As your link says 'antitrust law generally forbids businesses from banding together and collectively fixing prices and other conditions', but that's just one thing a union might want to do, and it doesn't stop individuals joining unions. As I said, you can literally not work for anyone at all and join a union.
This is what the unions will advise you
> Even though you are not considered an “employee” under federal labor law, you may still join a union.
I’d invite you to read the section directly after the quote you cherrypicked. For all intents and purposes you are not able to unionize because you aren’t protected under the NLRA. That is just how it is at present in the US—I’m still surprised you’re trying to dispute this basic fact. Perhaps you live in a different country with saner laws.
Again, this is a complex subject, and I’m not sure why you are so confident about your lack of knowledge.
EDIT: I think I get it now—chriseaton is from the UK and is unfamiliar with US labor laws. In the US the primary purpose of unions is collective bargaining (see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_unions_in_the_United_S...). Independent contractors very much cannot join a union for the purpose of collective bargaining, which is confirmed in both my reference and their reference. The NLRA, which empowers employees to form unions and collectively bargain, explicitly excludes independent contractors (see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Labor_Relations_Act...). I should have noticed his misunderstanding earlier.
These people are complaining that they’re not being paid enough.
Isn’t the proper solution to find another job? If more people stopped driving for ridesharing companies the prices would rise to attract them back. I don’t see why they are complaining when unemployment is at an all time low and they can find a job easily elsewhere. It sounds stupid.
A lot of people turn to jobs like Uber because they can't easily find a job. There are many people who desperately try for weeks or months to find employment. Companies like Uber love to prey on such people.
I don't really understand this argument. Uber didn't create the conditions causing these people not to be able to find better jobs. If Uber stopped "preying on" these people, would they be better off? It seems like they'd just be unemployed.
A slave owner gives an otherwise hungry man food and housing. That doesn't mean slavery is at all justifiable.
Uber pays people who otherwise might not have a job at all. That doesn't mean paying them incredibly low wages is something that should be free of criticism.
Completely different situation. Slaves were not better off under slavery than they were at home in West Africa, nor were they free to go back if they didn't like the deal.
If Uber were kidnapping people and forcing them to become drivers at gunpoint, you might have a point.
> A slave owner gives an otherwise hungry man food and housing. That doesn't mean slavery is at all justifiable.
Slave by its very definition implies lack of choice by the other person.
> Uber pays people who otherwise might not have a job at all. That doesn't mean paying them incredibly low wages is something that should be free of criticism.
Yes, actually, it does mean that. That's the nature of choice.
If someone is offering you something you otherwise would not have, you don't get the right to complain that they are not giving you more.
I'm not following your logic, are you suggesting you wouldn't ask for a raise?
There are a lot of moving pieces.
The abolishment of slavery didn't end slavery and it's conditions.
It changed the name and the rules. Many slaves became trapped in indentured servitude without enough pay to cover the cost of housing.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indentured_servitude
Eventually this became illegal as well, another tactic was paying employees through company credits to buy goods at the company store. Eventually this too became illegal.
During all of this Jim Crow laws were made to prevent further integration, schooling, and the advancement to higher paying jobs.
The origin of the phrase grandfather clause came about as a way to prevent voting for representatives who could represent them.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grandfather_clause
This hasn't ended either, we now deal with gerrymandering.
I don't believe the ability choose a log of last resort means that job can be free of criticism. Yes it provides a vital service: given that service is insufficient to meet basic needs, improvements are needed. That may mean better services to provide jobs or providing a minimum pay with which basic needs can be guaranteed.
> Is your argument that companies have zero responsibility to pay their employees reasonably?
Yeah, that sums it up. Companies have a responsibility to keep the agreements they make, and to not harm anyone. They don't have a positive responsibility to improve people's lives -- they're not charities.
> What is even the purpose of a company?
To make some people better off than they were before, by way of voluntary exchange, without hurting anyone.
If they're not doing that, if they're actually making people worse off than they would be otherwise, then that should of course be stopped.
> I'm not following your logic, are you suggesting you wouldn't ask for a raise?
A raise is a negotiation. You ask for a raise, they say yes or no. If they say no, you go find another job that pays what you want, and you take that one instead. Which is why, when you have that option, they may say yes to begin with.
> That may mean better services to provide jobs or providing a minimum pay with which basic needs can be guaranteed.
Expecting this to be provided by the employer of last resort is ridiculously inefficient.
The underlying problem is that the cost of living is more than the value of the labor of some people. The two main solutions that are to reduce the cost of living (e.g. housing costs), or to give up and subsidize their compensation somehow as a humanitarian gesture. The first is vastly preferable, but even when you resign yourself to the second, you want something like a UBI rather than price controls because it spreads the burden more evenly across everyone rather than imposing it only on the companies who employ the people at the bottom.
Price controls, by contrast, create a bunch of weird cliffs and perverse incentives. They cause reductions in hours or unemployment, and they're arbitrary lines. So if you raise the minimum to $10 then you do nothing for someone who is currently making $10, even though they're struggling too and it would be preferable for them to have some assistance as well. e.g. because they receive the same UBI but since they make more money than the person making $6 they also pay proportionally more taxes and give a small amount of it back. The person making $25/hour ends up paying even more taxes, and so on, until the taxes exceed the UBI.
Whereas if you raise the minimum to $25 to try to also help the person at $10 then you cause a lot more unemployment.
Incredibly low wages? This is only a handful of people you’re hearing from. Every uber driver I talk to is happy driving.
You’re hearing from
Some drivers that think they deserve to be paid 6 figures because they drive people around. It’s by definition a low-skill job. If they want more money they need to make themselves more valuable and find better jobs.
I use the jobspotter app to make extra money on the side so I know first hand how many “hiring” signs are shown in various areas in the Bay Area. You can find a job if you want. Almost every place is hiring. To say that Uber is your only choice is bullshit.
If you can’t find a better job in this economy and market then it’s you, not the market. And if you don’t like what you’re being paid then find a new job. It’s really as simple as that.
The main problem is that when the drivers accept work from Uber, they plan ahead to have the same pay years later, often buying car from mortgage. At that point the drivers have no choice but to work their ass off to be able to pay back the mortgage for lower and lower hourly net rates.
Okay, that is a fair point and perhaps there should be regulations to require Uber to disclose prominently to prospective drivers that their rate is not guaranteed. (Certainly it's already in fine print somewhere, but I'm not sure how clearly it's made to people).
However, that is not the point being made by the people quoted in this article, who are instead framing it in much more general terms that I might sum up as "any company not paying their employees a 'living wage' is unethical".
My personal belief is that the most unethical thing is the banks driving up asset prices with freely printed money. With sound money workers wouldn't have to work so much to be able to afford rent.
Huh? For most people the delay from paycheck to rent payment is weeks to months, and the inflation suffered on that money is less than one percent. How would locking the amount of money affect that in any notable way?
And a housing bubble can still happen in a deflationary economy. Money can still move from the workers to the rich.
The effective price goes up even if the dollar amount doesn't.
Requiring a living wage can benefit employees a lot more than it hurts employers. Stopping a race to the bottom does not leave everyone unemployed. But it takes collective action to do so, because yes on an individual basis it would leave that individual unemployed. Group dynamics are different from one-on-one dynamics between one entity with power and one without.
This is impossible to say, since we cannot run a simulation in which Uber/Lyft never existed, just like we can't measure the crimes that weren't committed because of laws.
We can only examine the world as it is, including the economic conditions that precipitate a person taking a ride share job, the long-term financial implications of slowing selling time and vehicle condition, combined with the diminishing returns offered by the company to make some inferences about whether this whole thing is 'good for people' or 'not.' And, I gotta say, the situation is looking more like the latter than the former.
> I don't really understand this argument. Uber didn't create the conditions causing these people not to be able to find better jobs. If Uber stopped "preying on" these people, would they be better off? It seems like they'd just be unemployed.
Uber didn't necessarily create the conditions, but it does knowingly exploit them. That kind exploitation is not value neutral and can be wrong.
You're assuming that the people taking the job are fully informed, rational actors, not acting under financial duress. This is not a reasonable assumption for a near-permanent economic underclass.
Your rationale could be extended outward to every adverse outcome for poor: "Well, poor people have higher rates of obesity and cancer because of their poor life choices in eating fast food and smoking."
It's a convenient out for the exploiters to blame their victims.
> You're assuming that the people taking the job are fully informed, rational actors, not acting under financial duress. This is not a reasonable assumption for a near-permanent economic underclass.
Sorry-not-sorry, for assuming people are not idiots. Either they have money to pay bills or they don't. It's not that complicated, and people are not idiots.
> "Well, poor people have higher rates of obesity and cancer because of their poor life choices in eating fast food and smoking."
And your plan is to what? Micro-manage people's life and tell them what they can, and can't do?
> It's a convenient out for the exploiters to blame their victims.
It's only exploiting if you trick them, mislead them, lie to them, or force them.
Fine print no one reads? Sure, complain about it. Hidden fees and the like? Outlaw those.
But a straightforward transaction? What are you complaining for?
Exactly. They can turn on and off the app whenever they want. There’s no contract. If they want to stop driving they can. If they want to drive for Lyft and Uber at the same time, they can. If they don’t want to drive for 6 months, they can. They can drive one trip a day and turn it off, and they can. There is complete freedom.
The only thing these people are complaining about is that they want the freedom to drive for Lyft but they want to get paid more. That’s all it is. There’s no exploitation.
But if the wages are too low, find a better job. It’s really that simple.
>Sorry-not-sorry, for assuming people are not idiots.
Being uninformed (because a system is complex) and/or acting irrationally (because of financing stress) are not aptly described as "idiocy," which is a value judgement about individuals, not a description of those individuals information.
>Either they have money to pay bills or they don't. It's not that complicated.
The long term financial heath of individuals and families is complicated. Complicated by information asymmetry, financial uncertainly, and unscrupulous lenders who sell short-term solutions (like lending you money to buy a car that you have to drive to earn enough money to pay for the car -- and then dropping the rate at which you can earn to pay off the car). Usury laws exist, for example, not because people are "stupid," but because well-heeled companies can and do financially exploit people in bad positions.
Basically, driving for Uber is a bad idea and almost always not worth it financially for the drivers. And yet people do it. Not because they are idiots, but because start-ups have been able to skirt hard-won labor protections and safety laws to exploit a group of ad-hoc workers, whose time would be better spent collecting welfare checks and gaining marketable skills to land a full time position.
