American mayor who hates Uber

Uber is operating in Madison, Wis., despite the best efforts of the city’s mayor, a former cabdriver, who wants stricter regulations on ride services.

Paul Soglin is the liberal mayor of Madison, Wis., one of few cities with a political sensibility to the left of San Francisco and an unemployment rate that’s just as low.

But unlike Mayor Ed Lee, who has emerged as a cheerleader for the tech industry, Soglin has fought to make Madison “the last city in America where Uber is allowed.”
Soglin, who is one of 280 mayors in town for the U.S. Conference of Mayors, told a Madison audience this year that Uber and Lyft’s business model is “built on exploitation” and treats drivers with a “16th century version of serfdom.”
So no, he has no intention of joining Lee on a tour of Uber’s headquarters Monday.
Soglin may be an outlier among the legions of public officials who swoon in the presence of Uber, which is valued at $50 billion and operates in hundreds of U.S. cities and 57 countries. But his opinion is in line with a ruling made public this week by the California Labor Commission, which said that an Uber driver is an employee, not an independent contractor.