A Class Action Over Uber's Pay Algorithm Lands in Amsterdam, and Portuguese Drivers Are Eligible to Join It Even Though the Wire Reports Leave Portugal Off the List

A Dutch foundation filed a collective action against Uber in the district court of Amsterdam on Wednesday, arguing that the algorithm that sets what a driver is paid for each trip is an automated decision the law does not allow the company to make. The European Trade Union Confederation calls it the first collective action of its kind. Wire reports of the filing list seven countries whose drivers are represented. Portugal is not one of them.

The claim's own eligibility rules say something different. On the campaign site run by the claimant, the answer to "who can join" names thirty-two countries, and Portugal is on the list.

What is being claimed

The claimant is Stichting WIE International, the Dutch arm of Worker Info Exchange, a non-profit set up to help gig workers get at the data collected about them. Its announcement is direct: "We have initiated a new collective action against Uber regarding its abusive dynamic pay system, with the aim of ending the algorithm-imposed wage cuts and obtaining compensation for the losses drivers have suffered."

The legal core is Article 22 of the General Data Protection Regulation, which gives people the right not to be subject to decisions based solely on automated processing. WIE argues that Uber's system decides, without human involvement, what a trip pays, which driver it is offered to, and which driver gets it. Alongside that it alleges that Uber processes drivers' personal data unlawfully to train machine learning, that it has breached its transparency duties by not explaining how the algorithm works, and that it unlawfully transferred driver data to the United States between August 2021 and September 2023.

The account of what changed is precise about dates. From 2020, WIE says, Uber used the pandemic to introduce "upfront pricing" in the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and other European markets, replacing payment based on time and distance with a price the company fixes before each trip. In 2022 it went further in the UK by making its commission variable too, on the argument that this would better match driver supply to rider demand.

The numbers behind it

The evidence base is a study run with the University of Oxford on data from 258 drivers covering 1.5 million trips between 2016 and 2024. Since dynamic pay came in, it found:

• Average gross hourly pay, before the driver's own costs, fell from about 22.20 pounds to about 19.06 pounds.
• Uber's commission rose from roughly 25 percent to around 29 percent on average, and on some trips it keeps 50 percent or more.
• Pay became markedly less predictable, and drivers reported more unpaid waiting time.
• Inequality between drivers widened. A small minority did better; most, especially those who had been driving longest or most regularly, did sharply worse.

Separately, economic experts at the consultancy Oxera, engaged by WIE, estimate that 48 percent of drivers in the Netherlands saw their hourly pay fall by an average of 7,508 euros a year, and that 66.7 percent of drivers in the United Kingdom lost an average of 5,337 pounds a year, which is roughly 6,217 euros at current rates.

Uber rejects the allegations. A spokesperson told AFP that the company "categorically" denies them, without having seen the filing, and said drivers "have complete freedom to accept or refuse trip offers, and we give them all the useful information so they can choose, such as the exact destination and the earnings generated by the proposed trip." The company added that the "great majority of the total value of trips continues to go where it should go: into drivers' pockets, and the percentage Uber retains from trips has remained stable."

The fine that came first

The action lands two weeks after the Dutch regulator hit the same company on the same principle. On 21 August 2026 the Autoriteit Persoonsgegevens, the Netherlands data protection authority, imposed a fine of 824,990,000 euros on Uber for making fully automated decisions about drivers. Between 2018 and 2022, when its software flagged a suspicion of fraud or a customer rating it judged too low, driver accounts were deactivated automatically, temporarily in the first case and permanently for persistently low ratings. No human looked at it.

Monique Verdier, the authority's deputy chair, put it this way: "Uber has committed serious infringements. Drivers were deactivated without pardon. From one moment to the next, they no longer had any income through Uber. That is forbidden. A computer should not make decisions on its own that have major consequences for you."