The idea that Lyft and Uber prey on these “people who can’t find jobs” in record low employment is laughable. There are hundreds of thousands of drivers for Lyft and Uber in California alone. If these were only those poor victims that were preyed upon by Lyft then that would be a huge number. The fact is they aren’t victims or preyed upon. They know how much they get paid and if they want to take the job, they can. If they don’t want, there are plenty of other jobs out there. I know for a fact because I use the jobspotter app and I see hiring signs everywhere.
If they don’t want, there are plenty of other jobs out there
Maybe there are lots of jobs there, but do these jobs give the flexibility of working whenever one wants, like Uber does? In life, nothing is as simple as that. Applying the same logic, we can say if a woman is mistreated by her husband/bf, she can simply leave him. If a manager is bad, find another job. If a country is hostile to immigrants, leave and move back home or to another country. And so on. The reality is somewhere in between "just pack up and go" and "stuck indefinitely".
Uber/Lyft/Instacart etc are in fact exploiting their drivers simply because they can. The drivers aren't unionized, they aren't getting much help from government regulations (it isn't illegal yet, just immoral and unethical), so they are at the mercy of these gig economy companies.
Here is an exercise. Can you name one gig economy company that is treating its workforce well? I am trying, and failing.
So now Lyft is forced to not only give 100% flexibility to its drivers but also pay above market rates as well? Why? The point is the job is flexible but it pays lower than other jobs. If you are okay with that then take it. If not, leave it. Why does Lyft have to pay more than what the drivers are worth to them as well as provide 100% flexibility?
If lyft/Uber/instacart are forced to make them employees instead of contractors then the first thing they will lose is the flexibility. They will likely not be allowed to work for other companies and have to drive X number of hours, etc. The drivers can’t have their cake and eat it too.
Again, life isn't as simple as that. Maybe it is easy for highly skilled software engineers to pick jobs of their choosing, but for majority of the workforce, it isn't as simple as "leave it". Which is what I am trying to explain.
I am simply pointing out that the whole situation is one sided, with these companies having all the power, and Uber (Lyft, Instacart etc) are simply taking advantage of it and exploiting their workforce. Sure, from a pure ruthless business view, it makes sense to pay as little as possible and extract as much as possible. A lot of companies do it and legally, they are not in the wrong. Ethically and morally, they are. And yes, they do prey upon the weakest among us and they do exploit them, you can sugar coat it any which way, but the fact remains.
It’s not one-sided. Lyft and Uber have to compete for drivers vs McDonald’s that is paying $15/hr. If the prices they paid were GENUINELY too low, then no one would drive for them.
But they have hundreds of thousands of drivers. If you’re somehow saying that only the weakest of the weak are driving for Uber, with no other options, you are delusional and just feeding your own narrative.
There is a significant barrier to start driving for Uber. You need a relatively new car with insurance and registration, drivers license, etc. You can’t have that if you’re so weak with no options as you suggest.
There are jobs that pay more with less flexibility. These individuals are free to pursue those jobs. Personally, I would easily trade a third of my salary in exchange for the flexibility of 4 months of vacation each year if my employer offered it. I'm sure I'm not alone in wanting to trade salary for flexibility because flexibility has greater marginal utility to me.
I think that's the point of the argument you're replying to. Assuming Uber drivers are rational, it means they're better off driving with Uber than they would be otherwise. In which case, why does Uber attract so much criticism? I'd understand if you criticized the general economic/social system that causes shitty jobs to be people's best option, but why criticize specific actors within it that (1) didn't create it, and (2) aren't making anyone worse off?
People are totally free to live in a world without Uber, by refusing to work for them or use their app. If that would cause them to be homeless or destitute, then what exactly is the issue with Uber -- that it's not bringing as many people as far out of destitution as you might like?
Because you're looking at the benefits in a vacuum. This is a company the skirts the law and intentionally blurs the line between employee and contractor for profit. It is entirely possible that driving for Uber is a rational choice for some people, and at the same time, that Uber is undervaluing their labor and taking advantage of them.
Similarly, in the past, people made the rational choice to sell themselves into indentured servitude. People also made the rational choice to sell their children to factory owners or into marriages for dowries.
Typically, if people had bargaining power through, say, collective action, there would be a corrective force when a sudden unilateral decision to reduce compensation by 25% is made.
> and intentionally blurs the line between employee and contractor for profit.
What profit are they making by doing that?
> Similarly, in the past, people made the rational choice to sell themselves into indentured servitude. People also made the rational choice to sell their children to factory owners or into marriages for dowries.
And are you blaming the person who took them it, or the conditions that led to that?
> Typically, if people had bargaining power through, say, collective action, there would be a corrective force when a sudden unilateral decision to reduce compensation by 25% is made.
But they do have power. They have the power to not work for Uber. If they did that and there were not enough drivers then Uber would raise rates, either permanently or with Surge pricing.
So they actually have MORE power than an employee in the same situation: The employee would lose their job, but Uber drivers can just refuse to work.
They're shedding expensive employee entitlements and liabilities.
> They have the power to not work for Uber.
A person's ability to exercise their power is proportional to the their financial security. A hungry person will have to make decisions in desperation to secure their next meal. A person behind on their rent will take whatever opportunity they can to secure a roof over their head.
> They're shedding expensive employee entitlements and liabilities.
If they paid those, they would just pay the person less. It doesn't actually change anything financially for the company.
>A person's ability to exercise their power is proportional to the their financial security. A hungry person will have to make decisions in desperation to secure their next meal. A person behind on their rent will take whatever opportunity they can to secure a roof over their head.
And? What does any of that have to do with Uber? They offered a job, either the person is better off with it, or they aren't.
It's not like there is a monopoly here. If Uber raised their rates there would be less trips taken, and less drivers would have jobs.
If the drivers feel they aren't making enough money, they would drive less, or not at all. Then rates would go up (if by no other means then by surge pricing).
I've talked to Uber drivers - by far, dwarfing all other issues, their #1 issue is there are not enough customers.
If they raised rates there would be even fewer customers - how does that help anyone?
people who haven't studied economics tend to think in moral terms that employees deserve a fair wage, and that it's wrong to exploit a desperate person. there may be lots of underlying reasons for these moral intuitions.
uber tends to imply greater earnings and less work than is actually required, encourages people to accumulate fixed costs in car investments, and then requires heavy hours to get the full benefits of the system.
Information is hard to organize. It’s easy to say that everyone has the potential to be economically rational but practically weighing decisions is hard.
People like you miss the point that companies like Uber could pay drivers more at the expense of paying you less, and come up with all sorts of handwavy econ 101 justifications for why that's morally acceptable.
> So then nothing here is Uber's fault, and Uber shouldn't get any blame.
Interesting that this is the line of thought that you decided to follow and refute, despite the fact that I never claimed that Uber was at fault for those particular problems a person may face. I'm not really a fan of engaging strawmen.
It's entirely possible that for some people, driving for Uber is a rational choice. It is also entirely possible that Uber is undervaluing their labor and taking advantage of them. Hope this helps.
> Interesting that this is the line of thought that you decided to follow and refute, despite the fact that I never claimed that Uber was at fault for those particular problems a person may face
Sorry, I wasn't trying to say that you did say Uber was at fault... I was just trying to clarify the train of thought and understand the conclusions that we can draw.
i.e. corporations are not at fault for people being poor and homeless and unable to get better jobs - that's clearly a government problem.
Every minute we spend blaming Uber/WalMart/McDonalds/etc for that is another minute we're distracted from the actual cause of the problem, and identifying a fix.
How can choosing uber rationally as a driver, and be taken advantage of by uber both be true at the same time?
If a driver chose uber rationally, that means they have considered all their options, and this is their best one. Therefore, uber is not undervaluing their labour, nor is taking advantage (where 'taking advantage' means to trick or coerce through any means to lead to the person to choose uber rather than the proper rational choice).
How can choosing uber rationally as a driver, and be taken advantage of by uber both be true at the same time?
Someone might rationally decide to drive for Uber, not because that is their best option, but because that could be their least worst option, among a list of shitty options.
If Uber and Instacart are my only options, and I decide to go with Uber, I am still making a rational choice. But only because I think Instacart is worse than Uber. That doesn't mean these companies aren't taking advantage of me, it just means one is less shitty than the other.
We've banned this account for repeatedly posting personal attacks to HN. That's not allowed here, regardless of how wrong someone else is.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. That means posting civilly and substantively, or not at all, and particularly avoiding flamebait.
No, sorry. Given the terrible job scenario and way too suppressed wages, "voluntary" is too much of a reach.
Seeking alternatives in tandem with regulation?
Yeah. Us all saying these over exploitative companies are OK?
No way.
Fact is, these companies, and many others, simply do not have to be as toxic to people as they are, and because of that, I am perfectly fine with attempts to clean things up.
Or, they can do it.
I do not care which, only that improvement happens.
It’s a strange market dynamic though — if Uber pays drivers more per mile, you’d have more people that will want to drive for Uber. This would mean fewer rides (per driver), which would cause the average take-home pay for a driver to be lower.
Which would cause drivers to leave, but everything would eventually equilibrate.
But if you also lower the per-mile rate (and total take home pay), then drivers won’t have much left over to “invest” in their independent businesses (their cars). So, the fleet will start to skew to older cars, which might start to drive away riders.
So, if you wanted to keep a steady supply of drivers, a player like Uber should want to maximize the total take-home pay for a driver, but not necessarily the per-mile rate (eventhough the two are obviously confounded).
But by and large, I completely agree with you. I can’t understand the logic behind lowering the per-mile rate for drivers. Given their inherent competition with Lyft for both drivers and riders, they should be working to keep both groups as happy as possible. Maybe they aren’t doing well and are trying to get their books in order before their IPO?
> Maybe they aren’t doing well and are trying to get their books in order before their IPO?
That's probably what it is. They're still not profitable. They might be hoping that this will tip them over the edge into profitability just before the IPO. This is a 25% cut. That's likely to piss off many drivers and make them want to do something else, but they might be counting on the fact that they have a steady supply of new drivers. The new drivers will never have experienced the higher rate.
Well it is a matter of what they are trying for - growth or profitability and how much in either direction. Amazon is an example of a success story of 'pump growth and then pump margin when huge'. What they are doing now is losing money and trying to make up for it through scale.
The sustainable equilibrium approach is the summation of profit margin x ride numbers.
> if Uber pays drivers more per mile, you’d have more people that will want to drive for Uber. This would mean fewer rides (per driver), which would cause the average take-home pay for a driver to be lower.
How so? Uber can and does control the number of drivers on their service at any given time.
The long term plan for Uber was to replace drivers with self driving taxis. They were open about this for a long time, though after the recent problems with their self driving program (killing someone), I'm not sure how on track the plan is.
