Unfortunately, we’ve been down this road before. A company armed with seemingly limitless investor funding has decided to take on New York City’s Taxi & Limousine Commission (TLC), and is dangling money and big promises in front of struggling workers to aid in their efforts. The fact that Empower’s CEO, Joshua Sear, openly admitted to City Council in March that “over 10,000 drivers using our software and services provided over a half a million rides to 150,000 riders… [including] over 100,000 rides in New York City,” is a strong indication the company is willing to shamelessly flout the rules and regulations that currently exist to protect the riding public and the drivers themselves from harm. He was literally bragging about 100,000 illegal trips, during just the week prior to his testimony.
Empower has lawyered up and is digging in, and like some large-scale hustling enterprise, the company sees the millions of dollars in fines they have already received as a cost of doing business. Perhaps their perspective is, if they can break the regulatory structure of the most regulated city in the nation, they can make it anywhere. Meanwhile, the drivers on their platform are taking a huge risk.
The drivers, many of whom are struggling to pay the bills in an extremely unstable economy, don’t seem to be fully aware of the dangers they potentially face. I urge every driver who reads this to consider the fact that if they perform rides for an unlicensed base like Empower, their workers’ compensation from The Black Car Fund will not be in effect in the event of accident. If that’s not enough to make you reconsider accepting jobs from Empower, understand that your auto insurance company can also deny claims from a driver that performs commercial work in NYC from a company that is operating illegally.
To be clear, the upside of accepting trips through Empower likely means a few extra bucks per trip – which can certainly add up over the course of a year – but the downside has the potential to be life-changing… and not in a good way.
Of course, the passengers that book rides through Empower are also exposed, and unlike Empower – which seems willing to risk paying out massive lawsuits – TLC-regulated drivers do not have unlimited resources to deal with a catastrophic situation that could cripple their finances. History has proven that consumers are often willing to take a risk to save a few bucks, but the drivers are the ones putting their heads on the chopping block, if they accept illegal rides.
To their credit, the Mamdani administration is trying to do the right thing. The TLC filed a lawsuit against Empower (owned by Yazam, Inc.) in an attempt to chase them out of town. Unfortunately, our judicial system grinds slowly forward in cases like this, and in the meantime lots of people could potentially be hurt along the way.
Industry advocates are also fighting back, attempting to have Empower removed from the various app stores under the reasonable position that the company is operating illegally – but so far, to no avail.
According to an article in The City Reporter, the TLC first hit Empower with a cease-and-desist letter back in May 2022. A more recent letter to the company urged them to immediately deactivate their app, and contact TLC to “discuss the application process for a For-Hire Vehicle Base license.”
“We are standing up for licensed drivers who follow the law, for passengers who deserve safe and accountable service, and for a regulatory system built on fairness,” said TLC spokesperson, Jason Kersten. “NYC’s streets are not a testing ground for companies that refuse oversight.”
City lawyers have pointed out that Empower is pretending to be a neutral software subscription, but in practice it does everything an app-hail company does – matching riders and cars, setting the economic terms of trips and processing payments – while skipping the TLC license cost and the congestion-related fees.
Empower’s chief of staff, Roshn Marwah, claims the company wants to work with the Mamdani Administration to iron out the issues, but steamrolling your way into the city, being told what they’re doing is illegal, yet continuing to flout laws, is not a good indication of their real intent, which – it seems to me – is to blow up the NYC regulatory system for ground transportation. Meanwhile, the company continues to deny that it operates as a for-hire vehicle base that dispatches rides, claiming it’s a “marketplace,” rather than a dispatcher of rides. We’ve heard that story before, and we’ve seen how it plays out. It’s the drivers who suffer in this battle.
My advice to drivers: Don’t get caught in the crossfire as this war rages on.
