are reminded, at least by racists, of how a ‘wave of refugees’ reached Europe, and the Federal Republic of Germany in particular, in 2015. Many of the new arrivals became fellow citizens, whose children are now pursuing their own careers in Germany. However, those who would have needed more help, who failed to overcome the integration hurdles of German society, or who were simply unlucky enough not to be needed by the labour market, were easy prey for Uber.
People who, due to a language barrier, know little to nothing about their rights or the support available to them, and whose desperation – often caused by trauma – makes them vulnerable to the promise of quick money, fitted perfectly into the company’s disruptive business model. Disruption here is not to be understood as creative destruction, but as the establishment of a new monopoly under the motto ‘legal, illegal, who cares’.
Migrants often had no alternatives to working for ride-hailing services. This made it easy for Uber to recruit them as the second generation of its drivers.
No sooner had the first reception facilities been set up and the first work permits issued than Uber began hiring. Initially, however, this often failed due to the basic local knowledge test, which could only be passed with minimal knowledge of German. Although Uber invested heavily, its hire cars did not initially outnumber taxis, so nothing changed for the drivers. The law still stood in the way of the aspiring monopolist. It sent its lobbyists into the fray – with success. Driven primarily by the state of Bavaria“ [3], the Bundesrat approved the abolition of the local knowledge test for hire car and ambulance drivers on 7 July 2017. [4] From then on, any reasonably healthy person with a driving licence and a clean criminal record could drive others around in hire cars on behalf of Uber. The unionised taxi drivers demanded that the profession be upgraded to a recognised apprenticeship with Chamber of Industry and Commerce (IHK) accreditation. But the CSU pushed through a complete de-skilling of the profession. Consequently, Uber’s expansion began: the company’s hire cars flooded the streets. Taxi companies’ takings fell dramatically.
The taxi industry, which had already been facing serious economic problems for years, was dealt the final blow by the lockdowns imposed to contain the coronavirus pandemic. Revenues temporarily fell below five euros an hour. This did not even cover the running costs of the vehicles. Row upon row of employed drivers lost their jobs, even though they had put up with incomes far below the minimum wage for years. The sudden collapse of so many taxi companies left a gap that Uber was only too happy to fill. Time was on the company’s side: it was able to capitalise on the global upheavals in the taxi industry without having to take direct responsibility for cars or drivers.
On 1 August 2021, sixty years after its introduction, an amendment to the Passenger Transport Act came into force, which, among other things, abolished the local knowledge test for taxi drivers as well.⁵ [5] Today, there is formally no longer any difference between Uber drivers and taxi drivers. The only remaining distinction is between taxi drivers who obtained their taxi licence before the new regulations came into force and those who obtained it afterwards. This offers no advantage to the old hands. On the contrary: some unqualified new colleagues are damaging their reputation. The law now only requires a short professional competence test.
However, introduction of this competence test was delayed by the Federal Ministry of Transport and the federal states and opposed by rural taxi companies. Finally, in October 2025, the Federal Association of Taxis and Hire Cars informed its members of a decision by the federal and state governments: “The short professional competence test is to be abolished without replacement. Formally, this is to be implemented through an amendment to the Driving Licence Regulation.” [6] Driving a taxi was thus definitively downgraded to an unskilled labourer’s job requiring no qualifications.
Crimes without punishment
It’s common knowledge, and from a business perspective it’s obvious: hire car companies operating on behalf of Uber, Bolt and other platforms are generally unable to pay the statutory minimum wage.
Uber’s accomplices are able to circumvent this regulation thanks to the company’s specific corporate structures. Many of them are short-lived limited liability companies (GmbHs) that practise ‘creative’ accounting and are wound up before the first tax audit. They issue drivers with very low, inaccurate payslips, which can be used to apply for social benefits as Citizens’ Income or Basic Income Support (ALG II Bürgergeld or Grundsicherung). Part of the pay is then paid under the table, so that drivers, who sometimes work more than 60 hours a week, can earn a monthly net income of up to 3,000 euros with the corresponding overtime. [7]
If a short-term limited liability company’s social security fraud is uncovered, it is usually only the drivers who face prosecution. Using Uber’s data, they can be accused of long working hours that do not match the company’s fabricated details on the payslip at all. Job centres then sometimes attempt to enforce repayments, even though it cannot be proven how long and in which vehicle drivers actually worked. The burden of proof is reversed, making it difficult for drivers to defend themselves against the allegations. Uber itself is not liable for the misconduct of its partner companies and politely distances itself whenever another breach of the law in its value chain comes to light.“ [8]
In the Uber system, social security benefits are misused as wage subsidies. This is the only way profit is generated. If necessary, the employee is pilloried and made a scapegoat; the next person up the chain, their immediate boss, is off the hook because the business is usually run by a front man who cannot be prosecuted. Here too, Uber and Co. enjoy legal advantages. Unlike taxi companies, which must declare their wages in full due to strict controls, car-hire firms can provide whatever information they like without fear of immediate consequences.
