Global unions and civil society called for UN WOMEN to cancel its partnership with UBER. During the annual UNCSW, the UN’s leading agency for women’s rights, UN WOMEN, announced a strategic partnership with UBER to “create 1,000,000 jobs for women as drivers on the Uber platform by 2020.”

We fail to see how a million precarious, informal jobs could contribute to women’s economic empowerment. Indeed, it represents exactly what the women’s movement has been fighting for decades. Uber economics is the most aggressive informalisation of an industry which was already deregulated three decades ago.

No company should make commitments on gender equality and women’s empowerment while simultaneously undermining those goals with their business and employment practices. Women deserve better than a shallow public relations exercise and part-time jobs in the shadow economy!