Around midnight on a windswept Saturday in April, three unmarked cars slowed to a halt on the Rue de Rivoli, near the ornate 19th-century facade of the Hôtel de Ville. The doors swung open, and six police officers, part of a special Paris law-enforcement brigade known as the Boers, hopped out in civilian clothing, with pistols strapped to their waists. They formed a silent huddle as their leader, Capt. Thierry Pujol, issued their marching orders for the evening.
“Tonight we’re going to start on the Champs-Élysées. Then we’re going to hit all the usual places,” said Pujol, an intense, wiry man, his eyes darting with the passing traffic. “Be on the lookout,” he said. “They’re everywhere.”
The Boers returned to their cars and headed toward the Place de la Concorde, before hanging a sharp right onto the Champs-Élysées. As the convoy rolled down the boulevard, a Maserati zoomed past Pujol’s car, but he ignored it; he had already zeroed in on his target, a black Renault Clio, turning onto Avenue George V. The telltale signs were there: an iPhone on the dashboard, someone sitting in the back seat. After following for a few moments, Pujol activated the siren.
Strapping on an orange police armband, he approached the car alongside two Boers who had just pulled up. “What are you doing in this vehicle?” he asked the driver, a 29-year-old French-Haitian named Jean Misaire.
“I’m driving for UberPOP,” Misaire said.
“Do you know that’s illegal?” asked one of the Boers, a musclebound officer with a nasal, Toulouse twang named Stéphane. (Most of the Boers asked to be identified by their first name only.) Misaire said he did not. Stéphane asked the passenger to exit and squeezed into the back seat of the car to question Misaire: When did his client hail him? Where did he start the ride? How long had he been driving?
In almost every market that the app-based car service Uber has entered, it has been met with some form of resistance. This has been especially pronounced in Europe over the past year, after the introduction of UberPOP, an inexpensive version of the service, comparable to UberX in the United States. Uber’s flagship product is a high-end black-car service that happens to function over an app. But UberPOP is different. It enables drivers without any kind of professional license to freelance as cabbies. (In France, confusingly, Uber also offers a service called UberX, but there it is the app’s black-car service, equivalent to the service known as UberBLACK in the U.S.)
In Uber’s eyes, it is merely a marketplace for labor, linking people who want to earn money with people willing to pay for a ride. But France, home of the 35-hour workweek and one of the most protective regulatory regimes in Europe, sees it differently. UberPOP, with its nonchalance about regulation and its gig-economy boosterism, is radically un-French. Late last year, Parliament passed a law essentially making the service illegal. Now Uber is contesting the constitutionality of certain aspects of the law, leaving UberPOP in legal limbo. Uber is telling its drivers to keep working in the meantime, which has provoked the Boer crackdown.
As Pujol hovered, Misaire explained to Stéphane that he had started using UberPOP quite recently. He was studying to be a network engineer, and, in order to support himself, playing chauffeur during his down time. “I did everything Uber asked me to,” he told me as Stéphane filled out paperwork. “I went through the trouble of registering as an independent business. I have a driver’s license. I have insurance. And now they want to stop me just because I’m trying to make some extra money.”
Pujol handed Misaire a summons to appear at the police precinct the following week for further questioning.
As we drove on, Pujol told me that UberPOP drivers were supposed to stop after they were caught. But he suspected that Misaire, like many others, would probably continue, backed by Uber’s formidable defense machine. “Uber will pay for his ticket,” Pujol said. “They pay for all these tickets. That’s how they operate.” He clenched his jaw and stared into a row of oncoming headlights. “ ‘Stop me if you can’ is Uber’s strategy.”
Seven years ago, on a cold winter night in Paris, two entrepreneurs named Travis Kalanick and Garrett Camp couldn’t find a cab, no matter how hard they tried. They were in town for LeWeb, a tech conference, and their experience led to a conversation about how awful the cabs were back home in San Francisco. They hit on a ridiculously simple idea: What if you could get a ride anytime, anywhere, just by tapping a button on your phone?
They began testing their app in New York a year later. That summer, they introduced UberCab in San Francisco. Funding started to pour in — and so did the legal challenges. San Francisco authorities issued a cease-and-desist order, objecting to the use of the word “cab” in the company’s name. But Kalanick, who became CEO, fought back and rolled out Uber across the United States, drawing city and state injunctions just about everywhere it went. Despite all this, Uber now operates in 58 countries and is estimated to be worth $50 billion.
When Uber expanded to Europe, Kalanick decided to unveil the service in France first. But the country made for what an H.R. manager might call a “bad cultural fit.” France is known for shielding workers, strategic industries and a variety of professions from “concurrence déloyale,” or unfair competition. Completely altering the landscape in which businesses operate is not viewed as positively in France as it is in Silicon Valley.