The IRS deduction rate per mile plus minimum wage per hour. Anything below that is so low that it is immoral (and would be illegal in any civilized country).
It'd be illegal in this country if not for some very creative stepping around the issue on the part of the "gig economy". (Which may itself be illegal but it appears Uber has become to large for this to matter)
Its a voluntary agreement between two parties - they should be able to make whatever deal they want as long as both parties are amenable. If not amenable, go elsewhere.
They don't agree voulnatrily on that low payoiut per mile because Uber and indivudual drivers have very different bargaining power. A free market can only exist between well-informed rational actors that can both walk away from the deal. In the face of huge power disparities you need limits on the power of the stronger player for a long term market to exist. This is exactly what minimum wage is. So don't trode out the tried old propaganda of cut-throat capitalists such as "they took the deal".
Apparently they already lose money (counting marketing costs and incentives) per ride, how can they expect to operate a going concern by striving to increase expenses?
If you need drivers to stay on the platform, and acquiring drivers is extremely expensive, paying them less won't help with driver retention (unless you're making them so rich they retire). If you engage in a race to the bottom on rates with your competition, you'll end up having to spend more on driver acquisition and retention.
If you take care of your drivers, they will want to drive for you more frequently, and your rides will have more drivers available. Sure, the price of rides will be a bit higher, maybe a lot higher, but it'll be sustainable.
And here's me speculating... there's only one case where lowering driver pay makes sense, and that's lowering your prices to drive someone else out of business. If Uber is facing so much competition from Lyft & others, they won't be around once people get sick of giving them money. And by pissing off their drivers, they're creating a spot in the market for a higher end competitor to come in. Once a socially responsible, fair trade competitor gets established, it'll be hard for Uber to raise their rates again, because they have a bottom of the barrel reputation.
Of course I'm not in charge of running a ride sharing company, and there are plenty of people who have good intentions at suck at business. Maybe I'm one of the people that naturally walks the path of good intentions that leads straight to hell. Who knows.
My guess is Uber has actually done enough legwork and figured out that contrary to these sob stories in the press, there are more than enough drivers that 1) have efficient vehicles that are cheaper to operate and 2) are willing to work for that profit in quantities to cover demand.
If the rates Uber is providing drivers are so dismal they're protesting in the street, frankly, they should quit. No one is forcing drivers into a money-losing proposition. I'm especially unsympathetic given that they're paid on a per-transaction basis and there are alternative ridesharing companies out there.
Those drivers can go work for a company that charges more for rides, and passengers who care about that can choose that option. The fact that passengers currently seem unwilling to pay for that (somehow we never consider it "socially responsible" that passengers are provided cheaper service...) makes me think that will be unlikely in the short term.
Right?? So many commenters are acting as if these drivers are somehow obligated to work there. Just. Go. Elsewhere. You are not entitled to the perfect job simply because you are alive. What the hell happened to personally responsibility/accountability?
The solution to getting a better job is not simply leaving your current job. A lot of people have a shit job because they can't get a better job. A lot if people are homeless because they can't get a job at all. It's not that damn simple.
Source: white middle class male in San Francisco couldn't get a job for most if 2009, eventually ended up homeless.
Speaking as a tire/lube shop technician, a large percentage of the general populace has a warning light of some sort on at any time... Maybe %20 (that we see, if course) in our coverage area, which is a 20k population city and the surrounding rural area.
My girlfriend tried out the Instacart gig for a while as she finally got her chronic low energy and fatigue addressed through B12 shots and wanted something to occupy her and give her a little extra spending money outside of what's budgeted.
That experience was absolutely demoralizing in terms of what she was able to actually make. Granted we live in a lower density city in the southeast so that result makes sense. But everything is very skewed toward the company in the case of Instacart...mileage reimbursement is from the store to the delivery...and you can be sent 10-15 miles from your point of origin to the store to purchase goods at.
I'm not surprised at all that Uber (and the gig economy as a whole) are squeezing their "independent contractor labor force" given that for them it's just a stepping stone toward a fully autonomous pipeline. The calculus here isn't toward establishing and maintaining a happy and committed workforce but bridging the gap between funding and profitability through autonomous solutions.
I don't know what the answer is but I couldn't imagine being in a position where one of the few viable options available for any sort of gainful employment was working as part of the "gig" economy.
edit: If that rate is intended to also cover fuel costs then fuel can easily eat up >10% of that $0.60/mi rate. Man.
I mean...if they could organize they could have the effective weight of a union - but the circumstances of Uber's employment scheme make that more difficult.
I imagine that would only be orders of magnitude harder to manager in this circumstances than in previous generations.
Especially for Uber who can incentivize payouts in an elastic fashion as the available labor pool shrinks. Service quality might decline a bit as available drivers decrease...but Uber won't even have to explicitly go out and find "scabs" - they can simply temporarily surge pricing to entice some of the drivers who either aren't striking or who aren't as committed.
Difficult indeed to really cut at the heart of Uber in this case and really swing some leverage as organized labor.
I mean, the surge in pricing wouldn't even be a thing someone has to do. It would just happen automatically.
That's the whole problem with this issue: Uber has made the market for taxis/rides incredibly liquid, which has driven the prices down to pretty much exactly the marginal costs. There are plenty of people who have already sunk the cost of a car, and have nothing else to do, so it still makes economic sense to do this with their time.
If the demand for unskilled labor doesn't increase, this will get worse.
Uber operates with a loss. The prices are under marginal cost. The drivers have no scale benefits like ordinary Taxi companies when it comes to buying cars or maintenance.
It only makes economical sense to drive for Uber with the car if you can't sell it for a good price (you know the car is good and not abused, the buyer doesn't) and that you don't plan on buying a new car after the wheels fall off on the present one, or you need to liquidize your assets a little bit, i.e. getting approx. 100USD for decreasing the value of the car and buying gas driving for Uber for 100USD.
That's why effective unions, like every government, use the threat of violece to enforce the social contract. They can delegate completely to the government if they can win recognition as employees (they aren't ICs under a reasonable reading of law) and jump through the appropriate hoops to get a closed shop.
I mean, that's temporary. Are you saying all workers will agree that only say 20% of them work at a time (rotating) to artificially create scarcity, raising price of labor, then redistribute income amongst themselves in a communal fashion? Because that's strictly worse.
There will always be the hopelessly desperate just waiting to be taken advantage of. The market will not magically stop this happening. We must make the choice; maybe we'll choose to allow exploitation of the hopelessly desperate, maybe we won't, but praying to the market to magically fix it won't do a thing.
I think the government should step in with UBI, supplemental income, or some such, but it would be wrong to fix price of labor for one particular industry/market. The latter is just a hack.
No, there won’t. Wages are rising for all levels of employees. Driving a vehicle without dealing with coworkers or a “boss” just happens to be something many, many people can do so as a supplier, you have tons of competition, therefore the prices you can charge are lower.
Work towards a position that requires you to be differentiated from others and see your ability to charge more go up.
Do you have any evidence that one day there will no longer be hopelessly desperate people? The evidence so far indicates otherwise. Where is your posited utopian future coming from?
Work towards a position that requires you to be differentiated from others and see your ability to charge more go up.
This is the standard trite, middle-class advice towards people who are hopelessly desperate and trapped in poverty. The hopelessly desperate cannot do this on their own. They don't have the time, the health, the regular hours, the safety blanket of cash, the lack of children, the support network, even the simple knowledge of how to gain skills, on and on - all the things people need to take your advice. They don't have that. That's what being hopelessly desperate is.
Wages are rising, at least nominally, of course. I know they the wage and wealth gap is increasing, and the top 10% are running away with almost all the spoils, and is not a good situation.
However, the context of my response was to the person you had responded to had said that Instacart would have to pay more if people stopped running food for them, to which you had responded that Instacart wouldn't since there was an endless supply of hopelessly desperate people that Instacart can pull from.
Getting from point A to point B, especially with the help of navigation software, is something everyone can do, hence the bottom of the barrel wages. You're competing with almost everyone. Expecting to earn more than the very minimum in that kind of market is unrealistic. Before, the bottom of the barrel jobs were retail/restaurant/hotel/service jobs, but now with Instacart and Uber and whatnot, those are the new bottom of the barrel jobs, and retail/restaurant/hotel/service jobs have had to raise their wages.
I understand some people might not have a good education, some might not know the right language, have a stable home, and that is something society needs to work at fixing, but that's not the reason Uber/Instacart can afford to pay little. It's because the type of work (unscheduled, be your own boss, no language skills necessary, no customer service skills, etc) is desirable compared to other jobs that have a large supply of labor.
My company was bleeding money so I had to close it down over this past fall. Spent all of my savings and had to start making money asap.
I turned to uber eats, grubhub, and doordash. None of the companies value the drivers. If anything it feels like the companies are trying to milk the drivers so that the company can profit.
If the drivers are happy the customer will be happy and profits can be made. Raising rates for customers, lowering payouts for contractors is a bad idea short term. Automation of transportation is not close enough to discourage all of your contractors from working.
And you think human nature would just magically change and everyone would be equally motivated to create things of value because you burnt down all the institutions? Hierarchy and inequality exist regardless of what political system you put in place. It is literally a law of nature. Every single system creates inequality, it’s just that capitalism also creates wealth, where as other systems historically can not compete in this regard. Humans are on average wealthier now than at any other point in history and this is a VERY good thing for creating the most good for the largest number of people possible.
This is nothing to do with self driving cars and everything to do with the imbalance of power when management acts an an organized team but labor doesn't.
It’s a good thing there is more than one organized team of management to pick from! Gainful employment is not a right, it’s a voluntary agreement by both parties. Vote with your feet and go elsewhere... they will feel the crunch.
The IRS deduction for business vehicle use in 2019 is 58 cents per mile. So they have effectively reduced the per mile payment to the cost of operating the vehicle.
Seems like they are on the verge of turning driving for Uber into a reverse mortgage for your car.
And quite frankly the business model might be to just bank on a steady supply of ex-criminals who have a hard time getting other work and may not understand the financial arrangement they are entering into. Exploit them for a while and when they realize they aren’t making money, just chalk it up to built-in turnover and on to the next unwitting driver.
You don't have to be an ex-criminal to have a hard time getting work and tendancy to get involved in harmful financial arrangements. I would argue, the latter at least, is the median individual.
No need of ex-criminality. Youth, inexperience, naivete, desperation will all suffice.
Following the long established model used by couriers, despatch riders etc. It appears to work only temporarily until the real maintenance and depreciation costs become apparent.
Not exactly an ethical base upon which to build - scamming your drivers until they realise it's effectively a scam.
