Uber won't require drivers to be vaccinated despite mandating the shot for corporate employees

Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi.
Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Uber employees at the company's US offices are required to get vaccines before return to work.
Uber drivers, which make up a far larger group, are not required to get vaccinated.
"It would only be fair to require vaccines for both riders and drivers," Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said.
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Before returning to the company's main office in San Francisco, where the vaccination rate is currently 70%, Uber's corporate employees must be vaccinated.

"White collar workers, you're spending time together in an office eight hours a day, 10 hours a day," Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi told CNBC's Squawk Box in an interview this week. "Based on the [Delta] variant and the health concerns there it was an easy call in terms of coming back to the office," he said.

As far the "over 100 million riders and drivers constantly moving around together on a monthly basis," no such vaccine mandate will be instituted by Uber, he said.

The massive group that includes both Uber's contracted driving staff and the app's millions of users is simply too large for Uber to police, he said.

"It would only be fair to require vaccines for both riders and drivers," Khosrowshahi said. "To put that responsibility, that kind of decision making power on a company, I don't think is right."

Uber does already mandate that both drivers and passengers wear masks.

"Before a driver or delivery person can go online, they will be asked to confirm, via a new Go Online Checklist, that they've taken certain safety measures and are wearing a mask or face cover," Khosrowshahi wrote in a blog post on May 13, 2020. "We've also built a similar checklist for riders. Before every trip, riders must confirm that they've taken precautions like wearing a face cover and washing or sanitizing their hands."

Uber's app could require proof of vaccination for both riders and drivers, but Uber is taking a different approach.

"Based on the circumstances that we're seeing now, the best path forward is for us and the government to push vaccination to really get the vaccination rates up," he said. "We think that's the best way forward."

Watch the full interview on CNBC's Squawk Box right here:

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