In the middle of the national rail strike last month when demand for cabs was sky-high, a group of Uber drivers decided they, too, would strike for 24 hours. A few hundred of them marched in protest to Uber’s London office in Aldgate Tower, complaining of poverty pay and arbitrary management by algorithm.
It was a typical day for Abdurzak Hadi, an Uber driver, although he has to pinch himself to believe where he has ended up. The 44-year-old father of three arrived in England on his own in 1992 as a teenage refugee, having fled Somalia’s brutal civil war. When he was old enough, he became a minicab driver. Then he signed up with Uber in 2014.