> Exploit them for a while and when they realize they aren’t making money
Between all the happy drivers who you begin to notice are just 2 weeks in, and also knowing they are homeless while they are driving in this area makes it harder to support the service
But there is also a reason they drove 100 miles from Sacramento and turned on the app.
Which is what it should be no? Drivers are still paid by the minute on top of that, which in LA is 21 cents/minute according to the news, working out to $12.6/hour. Not quite $15 minimum wage, but close.
21 cents per minute that you have a passenger in your car. With Uber, but not Lyft, you might get paid a bonus to drive some distance to pick up a passenger. But time you spend adding value to the company by working as slack capacity (and slowly burning down the value of your vehicle) isn't directly compensated.
I guess slack capacity is the crux of the contractor vs. employee debate. While you don't get paid hourly, you also don't have to be on the job hourly. That gives you the chance/incentive to switch to other "gigs" and improve overall market efficiency. At least that's the theory.
Since Uber drivers are independent contractors you need to account for the extra ~7.6% Social Security and Medicare tax they will have to pay when comparing it on a $/hr basis to w-2 jobs.
If they are also paying Uber drivers for their time in addition to their per mile vehicle costs then having a per mile cost in line with the cost to operate the vehicle is fine but when I looked into it ~5 years ago they charged the rider per mile driven and per minute of standing and then gave the driver a cut of that.
Its like they see developers and drivers as two different species. For every twenty something dev that makes $132K, there is a fourty something trying to rebuild a life post-trauma, doing their best to net $13K. Since insurance and gas aren't cheaper, the driver now will net $6K next year, while the dev would jump ship to another company if they didn't get a $6K bonus. While my head understands the economic principles that drive that reality, my heart doesn't understand how such a thing needs to happen.
Same with canteen workers, janitors and so forth. It's the reality of this economy without any intervention.
>my heart doesn't understand how such a thing needs to happen.
That's why developers, who have the economic leverage, should stand up for everyone working at their companies, including staff that isn't involved in technical work.
So would the tech workers cut 10% of their salary and gift it to those working for low pay in other roles?
I think it's overwhelmingly no. The option where the company shareholders take less profit is not even on the table - and that's what needs tackling, and the only way to tackle that is via a mix of govt welfare and unions. But the cultural narrative has shifted to the right so much that even mentioning the word union will cause a chilling effect on your career. No ones' gonna do it.
All I hear from my red-state family is how basically the world is coming to an end because the country has veered so far to the left.
I live in SF and things here always seem to be drifting leftward as well, but of course this is probably left HQ so I guess that's not surprising.
That said, some of my farthest left friends in San Francisco are convinced that some kind of extremist right-win revolution is about to happen, and one of them literally moved to Canada in fear of it.
I don't say any of this to disagree with you. Rather, I say this because I feel like something weird is going on in the world. There doesn't seem to be much consensus about what's going on around us - like people aren't living in the same reality.
As for me it seems like mostly life is just going on like it always has - but I deleted social media a while back and quit watching cable news... I think unplugging from that made me realize it's all a giant circus and a lot of people are getting roped into various factional hallucinations and sort of losing touch with reality. But I just don't get how it's become so pervasive, and it leaves me questioning how you can even know if anything is true or not.
Well basically all the metrics, A/B testing and optimization technologies built by companies like Google, Facebook and a load of other smaller tech startups found their way into the hands of people running media companies. Google Analytics probably did the most to set this trend as blog after blog started using it to understand how to drive traffic.
Now that the media has these tools, their content becomes subservient to getting those eyeballs, clicks, time on page and repeat visits.
What has all this taught us? That nothing drives metrics like anger and rage, so anger and rage is what the opinion industry produces. Furthermore, cognitive dissonance costs you eyeballs, so the tendency is to further self censor your content to avoid anything that might upset the increasingly sheltered worldview of your audience.
There's also no stopping the resulting inflation. If you want to solve the cost of living problem, you're better off focusing on reducing the costs instead of raising the amount of money available. Housing costs in many housing supply constrained markets will easily absorb any increase in median income income in those markets.
I think it’s obscene how much I make for what I do, having grown up in a blue collar family, working jobs that are far harder than what I do now, making minimum wage. If I didn’t have a family, I’d probably still rather be a software developer at $10 an hour instead of working at a KFC kitchen making what I make as a software developer now.
Programming is certainly harder than most jobs in the sense that fewer people are capable of doing it, which is the one that matters for economics. That doesn't mean other jobs are not harder in other ways that matter too.
those ways don't matter to the company doing the paying of wages. The only "way" that matters is the scarcity of people willing to perform said job. This is what our society has currently come to, and no individual can make that change without making a personal sacrifice.
You can load packages into an 18 wheeler for 20 years and you wont really learn much. A new person can come in tomorrow and do the same job pretty much without any learning. When you work as an engineer you constantly have to learn and keep your knowledge up to date on top of that.
Hard, yes, but you should start a business paying people developer salaries to load and unload boxes and we will see how well that works out for you. Also that job is soon to be an anachronism - robots are perfectly suited to replace humans for this task.
I actually doubt they will replace the loader. Not until they having something as dexterous as a human hand. Some functions, such as belt splitting is already replacing humans but there are no plans to replace the loaders. It requires too much human intuition at the moment for the machines to handle.
It doesn’t need to, but that same developer that will jump ship for a pay rise will also jump ship if their pay is cut to afford higher rates for the workers bringing the actual value to the company.
Why should I take a 50% pay cut just so the people driving the cars earning our incomes can afford to eat?
Because the people that pay your income so that you can afford to eat also make an income so that they can afford to eat.
As a developer who could "jump ship" to get a pay raise, I feel like I'm at a point where I understand too much is too much and there are a billion other people who need out attention. You don't need seven figures, no one does. We all want different things. So why not let people respectfully wish better for themselves?
I remember talking to a driver back in the early days of Uber X (probably 2012-ish) who told me he was on track to make $80k driving for Uber that year. Wow have things changed.
The trick today or to drive more during surge pricing hours. One of my drivers claimed to be making close to that. I suspect a large factor is also the city you drive in.
You have a vc-funded company, operating at a loss, commoditizing the "talent" (drivers/musicians), thereby conditioning the audience (passengers/listeners) to expect an unsustainable cost for the service, using that loss leader mentality to drive other solutions out of business, until they argue or take action that the talent should expect even lower rates than they've historically gotten so the company can have a shot at being profitable. When the larger effect is that the company has captured value that used to go to the talent and then instead goes to the investors.
Unlike the music industry, there aren’t a whole lot of people who would just be a cab driver for free in their spare time even if there was no money in it.
I've heard many stories of drivers who do it to help keep drunk drivers of the road. There was a German Rideshare website I used (8+ years ago) that had decent popularity without requiring payment within the website. In this case I think we'd need to define "a whole lot" to try and compare the two.
Have you ever received a free uber or lyft ride? I was in college when they were blowing up, and me, and each of my friends, probably used around 500$ of free rides each..
Here in Palo Alto I get offered rides in the middle of the night for less than a dollar! (I do sometimes get a pass). I pay Uber less than they pay their driver.
What do you need to support the assertion? The operating costs of a 'match x with y' service are negligible compared to Uber's revenue take.
They're pissing all that money away on loosely related r&d and their hopes/dreams of an autonomous future. They now also need to somehow continue justifying their mind boggling 72 billion dollar valuation.
I expect in the coming years Uber will die and be replaced by a service that works exactly the same way but for a far smaller revenue take and without any of the lofty ambitions.
“In September 2018, we increased the per-minute rate and minimum fares in hopes of making it more worthwhile to drive with Uber in L.A.,” the company said. “Unfortunately, these changes did not have the intended impact.”
As a result, Uber said it was increasing the per-minute rate drivers earn but reducing the per-mile rate and minimum fare. The per-minute rate jumped from 15 cents to 21 cents. But the minimum fare dropped from $3.75 to $2.62 and the more crucial per-mile rate dropped from 80 cents to 60 cents.
Organizers with Rideshare Drivers United started planning Monday’s action two weeks ago, responding to Uber’s decision to reduce per-mile fares from 80 cents to 60 cents—months after the company raised rates from 60 to 80 in September 2018. Uber says it’s now reversing the move to put its fares more in line with other ride-share companies, and that it expects the net effect of this 25 percent cut will mean that average driver earnings will return to the same level as before the September increase. Uber also noted that it increased its per-minute rate again on March 11. Lyft, meanwhile, has not changed driver rates in the city of L.A. for 12 months.
I'm paying the person I received the service from. Me handing someone extra cash is neither unfair nor unethical.
If you feel like Uber is doing something wrong there's a trivial solution. Just pay your driver more.
Sure it doesn't solve Uber's problems, it doesn't change the behavior of anyone else, but it does solve your personal culpability. (If you feel you have such culpability)
Tipping is horrible and incentivizes the worker to prioritize people who tip/ are likely to tip and underperform for people who do not/or are likely not to.
You can see this play out in the food service industry and it is horrible and only contributes to a culture of soft-discrimination.
I did Uber driving a while ago. I just called Uber support and they told me that my pay in the Bay Area is now 68 cents per mile and 29 cents per minute. In November it was 99 cents per mile and 18 cents per minute. I’ve randomly pulled up a ride I gave in November in which I took a guy 3.8 miles taking 17 minutes. Back then I was paid 8.5 and if I did it today I would have been paid 9.1. Shorter trips would of course not fare so well. But short trips suck even with higher pay per mile because short trips rack up dead miles — the unpaid miles between trips.
Before, I prioritized miles. Getting the most miles in the shortest amount of time seemed like the best thing to do although I never sat down and thouroughly worked out what strategy would pay the most. There are lots of subtleties that make the calculation difficult. But with this new pay scheme it might actually pay off to go slowly. This would make rides safer overall but might increase incidences of missing an exit when your fare is lost in instagram.
Maintaining a Toyota Corolla costs roughly 20 cents per mile, especially if you do your own oil changes. And that includes depreciation.
If anyone from Uber happens to read this, I have to say that paying for dead miles would do a lot of good. I would happily give up tips for paid dead miles. Eliminating dead miles would allow drivers to drive anywhere and change the equation in a way that would be very beneficial to Uber overall as a service.
Also add a tiny fee for people who cancel ride after ride looking for the shortest eta. On average a driver wastes 20 cents every time someone does that, probably. So charge 20 cents for cancelling even if it’s immediately. The small group of people who like to treat Uber like an eta slot machine can do so, drivers won’t sit and wait for several minutes to trigger the cancelation fee and the vast majority of riders who don’t do it will only see a small improvement in service quality with no increase in price.
I think the cancellation fees uber in particular charges are bullshit and I always dispute them with the credit card if uber doesn't give me credit. Every single one has been for a driver taking a trip that's way too far away, estimated wait time of two to three minutes becoming ten to fifteen minutes or more. If the driver who knows they are taking this trip and won't get there for over ten minutes but the eta is three minutes, why should I pay a cancellation fee when I finally cancel after waiting five minutes? That is total bullshit. Often the driver hasn't even finished his previous trip. I don't know whose fault it is, the driver's or uber's. The software should not allow a driver to take a trip with a short eta knowing that it'll take four or five times longer, sometimes before he even finishes his previous trip, but since it does, the driver should be aware of how far away he is and not take a trip he knows he's going to be way over the eta for. In this scenario, everyone loses.
Its a pretty regular occurance to see plenty of cars orbiting on your map, then the one that snags your request is 5 miles away going the wrong way on the highway with another fare, and you sit on your hands. Drivers tap rides without even looking at them just to get it first and have a fare ready, regardless if it makes sense timing wise. I’ve seen it from the passenger seat.
Yeah, something is wrong with me for believing the app. Even after I request the ride, the time estimate actually goes up instead of down and clearly, that's my fault too. I bet when an uber crashes, that will somehow be my fault too by your incredibly stupid logic.
My brother works for uber, He is 54 years old smokes a pack day and has had 2 heart attacks. He drives a Cadillac and pays $500-month for commercial insurance and has a monthly payment for his car. He has TLC plates to work in NYC ( fees apply) he makes about $300 a day works like a dog 12-14 hours a day. All of his friends are the same (uber drivers in NYC) Here you have the typical uber driver who does this for a living as his main gig not some side gig while building a start up or some bullshit side thing. These are the left over drivers from when the yellow cab money / industry dried up in NYC. The job is literally killing him. It's the classic frog in boiling water syndrome. The story is often used as a metaphor for the inability or unwillingness of people to react to or be aware of sinister threats that arise gradually rather than suddenly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog
By some metric, your (and my) genetics are also really bad and your (and my) job is not useful for society ;-).
The "it's genetics" argument is also super flawed, as if you look your family 2-4 generations back they were most likely drunk peasants and yet today you're not.
I’m sorry about your brother, but I’m not going say Uber’s responsible for his heart attacks and pack a day cigarette habit. Uber might be short changing him on money but you can’t blame them for poor lifestyle decisions.
Uber did not destroy his industry. Industry is flourishing. It's state's fault for not providing a good social safety net. Imagine if we all had to use horses, because the government did not want to "destroy" the industry.
We all know what is the end game here. Driving a vehicle will be recreational activity.
I don't know. he just said to me" I make 300 a day" assume $90 net take home for 12-14 hours or less. Uber basically KILLED The yellow cab industry in NYC. He was driving a yellow cab and considering buying a medallion ( the American dream) for $800k but that yellow cab medallion is worth shit now since uber came on the scene and yellow cab drivers who got a mortgage to buy a medallion are committing suicide now that the medallion is worth shit. So the whole situation is toxic they are FORCED to drive with uber / lyft and its a race to the bottom AI is paying them less and less. Uber is bleeding them dry. They can't drive yellow cabs and now uber is squeezing the shit out of what they are already making, they are under so much stress in order to get some type of relief from working 12-14 hour days for shit pay ,sometimes 7 days a week they smoke / drink to forget the pain of it all to escape for just a moment from earning less and less and getting used to surviving on less. Its brutal in NYC.
> He smokes a pack day and has had 2 heart attacks
> The job is literally killing him
I don't mean to be snide or to blame your brother (addiction is a powerful thing), but I'd say that maintaining a smoking habit despite having suffered not one but two heart attacks sounds more like putting a frog in a pot with some water, splashing boiling water into the pot twice, scalding the frog both times, and having the frog decide to stick around and see what happens next.
Ive tried to get a plethora of acquaintances and coworkers to try vape, the upfront cost of a good quality reliable one-device system can easily exceed a couple hundred dollars. The majority of people who I discuss this with are upfront-cost conscious above all, they just have $5 a day (or 2 packs a NY day being $14 a day) and have too little money to gamble, in their mind, on will vaping work.
Scholarly articles on nicotine replacement show that for every person who successful quits using that it costs around $7k, magnitudes more $$ than vape. For some people nicotine is one of the only things they have that makes them hate life less and be able to cope better. On some level I find it unfair that people should say 'well you shouldn't do that categorically' when the vast majority of people have their own individual preferences on vice.
Thanks for your perspective; I didn't know any of those costs.
Everyone has their own individual vice preferences, but some vices are demonstrably worse for health than others. I'm not one to tell a person to quit smoking, but it seems likely that in this case, the guy's two heart attacks did just that.
I can't quite understand the economics of this rate drop (which happened only in the LA market, btw). Here's my analysis, please let me know if you see anything wrong with it.
Uber makes 25% commission from the per-mile fee, so the total revenues to Uber and to the drivers is moving in the same direction. I assume Uber wouldn't drop the rate unless their revenue increased. So they must know that (1) the lower fee will be more than offset by the increased demand, and (2) they will have enough drivers to meet that greater demand.
It must be that the total money received by all drivers will go up. So each driver will make more money before expenses (not per hour, but in total).
How will Uber meet the increased demand? Sure, the drivers will be better utilized (less time without passengers), but would that really be enough? Or does Uber expect the drivers will work longer hours? I suppose it's possible that people really desperate for cash will work more even as they are paid (a lot) less. That would be both very sad and very hard to believe (since at this point McDonalds pays better than Uber, after accounting for gas and wear & tear on the car).
Anyway, if somehow the hours per driver stay the same, the gross income per hour will grow. Income after expenses will grow by an even greater percentage.
I really would like to understand whether the increased gross revenue per driver will come from longer hours or not.
You're overcomplicating it somewhat by separating things out that could reasonably just be averaged together.
The real question is what the supply and demand curves look like. It's possible for everyone to make more money by reducing prices and making it up on volume, if that's what happens.
If you're a driver and you currently spend a lot of time sitting around waiting for riders, and the lower prices reduce that wasteful idle time, you can end up making more money, even working the same number of hours, by driving more miles in the same number of hours.
But that's assuming the lower prices spur sufficient additional demand to compensate for the lower rate per mile, which is going to depend on the specifics of the local market.
I agree with you. I guess I'm asking how likely is the (quite appealing) scenario you describe?
The volume increase will more than offset the price drop -- otherwise Uber would have no incentive to drop the price in the first place. What else do we need to know to predict the outcome on drivers pay?
Predicting this kind of stuff is a rabbit hole. Suppose there is a strip of struggling restaurants downtown in an area with insufficient parking, so that your ride service is the best way to get there. If you lower prices by $.10/mile, you just lose money. If you lower prices by $.20/mile, the lower transportation cost allows the restaurants get enough new customers that they can make improvements, and then the restaurant improvements attract even more customers. Those customers are also your customers, and having many customers going to and from the same small area is your best case scenario because it allows you to pick up and drop off in the same place at the same time, so then you make more money too.
It's generally easier to just try it and see what happens, and then deduce the how from the what. Note however that this will not necessarily be the same thing that happens in another area or at another time, because of all the things that can be different and affect the outcome.
If Uber was not reasonably confident in their predictive models, they'd be shifting rates by like 1% per week to test the waters, instead of 25% in a day. And if Uber can have good predictive models, maybe independent economists who study this market could make somewhat decent predictions as well.
My wife and I have had a little different experience. About 1.5 years ago we took up deliervinf food with Caviar/Uber eats to get out and pay for our dates. She and I would go for 2 hours maybe 2-3 nights a week. On average she and I both made ~$26 per hour. Since we rode bikes we paid no insurance/parking/etc. I tried once doing it for 8 hours a day and my earnings went down to like $6 per hour.
I just got back from Brazil. There is a startup ride sharing service called 99 that is interesting.
As a comparison, a ride that costs 40 R$ (~$12 USD) on Uber will cost half that on 99. And, I heard while I was there that incredibly 99 pays the drivers more.
I don't know if this is a technical advancement that 99 hasn't needed to make the massive investment that Uber did now that lots more is understood about the ride sharing market, or if Brazilian VCs are pumping money in, or what. But, I experimented with 99 and it was much cheaper.
I stopped using them when a driver let the fare run for an hour after I got out of the vehicle. Unlike Uber there is no cancel button. I'm not sure if this was fraud or he turned off his phone or what, but the experience was terrible trying to get it resolved for an hour.
The most interesting thing is that there are startups attacking the incumbents (Uber and Lyft). The exciting thing is that Uber demonstrated incredible growth patterns like no company we've ever seen. I wonder if it will demonstrate shrinkage like nothing we've ever seen. I have no loyalty to them but Lyft isn't in Brazil and after that experience with 99 I stopped using it.
in Colombia, there's an app that allows the person soliciting the ride to offer a price, then various drivers can either counter offer or take the fare as bid
As a foreigner, I would hate that choice. I want to use an app that makes me feel like the parties are aligned on the agreement. When the driver didn't cancel my fare, it made me suspect he was needing to cheat me to make it fair, and I stopped using 99 completely since I started to assume everyone would need to do something like that to make money. A poor marketplace if that is the case.
99 was purchased by Didi and are heavily engaged in a price war to gain market share. Since they are much smaller, they can afford to sell at a loss, but as they scale, it becomes increasingly expensive to pay more while charging less.
This seems like a bad idea on the grounds that the backlash is likely to put Uber in a worse position by further making the case for unions and employment benefits. But that will likely happen after the IPO when they’ve used this to juice their revenue.
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[ 0.18 ms ] story [ 438 ms ] threadAnyone can unionise (well apart from military, law enforcement, prison guards, etc).
Even unemployed people can join unions. Whether your employer chooses to have anything to do with your union is another matter of course.
This is what the unions will advise you
> Even though you are not considered an “employee” under federal labor law, you may still join a union.
https://cwa-union.org/about/rights-on-job/legal-toolkit/my-e...
Again, this is a complex subject, and I’m not sure why you are so confident about your lack of knowledge.
EDIT: I think I get it now—chriseaton is from the UK and is unfamiliar with US labor laws. In the US the primary purpose of unions is collective bargaining (see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_unions_in_the_United_S...). Independent contractors very much cannot join a union for the purpose of collective bargaining, which is confirmed in both my reference and their reference. The NLRA, which empowers employees to form unions and collectively bargain, explicitly excludes independent contractors (see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Labor_Relations_Act...). I should have noticed his misunderstanding earlier.
The article goes on to give specific examples of contractors who are unionised, including in technology, so it cannot be a fact.