A distaste for marketplace chicanery runs deep with the Boers. The squad was founded in 1938 to police the taxi industry and curb the rise of unlicensed drivers. Their name dates back to when White Russians, anticommunist partisans who fled to France during the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, worked as coachmen in Paris. When the police approached, they would shout out their slang word for cop, “bourrrrre!” with a long trilled R, to warn comrades. The moniker stuck.
Until recently, French taxis faced almost no competition. The state strictly regulated the number of medallions available, keeping the fleet small. Though the government issues medallions to drivers at no cost, this scarcity makes them outrageously expensive on the secondary market. In Paris, the going price is about 2o0,000 euros, or $219,000. Today, the city has just 17,702 taxis, only a few thousand more than it had before the Nazis invaded. Yet virtually every time the government tries to expand the fleet, irate taxi drivers protest with a form of strike they call Operation Escargot, in which cabbies inch along thoroughfares, snarling traffic all over the capital.
In 2009, the government authorized a new category of transport, called Véhicules de Tourisme Avec Chauffeur (V.T.C.), to increase supply. These were mostly black-car services that couldn’t be hailed in the street, so they seemed to pose little threat to the taxi monopoly. But when Uber’s black-car service came along in 2011, the market for V.T.C.s exploded. Taxi drivers were never happy about the V.T.C. law, but they grew enraged when Uber arrived. In January 2014, they set up highway blockades and checkpoints, vandalizing Uber cars, smashing windows and slashing tires, frightening passengers in the process.
Last year, the government passed legislation known as the Thévenoud Law, which requires all chauffeurs to have a professional license and prevents V.T.C. services from using geolocation software to show the whereabouts of their cars. It was widely seen to be an attack on UberPOP. The French courts are weighing the validity of the law, but the French state has made its wishes clear.
The Interior Ministry, which has long overseen the taxi industry, authorized the expansion of the Boer squad to 80 from 64 in January after the passage of the Thévenoud Law, enabling the Boers to patrol for UberPOP drivers and other illicit chauffeurs around the clock. The Boers made only 28 busts last year; this year, they have already collared hundreds of drivers.
In the hours after Misaire was pulled over, Stéphane and his colleague Guillaume stopped three more drivers. The Boers are prohibited from consulting the map within Uber’s app to locate cars. Stéphane, like many Boers, has learned to spot UberPOP drivers by other means. One minute he’d be prattling on about a recent meal, then suddenly he’d see the glow of a cellphone mounted on the dashboard and passengers in the back seat of a car. Guillaume would ease their car up next to the cab and roll down the window. “Bonsoir, monsieur!” he’d shout in a deep, singsong voice. “Police. Would you please pull over?”
However effective the Boers may be, their task is much like working on the vice squad: You might halt individual transactions, but you can’t control the demands of the marketplace. Every passenger in a busted UberPOP that night vowed to keep using the service, even after stern lectures from the Boers.
A 25-year-old pharmacist named Florent was particularly adamant on this matter, at least once the Boers were out of earshot. “I believe only in Uber,” he told me as he went hunting for an A.T.M., so he could take a regular cab home. (Uber charges user accounts automatically.) “It’s a super system, it’s changed life for consumers and for the taxis in France. And UberPOP is even cheaper. There’s no way I’m going to stop using it.”
Uber’s French headquarters are in a leafy business park on the northern fringe of Paris. It is a sleek, modern space, with a vast support center for thousands of Uber drivers in an adjacent building. The complex is conveniently located near Paris’s traffic court, which hears cases against illegal taxi drivers.
Thibaud Simphal, general manager of Uber France, met me in the lobby one afternoon in April. At 33, with cropped chestnut hair, a square jaw and unflinching, light blue eyes, Simphal is probably one of the more energetic tech entrepreneurs that France has produced. Before joining Uber in early 2014, he helped found several software companies, including a venture called UbiCabs, a taxi-booking app in London.
In March, French police conducted a morning raid as part of its investigation into Uber’s operations. They scoured the place for about eight hours, Simphal said. “They took computers, documents and even connection kits for drivers,” he said. “They wanted data and information on UberPOP in particular.” France is hardly alone in its disdain for UberPOP. Courts in Spain, Italy, Germany and the Netherlands recently banned the service from operating.
However, not everyone in the French government is part of the backlash. The French economy minister, Emmanuel Macron, a young, liberal-minded technocrat, has cited Uber as an example of how a more modern French economy could work. Recently, Macron sparked an outcry in his ruling Socialist Party by pushing for legislation to ease certain regulations, in an effort to stimulate growth and alleviate youth unemployment, which still hovers around 25 percent. The reforms are relatively modest, but despite that, not uncontroversial. They include a provision that makes it easier to become a notary public, another to deregulate the intercity bus industry and another that would allow shops in tourist areas of Paris to open on Sundays once a month. (They are currently allowed to open five Sundays a year.)
