Minnesota Uber/Lyft Drivers Association President Eid Ali (center) speaks to reporters on Aug. 17, 2023 after a divided Minneapolis City Council passed an ordinance setting minimum pay for drivers. Mohamed Egal (left) would later split with Ali to help start a new group called MULDA Members. Farhan Badel (right of Ali) is now suing MULDA alleging the organization of fraud and deceptive business practices. Photo by Max Nesterak/Minnesota Reformer.
The organization that led the two-year-long campaign to win minimum wages and labor protections for Uber and Lyft drivers now faces a lawsuit brought by drivers alleging fraud and deceptive trade practices.
The six drivers bringing the lawsuit allege Minnesota Uber/Lyft Drivers Association President Eid Ali set up other organizations with similar names to funnel money to himself. They also accuse Ali of fraud for soliciting membership payments through MULDA’s website long after Ali changed the bylaws to say the group doesn’t have members.
The drivers — four of whom say they’re MULDA board members and two who say they’re dues-paying members — filed the lawsuit on Friday in Hennepin County District Court after trying unsuccessfully for months to get Ali to share documents with them, including the organization’s financial records, bylaws and meeting minutes.
“We want this organization back in the hands of drivers,” Farhan Badel, a dues-paying member of MULDA and plaintiff in the lawsuit, told the Reformer. “Drivers have the right to have an organization that has proper governance.”
Ali and his attorney Stephen Cooper did not respond to calls seeking comment.
Badel, who said he paid $100 to join MULDA, says he and the other drivers don’t have any sense of the organization’s finances and were often confused by who was actually in charge of the nonprofit and its finances besides Ali.
Ali served as the public face and behind-the-scenes negotiator in the effort to make Minnesota one of the first states to enact minimum pay rates for Uber and Lyft drivers, as well as greater pay transparency, protections against unfair terminations and insurance that covers being assaulted on the job.
The effort’s success was heralded by national media this year after earlier versions of the legislation were vetoed by Gov. Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey following threats by Uber and Lyft to pull out of the state.
But the law’s passage wasn’t MULDA’s final mission, which is why the group’s mostly Somali members are still concerned about its future.
At stake now are valuable contracts from Uber and Lyft to provide driver services — as well as MULDA’s organizing infrastructure that could prove to be a powerful political tool to advance the goals of the East African immigrant community.
Under the law passed by state lawmakers earlier this year, transportation network companies like Uber and Lyft must contract with a nonprofit advocacy organization to provide driver services like assistance with onboarding and appealing terminations, which are known as deactivations.
The law seems tailored to describe the Minnesota Uber/Lyft Drivers Association, requiring that the advocacy organization must have been operating for at least two years and be able to provide “culturally competent” driver services.
A spokeswoman for Uber said the company issued a request for proposals last month and plans to contract with a nonprofit by the Dec. 1 deadline. The law does not say the details of the contract have to be made public, including how much the companies pay to the advocacy organizations. The law also mandates that the nonprofit must operate “without excessive influence” from the companies.
The drivers bringing the lawsuit say Ali has treated the organization like his own private business rather than a nonprofit advocacy organization: He’s added and removed board members at will, kept details about the organization secret from its members — including the bylaws — and negotiated with lawmakers without input from dues-paying members.
Complaints about a lack of transparency in MULDA have been simmering for at least a year. Last fall, some drivers split off and formed a new group called MULDA Members during negotiations of the governor’s task force on driver pay.
Ali has led MULDA since its inception in June 2022, when a group of drivers began meeting at the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport waiting lot to discuss ways to address their long-standing complaints about Uber and Lyft.
The drivers selected 13 people to serve on a driver’s committee and Ali to be the group’s president because he said he had experience organizing taxi drivers, according to the lawsuit.
Ali incorporated MULDA as a nonprofit that month and set up a website that invited drivers to join for $30 per month. Although he never registered as a lobbyist, Ali has said he gave up driving when leading the fledgling organization became a full-time job.
In their lawsuit, Badel and the five other drivers estimate MULDA collected more than $60,000 from 280 drivers, but Ali frequently said the group represented thousands of drivers.
In October 2023, Ali held one of the group’s first press conferences at the state Capitol with Democratic lawmakers to call for legislation and said the four-month-old group had 1,000 driver members.
That spring, in April, Ali adopted bylaws for the organization and amended them a week later to say “this corporation shall have no members,” according to the lawsuit.
Ali then created two new organizations — MULDA and MULDA-RC — in August while an associate incorporated MuldaActionFund, P.A.
The purpose and structure of those organizations was never clear to members of MULDA, although Ali said it was for “fundraising purposes,” according to the lawsuit.
Ali added four more drivers to MULDA’s five-member board of directors in December 2023. Those are the four who are now suing MULDA: Mohamed Bulle, Mustafa Abdile, Ahmed Mohamed and Dawit Kassa.
They say in their lawsuit that Ali said he kicked them off the board in June and then denied their requests last month for financial documents, bylaws and other records, saying they weren’t board members. The two dues-paying members — Badel and Ahmed Igale — say in the lawsuit Ali denied their requests by telling them MULDA doesn’t have members.
Bulle, Abdile, Mohamed and Kassa protested their removal from the board, telling Ali it wasn’t valid because they weren’t given enough notice ahead of a meeting, provided an explanation for their removal or voted out by a two-thirds majority as required by the bylaws, according to the lawsuit.
Ali responded by arguing the four were never valid board members to begin with, according to the complaint. On Aug. 27, the four board members were informed of a MULDA meeting on Sept. 4, when the board would vote on a motion for the four to be “proactively removed as directors … whether or not they are found to have been elected as a matter of law or otherwise.”
The attorneys for the six drivers asked a judge for a temporary injunction ahead of the meeting, but the first hearing for the case was scheduled for later this month.