Uber Victory Upheld in Asian Driver’s Customer-Rating Bias Suit

A former Uber Technologies Inc. driver’s proposed class lawsuit didn’t sufficiently allege that the ride-sharing giant’s reliance on customer ratings to deactivate drivers discriminates against racial minorities, the Ninth Circuit ruled Monday.

The driver’s allegations didn’t raise an inference of a cause-effect link between Uber’s use of its star rating system and a disparate impact based on race, the court said. He pointed in part to his alleged personal experience of passengers canceling requested rides after being able to view his picture, but the rating system was allegedly only available after a ride and there was no explanation regarding how such customers could have contributed to a driver’s low rating, the court said.

Thomas Liu’s attempted reliance on social science literature documenting pervasive effects of racial bias in the use of customer ratings generally was also flawed, the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit said.

“This literature raises an important concern” and publicly available studies and reports could potentially support a disparate impact claim, but the materials cited by Liu “lack sufficient data concerning relevant actual conditions to provide a non-speculative basis for plausibly inferring” a significant racial disparity with respect to Uber, the court said in an unpublished decision.

Liu’s disparate impact claim further missed the mark by relying on a survey conducted by his legal team, the Ninth Circuit said.

The survey used the “incorrect denominator” and didn’t compare the number of drivers of specific races who were terminated due to low start ratings against the total number of drivers of that race in the entire survey pool, it said.

The survey therefore failed to reveal whether Uber terminates White drivers based on star ratings at different rates than minority drivers, the opinion said.

A follow-up survey Liu’s lawyers sent to drivers who had responded “no” in the first survey on whether they were deactivated based on the star ratings was similarly flawed, the court said.

The follow-up showed that more than half of the drivers who had answered “no” hadn’t been terminated at all, indicating they were confused by the initial survey. And the use of the term “Latinx” apparently confused some respondents who identify as Hispanic or Latino, the court said.

Dismissal of Liu’s disparate treatment bias claim was likewise proper, the Ninth Circuit said. That Uber allegedly was aware that using the star ratings to decide which drivers to deactivate adversely impacted minority drivers wasn’t enough to plead intentional discrimination, it said.

Judges Daniel P. Collins, Danielle J. Forrest, and Jennifer Sung joined the unsigned opinion.

Lichten & Liss-Riordan PC represented Liu and the proposed class. Littler Mendelson PC represented Uber. EEOC attorneys in Washington represented the commission.

The case is Liu v. Uber Techs., Inc., 9th Cir., No. 22-16507, unpublished 6/24/24.