Uber employees started an online petition to have Travis Kalanick reinstated in an operational role at the company less than 24 hours after now-former Chief Executive Officer of the company was forced to resign amidst pressure from a number of major investors. The existence of the petition was revealed by an internal email sent to all employees of the San Francisco, California-based ride-hailing giant, with its author stating that the firm’s board made a mistake by accepting Kalanick’s resignation, praising the ex-CEO’s leadership qualities and his ability to inspire people. The author promises to deliver the results of the anonymous online petition hosted on the company’s servers to the board, though they don’t specify when exactly that will happen. The petition itself allows Uber’s employees to express support for Kalanick with a single click, in addition to providing them with an optional form they can fill to write a note to the firm’s board of directors and Kalanick himself.
It’s currently unclear how many employees have already signed the anonymous petition, though that number likely already surpassed four digits, with many of Uber’s 12,000 employees recently taking to social networks to publicly state their full support of the company’s founder and former CEO. Kalanick recently took a leave of absence following a tragic boat accident in which his mother died and his father was severely injured, saying that he isn’t sure when exactly will he return to Uber but heavily implying that he will. His resignation came less than ten days after, with the tech giant’s ex-top executive reportedly being pressured to quit due to a set of scandals that the company went through in recent months, ranging from its legal battle with Alphabet’s Waymo over allegedly stolen trade secrets to accusations of a predatory corporate culture that supposedly allowed for physical abuse and sexual harassment within the company’s own ranks, as per Uber’s former Site Reliability Engineer Susan Fowler Rigetti.
A copy of the internal email introducing the petition can be seen beneath this writing. Kalanick has yet to publicly comment on his resignation, with an update on the situation expected to follow shortly.