On November 3, 2016, Emmanuel Macron, who had recently launched a presidential bid, mentioned what he felt was Uber’s positive role in providing work opportunities to low-income or unemployed youth (our translation and emphasis):
“You go to Stains [a low-income town outside of Paris] to tell young people who are Uber drivers that it is better to loiter or deal […]. Our collective failure is that the neighbourhoods where Uber hires these young people are neighbourhoods where we haven’t managed to offer them anything else. Yes, they sometimes work 60 to 70 hours to get the minimum wage, but they return with dignity, they find a job, they put on a suit and a tie.”
A year later, the perspective of many Uber drivers in Paris was quite different, as witnessed by a handout distributed by an activist group in November 2017:
