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According to a representative of Uber’s board of directors, it has “unanimously voted to adopt all the recommendations of the Holder Report.”
The question is: Exactly what are those recommendations?
For example, do they call for the departure of top Uber execs from the car-hailing company, including SVP of business Emil Michael, as sources have said they do?
Uber is as tight as a tick on this, at least until the recommendations are released to the employees on Tuesday (June 13). But sources inside Uber said that the company is in discussions with Michael of a “legal nature” related to an expected exit.
The negotiations were ongoing, but the resolution could be announced as early as tomorrow morning. (Or not — the departure of Uber CEO Travis Kalanick’s closest confidant and a key business leader at the company is a delicate thing, as you might imagine.)
As to the other recommendations, sources said they include a series of actions to correct what the report called a “hostile workplace” with a serious problem with retaliatory behavior. They might also include the departures of other execs, sources said.
As Recode reported earlier about the Holder report:
Sources who have seen parts of it said the report chronicles an aggressive and fast-growing startup, resulting in a frequently chaotic and “hostile work environment” without adequate systems in place to ensure that violations such as sexual harassment and retaliatory behavior were dealt with professionally.
“It’s ugly,” said one person familiar with the findings. “A story of a workplace gone wrong in a lot of key ways.”
The board met today for approximately seven hours to discuss a wide range of findings of an investigation law firm Covington & Burling conducted on the company’s culture and vote on the recommendations.
They also discussed whether Uber CEO Travis Kalanick should take a temporary leave of absence. No news on that either.
People inside and outside of the company, including a number of former employees, were interviewed as part of the investigation conducted by former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and his partner Tammy Albarran.
They were questioned about former Uber engineer Susan Fowler’s allegations of sexism and sexual harassment at the company — which prompted the investigation in the first place — as well as a trip to a South Korean escort bar with Kalanick, Michael and others.
While these people fielded questions about the general work culture, they also were asked about Kalanick specifically — his interpersonal skills, his partying and social life, whether he protected some people at the company over others.
Some of those who the law firm reached out to regarding Fowler’s allegations declined to be interviewed, said sources.
The investigation also shone a harsh light on board director and SVP of global operations Ryan Graves, as well as company CTO Thuan Pham. While Fowler was at Uber, Graves headed up human resources and Fowler wrote that she told Pham directly about the sexual harassment that she had experienced. Nothing was done, she said.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
