Trade Secrets, FOIA, Research & Platforms

All of the above meet in today's hot story from Bloomberg on how Uber is claiming that the information that cities hold on names of Uber drivers is proprietary confidential information. It all started with an economist Peter Norlander, from Loyola Chicago business school who requested the names of Uber and Lyft license holders from the City of Chicago. The question he wants to ask in his study is a question that is very relevant to the hottest employment and labor law policy debates of the moment: how much overlap exists between the drivers of these two competitors. The reason this question is relevant to the policy debate on employee classification -- see my previous post on this here - is that an argument made in favor of independent contractor status [rather employee classification] of workers on these apps is that they have the freedom to work for multiple platforms simultaneously. Under default employment laws, this parallel work would be in tension with the common law employee duty of loyalty which assumes exclusive work with one company and not competitors [not to be confused with the debates on noncompetes which are about post-employment competition, not during employment].

So the the city told Norlander he can't have the data because making the names public would make it easier for competitors to poach drivers. Seriously? Labor market competition is something we want to protect actually.

While FOIA does have exemptions for trade secrets, names of workers - whether they are employees or ICs should not be a trade secret. There may be privacy concerns from the workers' perspective though I don't think this applies here, but open to think about that. But Uber shouldn't get to claim secrecy because it wants to prevent poaching. I am quoted on this toward the end of the article.