EDIT: I wonder now if the core of this misunderstanding is the difference between “to join a union” and “to unionize”? See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_unions_in_the_United_S...
Isn’t the proper solution to find another job? If more people stopped driving for ridesharing companies the prices would rise to attract them back. I don’t see why they are complaining when unemployment is at an all time low and they can find a job easily elsewhere. It sounds stupid.
Uber pays people who otherwise might not have a job at all. That doesn't mean paying them incredibly low wages is something that should be free of criticism.
If Uber were kidnapping people and forcing them to become drivers at gunpoint, you might have a point.
Slave by its very definition implies lack of choice by the other person.
> Uber pays people who otherwise might not have a job at all. That doesn't mean paying them incredibly low wages is something that should be free of criticism.
Yes, actually, it does mean that. That's the nature of choice.
If someone is offering you something you otherwise would not have, you don't get the right to complain that they are not giving you more.
There are a lot of moving pieces. The abolishment of slavery didn't end slavery and it's conditions. It changed the name and the rules. Many slaves became trapped in indentured servitude without enough pay to cover the cost of housing. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indentured_servitude Eventually this became illegal as well, another tactic was paying employees through company credits to buy goods at the company store. Eventually this too became illegal. During all of this Jim Crow laws were made to prevent further integration, schooling, and the advancement to higher paying jobs. The origin of the phrase grandfather clause came about as a way to prevent voting for representatives who could represent them. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grandfather_clause
This hasn't ended either, we now deal with gerrymandering.
I don't believe the ability choose a log of last resort means that job can be free of criticism. Yes it provides a vital service: given that service is insufficient to meet basic needs, improvements are needed. That may mean better services to provide jobs or providing a minimum pay with which basic needs can be guaranteed.
Sure, and why is it Uber's responsibility to make those improvements?
What is even the purpose of a company? Make unicorn valuation through low wages, write a couple blog posts, then dip?
Yeah, that sums it up. Companies have a responsibility to keep the agreements they make, and to not harm anyone. They don't have a positive responsibility to improve people's lives -- they're not charities.
> What is even the purpose of a company?
To make some people better off than they were before, by way of voluntary exchange, without hurting anyone.
If they're not doing that, if they're actually making people worse off than they would be otherwise, then that should of course be stopped.
A raise is a negotiation. You ask for a raise, they say yes or no. If they say no, you go find another job that pays what you want, and you take that one instead. Which is why, when you have that option, they may say yes to begin with.
> That may mean better services to provide jobs or providing a minimum pay with which basic needs can be guaranteed.
Expecting this to be provided by the employer of last resort is ridiculously inefficient.
The underlying problem is that the cost of living is more than the value of the labor of some people. The two main solutions that are to reduce the cost of living (e.g. housing costs), or to give up and subsidize their compensation somehow as a humanitarian gesture. The first is vastly preferable, but even when you resign yourself to the second, you want something like a UBI rather than price controls because it spreads the burden more evenly across everyone rather than imposing it only on the companies who employ the people at the bottom.
Price controls, by contrast, create a bunch of weird cliffs and perverse incentives. They cause reductions in hours or unemployment, and they're arbitrary lines. So if you raise the minimum to $10 then you do nothing for someone who is currently making $10, even though they're struggling too and it would be preferable for them to have some assistance as well. e.g. because they receive the same UBI but since they make more money than the person making $6 they also pay proportionally more taxes and give a small amount of it back. The person making $25/hour ends up paying even more taxes, and so on, until the taxes exceed the UBI.
Whereas if you raise the minimum to $25 to try to also help the person at $10 then you cause a lot more unemployment.
You’re hearing from Some drivers that think they deserve to be paid 6 figures because they drive people around. It’s by definition a low-skill job. If they want more money they need to make themselves more valuable and find better jobs.
I use the jobspotter app to make extra money on the side so I know first hand how many “hiring” signs are shown in various areas in the Bay Area. You can find a job if you want. Almost every place is hiring. To say that Uber is your only choice is bullshit.
If you can’t find a better job in this economy and market then it’s you, not the market. And if you don’t like what you’re being paid then find a new job. It’s really as simple as that.
However, that is not the point being made by the people quoted in this article, who are instead framing it in much more general terms that I might sum up as "any company not paying their employees a 'living wage' is unethical".
And a housing bubble can still happen in a deflationary economy. Money can still move from the workers to the rich. The effective price goes up even if the dollar amount doesn't.
Life is full of disappointment.
This is impossible to say, since we cannot run a simulation in which Uber/Lyft never existed, just like we can't measure the crimes that weren't committed because of laws.
We can only examine the world as it is, including the economic conditions that precipitate a person taking a ride share job, the long-term financial implications of slowing selling time and vehicle condition, combined with the diminishing returns offered by the company to make some inferences about whether this whole thing is 'good for people' or 'not.' And, I gotta say, the situation is looking more like the latter than the former.
Uber didn't necessarily create the conditions, but it does knowingly exploit them. That kind exploitation is not value neutral and can be wrong.
It's more of a government responsibility to take care its citizen well being.
Offering someone a job is preying? Either they want it or they don't. Either it makes them money or they don't.
You're talking like they are better off if Uber didn't offer them the job.
Your rationale could be extended outward to every adverse outcome for poor: "Well, poor people have higher rates of obesity and cancer because of their poor life choices in eating fast food and smoking."
It's a convenient out for the exploiters to blame their victims.
Sorry-not-sorry, for assuming people are not idiots. Either they have money to pay bills or they don't. It's not that complicated, and people are not idiots.
> "Well, poor people have higher rates of obesity and cancer because of their poor life choices in eating fast food and smoking."
And your plan is to what? Micro-manage people's life and tell them what they can, and can't do?
> It's a convenient out for the exploiters to blame their victims.
It's only exploiting if you trick them, mislead them, lie to them, or force them.
Fine print no one reads? Sure, complain about it. Hidden fees and the like? Outlaw those.
But a straightforward transaction? What are you complaining for?
The only thing these people are complaining about is that they want the freedom to drive for Lyft but they want to get paid more. That’s all it is. There’s no exploitation.
But if the wages are too low, find a better job. It’s really that simple.
Being uninformed (because a system is complex) and/or acting irrationally (because of financing stress) are not aptly described as "idiocy," which is a value judgement about individuals, not a description of those individuals information.
>Either they have money to pay bills or they don't. It's not that complicated.
The long term financial heath of individuals and families is complicated. Complicated by information asymmetry, financial uncertainly, and unscrupulous lenders who sell short-term solutions (like lending you money to buy a car that you have to drive to earn enough money to pay for the car -- and then dropping the rate at which you can earn to pay off the car). Usury laws exist, for example, not because people are "stupid," but because well-heeled companies can and do financially exploit people in bad positions.
Basically, driving for Uber is a bad idea and almost always not worth it financially for the drivers. And yet people do it. Not because they are idiots, but because start-ups have been able to skirt hard-won labor protections and safety laws to exploit a group of ad-hoc workers, whose time would be better spent collecting welfare checks and gaining marketable skills to land a full time position.
Maybe there are lots of jobs there, but do these jobs give the flexibility of working whenever one wants, like Uber does? In life, nothing is as simple as that. Applying the same logic, we can say if a woman is mistreated by her husband/bf, she can simply leave him. If a manager is bad, find another job. If a country is hostile to immigrants, leave and move back home or to another country. And so on. The reality is somewhere in between "just pack up and go" and "stuck indefinitely".
Uber/Lyft/Instacart etc are in fact exploiting their drivers simply because they can. The drivers aren't unionized, they aren't getting much help from government regulations (it isn't illegal yet, just immoral and unethical), so they are at the mercy of these gig economy companies.
Here is an exercise. Can you name one gig economy company that is treating its workforce well? I am trying, and failing.
If lyft/Uber/instacart are forced to make them employees instead of contractors then the first thing they will lose is the flexibility. They will likely not be allowed to work for other companies and have to drive X number of hours, etc. The drivers can’t have their cake and eat it too.
Again, life isn't as simple as that. Maybe it is easy for highly skilled software engineers to pick jobs of their choosing, but for majority of the workforce, it isn't as simple as "leave it". Which is what I am trying to explain.
I am simply pointing out that the whole situation is one sided, with these companies having all the power, and Uber (Lyft, Instacart etc) are simply taking advantage of it and exploiting their workforce. Sure, from a pure ruthless business view, it makes sense to pay as little as possible and extract as much as possible. A lot of companies do it and legally, they are not in the wrong. Ethically and morally, they are. And yes, they do prey upon the weakest among us and they do exploit them, you can sugar coat it any which way, but the fact remains.
But they have hundreds of thousands of drivers. If you’re somehow saying that only the weakest of the weak are driving for Uber, with no other options, you are delusional and just feeding your own narrative.
There is a significant barrier to start driving for Uber. You need a relatively new car with insurance and registration, drivers license, etc. You can’t have that if you’re so weak with no options as you suggest.
The Value of Flexible Work: Evidence from Uber Drivers
https://www.nber.org/papers/w23296?sy=296
There are jobs that pay more with less flexibility. These individuals are free to pursue those jobs. Personally, I would easily trade a third of my salary in exchange for the flexibility of 4 months of vacation each year if my employer offered it. I'm sure I'm not alone in wanting to trade salary for flexibility because flexibility has greater marginal utility to me.
Instead of assuming stupidity on one party's end, why not consider that there is a rational explanation for people's behavior?
A very rational explanation is that for many people, driving for Uber beats not being able to pay bills, going hungry or being homeless.
People are totally free to live in a world without Uber, by refusing to work for them or use their app. If that would cause them to be homeless or destitute, then what exactly is the issue with Uber -- that it's not bringing as many people as far out of destitution as you might like?
Because you're looking at the benefits in a vacuum. This is a company the skirts the law and intentionally blurs the line between employee and contractor for profit. It is entirely possible that driving for Uber is a rational choice for some people, and at the same time, that Uber is undervaluing their labor and taking advantage of them.
Similarly, in the past, people made the rational choice to sell themselves into indentured servitude. People also made the rational choice to sell their children to factory owners or into marriages for dowries.
Typically, if people had bargaining power through, say, collective action, there would be a corrective force when a sudden unilateral decision to reduce compensation by 25% is made.
What profit are they making by doing that?
> Similarly, in the past, people made the rational choice to sell themselves into indentured servitude. People also made the rational choice to sell their children to factory owners or into marriages for dowries.
And are you blaming the person who took them it, or the conditions that led to that?
> Typically, if people had bargaining power through, say, collective action, there would be a corrective force when a sudden unilateral decision to reduce compensation by 25% is made.
