Uber Technologies Inc., headquartered in San Francisco, California, has fired a senior executive, who acquired the medical records of a woman who was raped by an Uber driver in India. This tragedy is the most recent example of vile misdemeanor revealed at the company.
Uber is currently operating in five hundred and seventy cities around the globe. Eric Alexander, Uber’s president of business in Asia, was discharged on Tuesday after reporters began to question his actions.
In the last three months, Uber has tackled an array of heated accusations about immortality in its offices around the world, involving allegations of discrimination and sexual harassment.
Next week, Eric H. Holder Jr., the former attorney general who is now a partner at the law firm Covington and Burling, will release the results of an investigation that inspected the company’s culture.
On Tuesday, Uber announced that the company had let go twenty employees in the recent months over issues in another investigation, while numerous other workers stay on notice or enroll in training programs to confront any issues that have come to the surface since the investigation.
As investigators questioned Uber employees about issues at the company, top executives did not reveal that they knew Eric Alexander had acquired the records of the Indian woman.
According to Travis Kalanick, Uber’s chief executive, and Emil Michael, the company’s senior vice president of business, they both read and debated the woman’s private medical records with Alexander.
The actions that steered toward Alexander termination began in late 2014, when a woman publically alleged that her Uber driver raped her after dozing off on in the car ride to her home in the Delhi area.
Opponents quickly criticized Uber over its screening practices when it was discovered that the driver had previously been incarcerated for months on suspicion of rape in another instance.
To counteract the negativity, Uber decided to install safety features in all its vehicles, including a panic button for passengers who feel like their safety or security is in jeopardy.
Ultimately, the lawsuit filed by the woman, rape victim against Uber was settled. The Uber driver was found guilty of rape.
After the media got ahold of the lawsuit, Uber was forbidden in Delhi. It jeopardized Uber’s chance of controlling the market in India. With 1.3 billion people calling India home, the company’s business would have skyrocketed.
Alexander was convinced that the rape charges were part of Ola’s big scheme to ruin Uber’s reputation and business; Ola is the leading ride-hailing company in India and one of Uber’s biggest Asian rivals.
Alexander held onto the woman’s records because he believed the medical report differed from her account in court. Although Alexander was not one of the twenty employees that Uber fired on Tuesday, Uber still refuses to comment on his termination.
As of now, Uber employees and the public are impatiently awaiting the results of Mr. Holder’s investigation.
