A Detroit pension fund has brought the Uber rider safety lawsuit directly to the company’s boardroom, naming chief executive Dara Khosrowshahi and several directors as the parties responsible for years of inadequate oversight that left passengers exposed to sexual misconduct by drivers.
The complaint, filed on Monday in the US District Court for the Northern District of California, was brought by the Detroit Police and Fire Retirement System, a minority Uber shareholder. It alleges that Uber ‘knowingly cut compliance corners in the name of growing the company.’
The Uber Rider Safety Lawsuit and Its Scope
The action is a derivative suit, meaning any financial recovery would flow to Uber’s shareholders rather than to the plaintiffs directly, according to CBC News. The complaint seeks to hold Uber’s directors personally responsible for alleged breaches of fiduciary duty.
The scale of the underlying litigation is considerable. As of 1 June, Uber faced 3,571 active lawsuits in the same San Francisco federal court from passengers alleging sexual misconduct by drivers, according to CBC News.
The complaint characterises Uber as a ‘serial compliance offender,’ and alleges that the culture of cost-cutting harmed not only victims of sexual assault and harassment but also customers with disabilities and subscribers to Uber’s Uber One service, according to TechCrunch.
The lawsuit also alleges that oversight failures contributed to separate federal government litigation filed last year, in which the US government accused Uber of routinely refusing to serve disabled passengers, including those with service animals or stowable wheelchairs, and of engaging in deceptive billing and cancellation practices, the Journal Record reported.
‘Uber faces significant liability in defending these suits and responding to inquiries, in addition to the hundreds of millions of dollars at stake,’ the complaint reads. ‘Uber has also seen its reputation irredeemably damaged by the negative ongoing media coverage of the wrongdoing.’
Cameras, Background Checks, and the Contractor Defence
The complaint lays out specific safety measures that Uber considered but delayed or rejected. The company studied adding in-car cameras to drivers’ vehicles around 2017 and ‘found the plan to be feasible, cost-effective, likely to reduce the incidence of misconduct, and help drivers,’ the lawsuit says.
Uber declined to proceed, the complaint states, ‘because it would mean exercising greater control over drivers’ activities, weakening Uber’s argument that its drivers are independent contractors.’ The company also considered more rigorous background checks and programmes designed to better match women riders with women drivers, according to the complaint, but either delayed or rejected those proposals too.
The suit alleges that when Khosrowshahi succeeded Travis Kalanick as Uber’s chief executive in 2017, he ‘made cosmetic changes to Uber’s compliance practices and workplace culture, and became less brazen in pushing regulatory limits.’ It adds: ‘But Uber’s culture of prioritizing cost-cutting measures meant that it continued to skimp on compliance or even seek to tamp down on complaints.’
An Uber spokesperson rejected the claims, saying the lawsuit ‘ignores important facts and is based on misleading, false narratives from other meritless lawsuits that we have already addressed publicly and in the courtroom.’ The company has said safety incidents are ‘exceptionally rare’ on its platform and that it is ‘constantly working to make every trip safer.’
Uber’s own newsroom states that reports of serious sexual assault on the platform have fallen by 44%, and that Uber was the first company to publish this category of safety data publicly, according to Uber’s safety record page.
The shareholder pressure predates Monday’s filing. The New York State Common Retirement Fund had previously filed a shareholder proposal requesting that Uber’s board prepare and publicly disclose a transparency report on its oversight of sexual harassment, assault, and violence prevention. That proposal cited Uber’s own 2024 annual report disclosure that ‘There have been numerous incidents and allegations worldwide of Drivers, or individuals impersonating Drivers, sexually assaulting, abusing, kidnapping and/or fatally injuring consumers,’ according to a filing published by the New York State Office of the State Comptroller.
The Detroit fund’s derivative suit escalates that pressure into direct personal liability claims against the board. Whether the directors can be held individually responsible will turn on what courts make of the compliance decisions documented in the complaint, and the outcome of that question may shape how Uber, and other gig-economy platforms, structure their safety governance going forward.