But they do have power. They have the power to not work for Uber. If they did that and there were not enough drivers then Uber would raise rates, either permanently or with Surge pricing.
So they actually have MORE power than an employee in the same situation: The employee would lose their job, but Uber drivers can just refuse to work.
They're shedding expensive employee entitlements and liabilities.
> They have the power to not work for Uber.
A person's ability to exercise their power is proportional to the their financial security. A hungry person will have to make decisions in desperation to secure their next meal. A person behind on their rent will take whatever opportunity they can to secure a roof over their head.
If they paid those, they would just pay the person less. It doesn't actually change anything financially for the company.
>A person's ability to exercise their power is proportional to the their financial security. A hungry person will have to make decisions in desperation to secure their next meal. A person behind on their rent will take whatever opportunity they can to secure a roof over their head.
And? What does any of that have to do with Uber? They offered a job, either the person is better off with it, or they aren't.
It's not like there is a monopoly here. If Uber raised their rates there would be less trips taken, and less drivers would have jobs.
If the drivers feel they aren't making enough money, they would drive less, or not at all. Then rates would go up (if by no other means then by surge pricing).
I've talked to Uber drivers - by far, dwarfing all other issues, their #1 issue is there are not enough customers.
If they raised rates there would be even fewer customers - how does that help anyone?
Information is hard to organize. It’s easy to say that everyone has the potential to be economically rational but practically weighing decisions is hard.
Please engage with my actual arguments, rather than attacking what you (inaccurately) perceive to be my motivation for making them.
So then nothing here is Uber's fault, and Uber shouldn't get any blame.
The problem is the the country that make people unable to pay bills, get food or housing, right?
I wish Americans would lampoon their own government/country as much as they lampoon big businesses.
Interesting that this is the line of thought that you decided to follow and refute, despite the fact that I never claimed that Uber was at fault for those particular problems a person may face. I'm not really a fan of engaging strawmen.
It's entirely possible that for some people, driving for Uber is a rational choice. It is also entirely possible that Uber is undervaluing their labor and taking advantage of them. Hope this helps.
Sorry, I wasn't trying to say that you did say Uber was at fault... I was just trying to clarify the train of thought and understand the conclusions that we can draw.
i.e. corporations are not at fault for people being poor and homeless and unable to get better jobs - that's clearly a government problem.
Every minute we spend blaming Uber/WalMart/McDonalds/etc for that is another minute we're distracted from the actual cause of the problem, and identifying a fix.
If a driver chose uber rationally, that means they have considered all their options, and this is their best one. Therefore, uber is not undervaluing their labour, nor is taking advantage (where 'taking advantage' means to trick or coerce through any means to lead to the person to choose uber rather than the proper rational choice).
Someone might rationally decide to drive for Uber, not because that is their best option, but because that could be their least worst option, among a list of shitty options.
If Uber and Instacart are my only options, and I decide to go with Uber, I am still making a rational choice. But only because I think Instacart is worse than Uber. That doesn't mean these companies aren't taking advantage of me, it just means one is less shitty than the other.
And if your partner does something annoying you leave them and get a new one.
holy fuck. Imagine being this big of an idiot.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. That means posting civilly and substantively, or not at all, and particularly avoiding flamebait.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Someone should explore doing it.
I like the services, and many drivers like the work, but almost all of them hate the pay and overall relationship.
Seeking alternatives in tandem with regulation?
Yeah. Us all saying these over exploitative companies are OK?
No way.
Fact is, these companies, and many others, simply do not have to be as toxic to people as they are, and because of that, I am perfectly fine with attempts to clean things up.
Or, they can do it.
I do not care which, only that improvement happens.
Which would cause drivers to leave, but everything would eventually equilibrate.
But if you also lower the per-mile rate (and total take home pay), then drivers won’t have much left over to “invest” in their independent businesses (their cars). So, the fleet will start to skew to older cars, which might start to drive away riders.
So, if you wanted to keep a steady supply of drivers, a player like Uber should want to maximize the total take-home pay for a driver, but not necessarily the per-mile rate (eventhough the two are obviously confounded).
But by and large, I completely agree with you. I can’t understand the logic behind lowering the per-mile rate for drivers. Given their inherent competition with Lyft for both drivers and riders, they should be working to keep both groups as happy as possible. Maybe they aren’t doing well and are trying to get their books in order before their IPO?
That's probably what it is. They're still not profitable. They might be hoping that this will tip them over the edge into profitability just before the IPO. This is a 25% cut. That's likely to piss off many drivers and make them want to do something else, but they might be counting on the fact that they have a steady supply of new drivers. The new drivers will never have experienced the higher rate.
The sustainable equilibrium approach is the summation of profit margin x ride numbers.
How so? Uber can and does control the number of drivers on their service at any given time.
Keep in mind that Uber currently operates at a loss.
Apparently they already lose money (counting marketing costs and incentives) per ride, how can they expect to operate a going concern by striving to increase expenses?
If you take care of your drivers, they will want to drive for you more frequently, and your rides will have more drivers available. Sure, the price of rides will be a bit higher, maybe a lot higher, but it'll be sustainable.
And here's me speculating... there's only one case where lowering driver pay makes sense, and that's lowering your prices to drive someone else out of business. If Uber is facing so much competition from Lyft & others, they won't be around once people get sick of giving them money. And by pissing off their drivers, they're creating a spot in the market for a higher end competitor to come in. Once a socially responsible, fair trade competitor gets established, it'll be hard for Uber to raise their rates again, because they have a bottom of the barrel reputation.
Of course I'm not in charge of running a ride sharing company, and there are plenty of people who have good intentions at suck at business. Maybe I'm one of the people that naturally walks the path of good intentions that leads straight to hell. Who knows.
My guess is Uber has actually done enough legwork and figured out that contrary to these sob stories in the press, there are more than enough drivers that 1) have efficient vehicles that are cheaper to operate and 2) are willing to work for that profit in quantities to cover demand.
If the rates Uber is providing drivers are so dismal they're protesting in the street, frankly, they should quit. No one is forcing drivers into a money-losing proposition. I'm especially unsympathetic given that they're paid on a per-transaction basis and there are alternative ridesharing companies out there.
Those drivers can go work for a company that charges more for rides, and passengers who care about that can choose that option. The fact that passengers currently seem unwilling to pay for that (somehow we never consider it "socially responsible" that passengers are provided cheaper service...) makes me think that will be unlikely in the short term.
Source: white middle class male in San Francisco couldn't get a job for most if 2009, eventually ended up homeless.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benefit_corporation
I think I will be right, long term.
That experience was absolutely demoralizing in terms of what she was able to actually make. Granted we live in a lower density city in the southeast so that result makes sense. But everything is very skewed toward the company in the case of Instacart...mileage reimbursement is from the store to the delivery...and you can be sent 10-15 miles from your point of origin to the store to purchase goods at.
I'm not surprised at all that Uber (and the gig economy as a whole) are squeezing their "independent contractor labor force" given that for them it's just a stepping stone toward a fully autonomous pipeline. The calculus here isn't toward establishing and maintaining a happy and committed workforce but bridging the gap between funding and profitability through autonomous solutions.
I don't know what the answer is but I couldn't imagine being in a position where one of the few viable options available for any sort of gainful employment was working as part of the "gig" economy.
edit: If that rate is intended to also cover fuel costs then fuel can easily eat up >10% of that $0.60/mi rate. Man.
> As independent contractors who can’t unionize, drivers are isolated from one another.
Especially for Uber who can incentivize payouts in an elastic fashion as the available labor pool shrinks. Service quality might decline a bit as available drivers decrease...but Uber won't even have to explicitly go out and find "scabs" - they can simply temporarily surge pricing to entice some of the drivers who either aren't striking or who aren't as committed.
Difficult indeed to really cut at the heart of Uber in this case and really swing some leverage as organized labor.
Especially with the setback face in U.S. court.
That's the whole problem with this issue: Uber has made the market for taxis/rides incredibly liquid, which has driven the prices down to pretty much exactly the marginal costs. There are plenty of people who have already sunk the cost of a car, and have nothing else to do, so it still makes economic sense to do this with their time.
If the demand for unskilled labor doesn't increase, this will get worse.
It only makes economical sense to drive for Uber with the car if you can't sell it for a good price (you know the car is good and not abused, the buyer doesn't) and that you don't plan on buying a new car after the wheels fall off on the present one, or you need to liquidize your assets a little bit, i.e. getting approx. 100USD for decreasing the value of the car and buying gas driving for Uber for 100USD.
Work towards a position that requires you to be differentiated from others and see your ability to charge more go up.
Wages are rising for all levels of employees.
It's my understanding that the evidence indicates this isn't true (for example, https://globalriskinsights.com/2018/01/us-economy-workers-di... , and many other such). What are you basing this assertion on?
Work towards a position that requires you to be differentiated from others and see your ability to charge more go up.
This is the standard trite, middle-class advice towards people who are hopelessly desperate and trapped in poverty. The hopelessly desperate cannot do this on their own. They don't have the time, the health, the regular hours, the safety blanket of cash, the lack of children, the support network, even the simple knowledge of how to gain skills, on and on - all the things people need to take your advice. They don't have that. That's what being hopelessly desperate is.
Wages are rising, at least nominally, of course. I know they the wage and wealth gap is increasing, and the top 10% are running away with almost all the spoils, and is not a good situation.
However, the context of my response was to the person you had responded to had said that Instacart would have to pay more if people stopped running food for them, to which you had responded that Instacart wouldn't since there was an endless supply of hopelessly desperate people that Instacart can pull from.
Getting from point A to point B, especially with the help of navigation software, is something everyone can do, hence the bottom of the barrel wages. You're competing with almost everyone. Expecting to earn more than the very minimum in that kind of market is unrealistic. Before, the bottom of the barrel jobs were retail/restaurant/hotel/service jobs, but now with Instacart and Uber and whatnot, those are the new bottom of the barrel jobs, and retail/restaurant/hotel/service jobs have had to raise their wages.
I understand some people might not have a good education, some might not know the right language, have a stable home, and that is something society needs to work at fixing, but that's not the reason Uber/Instacart can afford to pay little. It's because the type of work (unscheduled, be your own boss, no language skills necessary, no customer service skills, etc) is desirable compared to other jobs that have a large supply of labor.
At risk of sounding trite, nominal is cold comfort when the real is dropping.
I turned to uber eats, grubhub, and doordash. None of the companies value the drivers. If anything it feels like the companies are trying to milk the drivers so that the company can profit.
If the drivers are happy the customer will be happy and profits can be made. Raising rates for customers, lowering payouts for contractors is a bad idea short term. Automation of transportation is not close enough to discourage all of your contractors from working.