When I met him for the first time last October, Macron had seen Kalanick that same morning and emerged energized from the conversation. “There’s potential here to create thousands of jobs,” Macron told me, referring to Uber. “What should we do? Should we only defend those who have a job? Or try to open up this economy to give a place to other people who also want work?”
At Uber’s headquarters, Simphal guided me into a cavernous hall filled with about 200 people, mostly Arab and African immigrants from Paris’s banlieues. The space had a welcoming, loftlike feel, with large exposed wooden beams and high ceilings. Behind a stretch of white counters, Uber employees walked prospective drivers through the application process. Other drivers inquired about moving up in the organization, by upgrading their car or license. But unlike the people behind the counter, the drivers would never become Uber employees, only “driver-partners,” or basically freelancers.
As we walked through the crowd, Simphal wondered aloud why politicians didn’t talk more about the personal and economic benefits of the jobs Uber created. “Honestly, what you’re seeing is job creation,” he told me, sweeping his eyes around the room. “You’re in a country where you want jobs? Well, here you are. On a Tuesday afternoon, the number of people in this hall is fairly normal for us, and it’s like this every day. And all of them say: ‘You know what? I just want to work.’ ”
Despite the police surveillance, Uber advertises UberPOP on popular radio stations and on its website, beckoning listeners to sign up as drivers with the promise of making up to 200 euros a day. The lawsuits and Boer patrols are mentioned nowhere.
This omission is understandable, in part because Uber assumes much of the legal risk. (Uber also claims that it makes its legal status clear to UberPOP drivers when they join.) When a driver is stopped, Uber’s defense machine takes over. “We tell them, if you get fined, come to us and we’ll support you,” Simphal said. “We want them to feel as confident as we feel about what we’re doing and our interpretation of the law.”
Three days after the Boers pulled him over, Misaire and I met near La Défense, the business district, not far from where he was taking a 10-month training course to become a Cisco-certified network operator. Misaire lived with his girlfriend in a small apartment in an affluent suburb called Boulogne-Billancourt. His dream is to run the network of a big company in a French-speaking part of Canada, where there are more job opportunities and better chances at upward mobility than in France.
On Fridays after his class ended, he got into his car and flipped on his UberPOP app. On a good weekend, he earned about 300 to 400 euros, after paying 20 percent in taxes and Uber’s 24 percent commission, which has since dropped to 20 percent. Friends of his who worked full time as Uber drivers could clear up to 2,400 euros, or $2,600 a month. “That’s the salary of someone with a master’s degree in France,” Misaire said. “It’s much more than the minimum wage, which many people earn in this country.” The government was footing the bill for his training, but with no other income, the money he was making helped pay the rent and allowed him to take his girlfriend out for drinks or dinner.
The police bust rattled Misaire, but he intended to keep driving. Uber had already sent him an email that, in effect, reassured him he had done nothing wrong. “I don’t understand why the state is coming down so hard on Uber,” he said. “Because the state is winning from this all around.”
He sipped an espresso as he crunched some numbers. “Uber is taking a chunk of what I make and pays taxes on that. The state gets another 20 percent off my earnings. I spend the money I earn as an UberPOP driver at a restaurant and pay VAT” — value-added tax, included in the price of many goods in France — “then the restaurant pays taxes on what it makes to the state. So what’s the problem here?”
Later that week, Misaire was scheduled to appear at the police precinct. I managed to hail a taxi to go meet him, and the driver, a young, red-bearded Frenchman named Michel, asked why I was going to the police station. When I told him it was for an UberPOP case, he began to rant. “Those guys are totally illegal!” he shouted. “They’re cheating the system and driving us out of business!”
He said he started driving six years ago after paying 100,000 euros for his taxi medallion with a bank loan, around the time France passed the V.T.C. law. Now, Michel said, he had fewer clients than ever. I pointed out that Uber claims to be making up for a dearth of cabs. “If they want more taxis, the government should hand out more licenses — that’s how to solve the problem,” he said. “Yes, Uber is bringing in new technology. Yes, it’s creating jobs. But at what cost? The cost of massacring others through unfair competition.”
In the police station, an officer greeted Misaire and his Uber-recommended lawyer and ushered them to a private room. During the questioning, Misaire told me later, the police probed him about his background and what he had done in order to become an UberPOP driver. They also asked what he did for a living, how much he made and how often he used the app.
Misaire was warned that he might be fined at least 500 euros, but a decision would come later about whether he would go before a judge. So far, only a handful of the hundreds of UberPOP drivers that the Boers have hauled in have faced a court hearing.
In any case, Uber would be willing to pay the fine.
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