The possibility of being punished for their own employment hangs constantly over workers like the sword of Damocles. They are entirely dependent on their bosses, regularly find themselves in a career dead end, and can hardly get involved in social or trade union activities. Their bargaining position is correspondingly weak when the ill-gotten profits, which are at the expense of the state and society, are divided among the business partners. Uber receives 20 to 30 per cent of turnover as commission, its general contractor five per cent. The rest is divided between the Uber partner companies and their drivers. If you multiply the number of Uber drivers by the amount of their social security contributions, you get a good idea of the financial scale of the funds flowing from Germany to Uber’s headquarters in San Francisco. In Berlin alone, this amounts to around 3.5 million euros per month.
Setting the record straight
The example of Hamburg shows that, despite legislative changes to the detriment of the taxi industry, regulation is both sensible and possible. There, the number of Uber vehicles is negligible due to the enforcement of existing laws. To stay in business, Uber arranges taxis in Hamburg that operate at the legally set fare. If this level of control were applied across the whole of Germany, social fraud would be a thing of the past.
Yet it is precisely this fraud that forms the basis of the company’s business model, which is why it is levelling serious – that is to say, high-profile – accusations at the Hamburg Senate.
The Hanseatic city is using “false arguments” to justify a “blocking stance”, under which Hamburgers in particular are suffering, “as they are being denied affordable mobility options beyond taxis”, complained Christoph Weigler, head of Uber Germany, recently. Pitting citizens against the state government by appealing to their immediate economic interests, when the government is preventing the plundering of public coffers by big capitalists in the interests of the urban community, is rather perfidious PR. The Senate, however, remained undeterred and countered soberly by pointing out that the price of a hire car journey would, simply because of the higher VAT rate, naturally have to be “higher than that of a taxi journey” even with otherwise “similar costs”. [9]
In Berlin, on the other hand, taxi drivers are finding that virtually all forces in business, politics and administration are uninterested in simple improvements. The administrators of class society are once again demonstrating their indifference to the needs and voices of working people. Actions and decisions are usually taken in the interests of those who benefit from exploitation and rock-bottom wages. When taxi companies, on top of that, join forces with the Uber lobby and denigrate, for example, the public transport taxi as an expensive alternative, it becomes clear that nothing will change until wage earners organise resistance.
Only when the regulatory authorities are forced to fulfil their duty to consistently apply the Minimum Wage and Working Hours Act and make the licensing of taxis and hire cars conditional on compliance with the rules can the job of a taxi driver once again become ‘good work’ as defined by the DGB. If, moreover, we succeed in persuading employers’ liability insurance associations and health insurance funds to work towards this goal together with the regulatory authorities, success will be just a matter of months.
Ultimately, this is not just about the drivers, but also about the transport of the future and social participation in it. Around a year ago, the Verdi trade union and the Association of German Transport Companies developed joint objectives for public transport up to 2035, which also incorporated demands from taxi associations. It is stated there that the reliability of taxis, buses and trains is largely determined by the employees, that is, their expertise and their working conditions. ¹⁰ [10] It is clear that the de-skilling driven by Uber and its accomplices for the sake of ruthless exploitation cannot produce a reliable local transport system.
As taxis fill both temporal and regional gaps in scheduled services and, in some rural areas, ensure mobility in the first place, they are an indispensable part of public transport. However, closer integration, let alone incorporation into local mobility plans – which taxi associations see as an opportunity for the future of their trade – is unthinkable with Uber. One would be rather foolish to make oneself dependent on a corporation that is out to plunder one’s own coffers.
Anyone wishing to navigate Germany without their own vehicle in future would therefore be well advised to listen more closely to the drivers’ demands and support them in standing up to Uber and the taxi bosses.
Klaus Meier worked as a taxi driver in Berlin from 1985 to 2017. Since 2019, he has been working as a taxi social advocate, addressing the concerns and difficulties of his colleagues.