That's probably particularly true of those companies, but it's also endemic to capitalism more generally.
Seems like they are on the verge of turning driving for Uber into a reverse mortgage for your car.
Following the long established model used by couriers, despatch riders etc. It appears to work only temporarily until the real maintenance and depreciation costs become apparent.
Not exactly an ethical base upon which to build - scamming your drivers until they realise it's effectively a scam.
Between all the happy drivers who you begin to notice are just 2 weeks in, and also knowing they are homeless while they are driving in this area makes it harder to support the service
But there is also a reason they drove 100 miles from Sacramento and turned on the app.
If they are also paying Uber drivers for their time in addition to their per mile vehicle costs then having a per mile cost in line with the cost to operate the vehicle is fine but when I looked into it ~5 years ago they charged the rider per mile driven and per minute of standing and then gave the driver a cut of that.
>my heart doesn't understand how such a thing needs to happen.
That's why developers, who have the economic leverage, should stand up for everyone working at their companies, including staff that isn't involved in technical work.
I think it's overwhelmingly no. The option where the company shareholders take less profit is not even on the table - and that's what needs tackling, and the only way to tackle that is via a mix of govt welfare and unions. But the cultural narrative has shifted to the right so much that even mentioning the word union will cause a chilling effect on your career. No ones' gonna do it.
All I hear from my red-state family is how basically the world is coming to an end because the country has veered so far to the left.
I live in SF and things here always seem to be drifting leftward as well, but of course this is probably left HQ so I guess that's not surprising.
That said, some of my farthest left friends in San Francisco are convinced that some kind of extremist right-win revolution is about to happen, and one of them literally moved to Canada in fear of it.
I don't say any of this to disagree with you. Rather, I say this because I feel like something weird is going on in the world. There doesn't seem to be much consensus about what's going on around us - like people aren't living in the same reality.
As for me it seems like mostly life is just going on like it always has - but I deleted social media a while back and quit watching cable news... I think unplugging from that made me realize it's all a giant circus and a lot of people are getting roped into various factional hallucinations and sort of losing touch with reality. But I just don't get how it's become so pervasive, and it leaves me questioning how you can even know if anything is true or not.
Okay, side tangent over... carry on...
Now that the media has these tools, their content becomes subservient to getting those eyeballs, clicks, time on page and repeat visits.
What has all this taught us? That nothing drives metrics like anger and rage, so anger and rage is what the opinion industry produces. Furthermore, cognitive dissonance costs you eyeballs, so the tendency is to further self censor your content to avoid anything that might upset the increasingly sheltered worldview of your audience.
those ways don't matter to the company doing the paying of wages. The only "way" that matters is the scarcity of people willing to perform said job. This is what our society has currently come to, and no individual can make that change without making a personal sacrifice.
> which is the one that matters for economics
Why should I take a 50% pay cut just so the people driving the cars earning our incomes can afford to eat?
As a developer who could "jump ship" to get a pay raise, I feel like I'm at a point where I understand too much is too much and there are a billion other people who need out attention. You don't need seven figures, no one does. We all want different things. So why not let people respectfully wish better for themselves?
won't help systematically but it seems like a way to personally work towards the mission you've outlined.
You have a vc-funded company, operating at a loss, commoditizing the "talent" (drivers/musicians), thereby conditioning the audience (passengers/listeners) to expect an unsustainable cost for the service, using that loss leader mentality to drive other solutions out of business, until they argue or take action that the talent should expect even lower rates than they've historically gotten so the company can have a shot at being profitable. When the larger effect is that the company has captured value that used to go to the talent and then instead goes to the investors.
They're pissing all that money away on loosely related r&d and their hopes/dreams of an autonomous future. They now also need to somehow continue justifying their mind boggling 72 billion dollar valuation.
I expect in the coming years Uber will die and be replaced by a service that works exactly the same way but for a far smaller revenue take and without any of the lofty ambitions.
Found more context:
“In September 2018, we increased the per-minute rate and minimum fares in hopes of making it more worthwhile to drive with Uber in L.A.,” the company said. “Unfortunately, these changes did not have the intended impact.”
As a result, Uber said it was increasing the per-minute rate drivers earn but reducing the per-mile rate and minimum fare. The per-minute rate jumped from 15 cents to 21 cents. But the minimum fare dropped from $3.75 to $2.62 and the more crucial per-mile rate dropped from 80 cents to 60 cents.
https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2019/03/uber-lyft-nyc...
Organizers with Rideshare Drivers United started planning Monday’s action two weeks ago, responding to Uber’s decision to reduce per-mile fares from 80 cents to 60 cents—months after the company raised rates from 60 to 80 in September 2018. Uber says it’s now reversing the move to put its fares more in line with other ride-share companies, and that it expects the net effect of this 25 percent cut will mean that average driver earnings will return to the same level as before the September increase. Uber also noted that it increased its per-minute rate again on March 11. Lyft, meanwhile, has not changed driver rates in the city of L.A. for 12 months.
I suspect a significant number of riders are pretty well off. Why not be exceedingly generous? Tip the driver 10 or 20$.
tipping should be a bonus, for a job well done. Tipping is meant to be a reward for extra-mile service. Tipping is NOT for just merely doing the job.
By making tipping part of sustainable wage, you're just subsidising the wages that the employer should be paying. It's both unfair and unethical.
If you feel like Uber is doing something wrong there's a trivial solution. Just pay your driver more.
Sure it doesn't solve Uber's problems, it doesn't change the behavior of anyone else, but it does solve your personal culpability. (If you feel you have such culpability)
You can see this play out in the food service industry and it is horrible and only contributes to a culture of soft-discrimination.
Before, I prioritized miles. Getting the most miles in the shortest amount of time seemed like the best thing to do although I never sat down and thouroughly worked out what strategy would pay the most. There are lots of subtleties that make the calculation difficult. But with this new pay scheme it might actually pay off to go slowly. This would make rides safer overall but might increase incidences of missing an exit when your fare is lost in instagram.
Maintaining a Toyota Corolla costs roughly 20 cents per mile, especially if you do your own oil changes. And that includes depreciation.
If anyone from Uber happens to read this, I have to say that paying for dead miles would do a lot of good. I would happily give up tips for paid dead miles. Eliminating dead miles would allow drivers to drive anywhere and change the equation in a way that would be very beneficial to Uber overall as a service.
Also add a tiny fee for people who cancel ride after ride looking for the shortest eta. On average a driver wastes 20 cents every time someone does that, probably. So charge 20 cents for cancelling even if it’s immediately. The small group of people who like to treat Uber like an eta slot machine can do so, drivers won’t sit and wait for several minutes to trigger the cancelation fee and the vast majority of riders who don’t do it will only see a small improvement in service quality with no increase in price.
Uber is assigning the rides, consistently incorrectly showing 3 minutes away and with a ride to finish sometimes.
They are stupid/lazy, but its their genetics and they can't help it.
So what is it, that society should do with these people. Curious solutions.
The "it's genetics" argument is also super flawed, as if you look your family 2-4 generations back they were most likely drunk peasants and yet today you're not.
We all know what is the end game here. Driving a vehicle will be recreational activity.
Is this profit, revenue or in transactions?
> The job is literally killing him
I don't mean to be snide or to blame your brother (addiction is a powerful thing), but I'd say that maintaining a smoking habit despite having suffered not one but two heart attacks sounds more like putting a frog in a pot with some water, splashing boiling water into the pot twice, scalding the frog both times, and having the frog decide to stick around and see what happens next.
Scholarly articles on nicotine replacement show that for every person who successful quits using that it costs around $7k, magnitudes more $$ than vape. For some people nicotine is one of the only things they have that makes them hate life less and be able to cope better. On some level I find it unfair that people should say 'well you shouldn't do that categorically' when the vast majority of people have their own individual preferences on vice.
Everyone has their own individual vice preferences, but some vices are demonstrably worse for health than others. I'm not one to tell a person to quit smoking, but it seems likely that in this case, the guy's two heart attacks did just that.
Uber makes 25% commission from the per-mile fee, so the total revenues to Uber and to the drivers is moving in the same direction. I assume Uber wouldn't drop the rate unless their revenue increased. So they must know that (1) the lower fee will be more than offset by the increased demand, and (2) they will have enough drivers to meet that greater demand.
It must be that the total money received by all drivers will go up. So each driver will make more money before expenses (not per hour, but in total).
How will Uber meet the increased demand? Sure, the drivers will be better utilized (less time without passengers), but would that really be enough? Or does Uber expect the drivers will work longer hours? I suppose it's possible that people really desperate for cash will work more even as they are paid (a lot) less. That would be both very sad and very hard to believe (since at this point McDonalds pays better than Uber, after accounting for gas and wear & tear on the car).
Anyway, if somehow the hours per driver stay the same, the gross income per hour will grow. Income after expenses will grow by an even greater percentage.
I really would like to understand whether the increased gross revenue per driver will come from longer hours or not.
The real question is what the supply and demand curves look like. It's possible for everyone to make more money by reducing prices and making it up on volume, if that's what happens.
If you're a driver and you currently spend a lot of time sitting around waiting for riders, and the lower prices reduce that wasteful idle time, you can end up making more money, even working the same number of hours, by driving more miles in the same number of hours.
But that's assuming the lower prices spur sufficient additional demand to compensate for the lower rate per mile, which is going to depend on the specifics of the local market.
The volume increase will more than offset the price drop -- otherwise Uber would have no incentive to drop the price in the first place. What else do we need to know to predict the outcome on drivers pay?
It's generally easier to just try it and see what happens, and then deduce the how from the what. Note however that this will not necessarily be the same thing that happens in another area or at another time, because of all the things that can be different and affect the outcome.
As a comparison, a ride that costs 40 R$ (~$12 USD) on Uber will cost half that on 99. And, I heard while I was there that incredibly 99 pays the drivers more.
I don't know if this is a technical advancement that 99 hasn't needed to make the massive investment that Uber did now that lots more is understood about the ride sharing market, or if Brazilian VCs are pumping money in, or what. But, I experimented with 99 and it was much cheaper.
I stopped using them when a driver let the fare run for an hour after I got out of the vehicle. Unlike Uber there is no cancel button. I'm not sure if this was fraud or he turned off his phone or what, but the experience was terrible trying to get it resolved for an hour.
The most interesting thing is that there are startups attacking the incumbents (Uber and Lyft). The exciting thing is that Uber demonstrated incredible growth patterns like no company we've ever seen. I wonder if it will demonstrate shrinkage like nothing we've ever seen. I have no loyalty to them but Lyft isn't in Brazil and after that experience with 99 I stopped using it.
Fun times.