The investigation began with 171 French drivers who went to the Ligue des droits de l'Homme (Human Rights League), which complained to the French regulator CNIL. Because Uber's European headquarters are in the Netherlands, the Dutch authority took the case under the GDPR's one-stop-shop mechanism. Uber has stopped the practice and has appealed the fine. It is the fourth fine the Dutch authority has imposed on the company, after 600,000 euros in 2018, 10 million in 2023 and 290 million in 2024.

Two things follow. The fine is a regulator penalising a company; it does not put money in any driver's hand. And it concerns automated deactivation, not automated pay. The new claim is about pay, and it is the drivers, not the state, asking to be paid.

Where Portugal sits

The Lusa report of the filing, carried by Observador, says the action represents "several thousand drivers in the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, France, Poland and Romania." That is the set of countries where WIE has organised drivers, and it is accurate as a description of who is already signed up.

It is not the set of countries whose drivers can join. The claim's frequently asked questions state that you are eligible "if you have driven for Uber at any time after November 2020" in the Netherlands, the UK, or a list that runs through Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway.

On the terms, WIE says joining costs nothing. The case is funded externally by Innsworth Capital. If the claim fails, participants pay nothing. If it succeeds, the funder is reimbursed its costs and takes a success fee of at most 25 percent of a participant's compensation, or 22.5 percent for members of a union or comparable worker organisation, and WIE says it will first try to have Uber pay those costs. Nobody is promised anything: as the FAQ puts it, "no one can promise that."

Why the commission figure matters here in particular

Portugal has just legislated on exactly the number this case is about. The rewritten ride-hailing law reached the official gazette on 25 August with a ceiling of 25 percent on what the platform may keep from the fare. It also lets taxis join the platforms and requires drivers to speak Portuguese, and it is already headed for the Constitutional Court at the taxi associations' request.

Put the two side by side. Portugal's parliament has fixed the platform's share at a maximum of 25 percent. The Oxford and WIE research says Uber's average commission, in the markets it studied, has already risen past that to about 29 percent, with individual trips at 50 percent or more. The Portuguese cap is a statutory answer to the same phenomenon this Amsterdam claim is litigating, arrived at independently and roughly at the same time.

The scale locally is not trivial. Portugal's ride-hailing sector turned over 808 million euros in 2025 with a driver pool above 38,000 across Uber and Bolt. A large share of those drivers are immigrants, which is precisely the group least likely to hear that a Dutch foundation has opened a claim they are entitled to join.

What this means for expats

• If you drive for Uber in Portugal: read the claim's own eligibility page rather than the news coverage, because they say different things. The requirement is that you drove for Uber at some point after November 2020 in one of the listed countries, and Portugal is listed. Joining is free, and the FAQ says it would be unlawful for Uber to punish or deactivate you for taking part, though it also notes that if you ask WIE to make data access requests on your behalf, your identity will have to be disclosed to Uber.
• If you drive here and want your own data: you do not need a class action for that. Article 15 of the GDPR gives you the right to ask Uber for the personal data it holds on you, and Article 22 is the provision both the Dutch fine and this claim are built on. Portugal's own data regulator, the CNPD, takes complaints from anyone in the country, and has been notably willing to say when it thinks a text is wrong.
• If you take Ubers rather than drive them: nothing here changes what you pay or how you book. Upfront pricing is what you already see when you open the app.
• If you are watching the platform economy: the shape of this matters more than the sums. A regulator has already found that letting software decide a driver's income without human review breaches the GDPR, and been upheld to the tune of 825 million euros, pending appeal. The new claim asks a civil court to say the same thing about pay and to make the company compensate the people it affected. Whether an algorithm setting a price counts as a decision "based solely on automated processing" is the question the Amsterdam court will have to answer, and the answer will not stay in the Netherlands.

Uber separately announced on Wednesday that it is cutting about 10 percent of its global workforce, roughly 3,300 people, reducing by 20 percent the headcount seven or more levels below the chief executive and nearly halving the number of manager micro-teams. That is a company restructuring, not a response to this filing, and the two are related only in that they landed on the same day.