Sign up for the Guardian’s First Thing newsletter In his final hours of office, Donald Trump pardoned a former Google engineer who was convicted of stealing trade secrets from the company before taking up a new role with competitor Uber. Anthony Levandowski, 40, had been sentenced in August 2020 to 18 months in prison after…
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Soon after Joe Biden is inaugurated as the next US president, he is expected to take several strong steps on the labor front aimed at reversing or remedying the policies of Donald Trump – who promised workers a lot and delivered little. But Biden’s number one priority will be to tackle the issues left in…
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By 2021, according to various Silicon Valley luminaries, bandwagoning politicians and leading cab firms in recent years, self-driving cars would have long been crossing the US, started filing along Britain’s motorways and be all set to provide robotaxis in London. 1 January has not, however, brought a driverless revolution. Indeed in the last weeks of…
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Uber has settled a high-profile case with one of its food delivery riders, avoiding a landmark ruling on whether gig economy workers are employees or contractors, experts say. The Australian arm of the multinational company settled with former Uber Eats delivery rider Amita Gupta before the full bench of the federal court could rule on…
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A chancellor who will borrow £394bn this financial year has to come up with a few new ways to raise money, and here’s a Treasury idea that sounds modest but interesting: put VAT on Uber taxi trips and stays in Airbnb properties. It would also seem to pass a basic test of fairness. Most Uber…
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Rishi Sunak is considering toughening up VAT rules for the Uber drivers and Airbnb landlords central to the rapidly expanding sharing economy as the Treasury considers ways of repairing the damage to the public finances caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. The chancellor has taken the first steps towards increasing the government’s VAT revenues with the…
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