$10/hr that comes with high liability to your personal belongings doesn't make for a good "supplemental" job. Plus, as mentioned in the Twitter thread, most of the money Uber pays out is in incentives which are absolutely targeted at full-time drivers.
From the data we have about ride sharing. The bulk of rides are done either by people who drive full time or people who drive as a second job. If it were not for those two groups of people, both of which utilize ride sharing as a "job", one could speculate that Uber and Lyft would not be able to exist.
Please enlighten us about how Uber can exist if no one treats it as a job based on the data we currently have. I look forward to your insightful response.
Why is it the drivers' responsibility to subsidize a corporate entity's existence?
How much of themselves should they give to prop up an unsustainable business model?
The money flows up, not down. When Uber eventually collapses, the CEO will fuck off with his golden parachute and all anyone else will have to show for their work is a heavily-depreciated Kia.
We've all heard stories. Some journalists have even been able to get people on record. And still I have to ask why an anecdotal Twitter rant, something the user seems to specialize in, holds any water whatsoever and how it made it to the front page.
While I certainly wish for better conditions for these drivers (and in a grander sense, the entire gig economy), I also worry about the price sensitivity of riders when they go to use these apps: There are tons of users that will make their Uber vs. Lyft decision based on <$1.00 in fare difference. If these drivers get everything they want, I cannot imagine a scenario where fares do not go through the roof, which will likely lead to a decrease in demand, which will have a negative effect on take-home pay for drivers.
The drivers certainly deserve better, however, I think the toothpaste is out of the tube when it comes to what consumers expect and are willing to pay.
It's probably for the best if there's fewer people driving for rideshare companies, who individually make more money. The negative externalities from all those extra cars on the road are fierce, and if those single occupancy trips were charged appropriately then more trips would be taken by alternate methods.
You're still in a car-centric mindset. What I have in mind are non-car transit alternatives, like walking, biking, e-biking, e-scooters, light rail, heavy rail, etc.
Even if the cars are fully electric, they're still dangerous as you point out (until the time they become fully self-driving). So it's best to eliminate as many of them as possible. And a simple tool to do so is to increase taxes on all for-hire vehicle rides, thus targeting taxis and rideshares equally.
And yet plenty of cities worldwide predominantly use public transit to get around (including NYC). So it can and is done, thus it's not "too expensive". Once the transit is there, all that remains is to continue deprioritizing cars, which is quite cheap.
I think that you could make the argument the opposite direction too, that the toothpaste is out of the tube when it comes to convenience. Maybe it's all about price sensitivity, but easily available taxis are such a part of American urban life now it's hard to imagine that it will totally go away if drivers are treated fairly.
Though there's both price sensitivity and competition.
It's hard from the outside to say about price sensitivity (although I'm sure Uber and Lyft have run lots of experiments). Personally, I take Uber, Lyft, taxis, or a private car (or a rental car, public transit etc.) mostly based on what's most convenient to me. But this is predominantly just business travel. I'm sure many daily users have a different calculus.
But there's also the fact that, if Uber doubles their prices tomorrow and Lyft doesn't, a lot of people will presumably shift to the cheaper ride especially given that most of the drivers are the same. (Of course, Lyft could follow suit. At which point, they probably get accused of price fixing.)
I'd like to believe that a simple fix to at least some of the ills afflicting both drivers and companies associated with "ride-share" is to simply double the prices. A few unprofitable customers drop off but the various professionals using these services to go to their jobs or when they travel grumble but keep on using the services.
However, I suspect a lot of the users of these services are pretty price sensitive, both encouraging a race to the bottom for pricing among the services and leading people to drop them entirely if pricing is too high. And once they're considered more of a luxury service, the supply/demand may well drop to the point where a lot of areas with sufficient density today no longer have.
As someone who uses ride-share while traveling for business, if prices doubled, I wouldn't grumble about it and continue to pay, I'd rent a car instead. That's just how the numbers work out.
I do (rarely) take Uber or Lyft instead of renting a car these days on occasions where I'd just prefer not to deal with renting a car and the prices are roughly in the same ballpark. If the deltas were bigger in favor of rental (incl. parking, gas, etc.) I'd probably go back to renting more.
That said, at least for my travel, I mostly rent when I want the flexibility of renting a car or Uber/Lyft just isn't practical, not based on which is cheapest. And I take ride-share/cabs/private car when rental is inconvenient and doesn't buy me anything. (e.g. just going from airport into a city).
>If these drivers get everything they want, I cannot imagine a scenario where fares do not go through the roof, which will likely lead to a decrease in demand, which will have a negative effect on take-home pay for drivers.
With that in mind, revisit page 8 of uber's S1 document(link below), where their momentum towards profitability depends of a circle of arrows where
more drivers/driver availability → lower fares/wait times → more riders → more driver opportunity/earning potential → more drivers
Now just turn the arrows backwards and swap out less/more lower/higher ; if something like unionization occurs that's the path through which uber will (according to their own rubric) spiral down to 0.
The only way they could prevent hemorrhaging drivers and users once that spiral started would be to burn through VC money at a faster rate.
Uber drivers in question are faced with first world costs of living. You're moving the goal posts in support of economic slavery (comparing third world workers in the third world to first world gig workers in the first world, with first world costs of living).
If you can't pay your first world employees a first world living wage, Bye Felica.
Taxi driving is not skilled labor. It simply isn't worth much; certainly not what its full-time drivers are demanding.
Can we also complain about Mechanical Turk? I'd like to earn first-world wages classifying pictures of cats full-time.
Neither scenario is what the gig economy is supposed to be about. If a job doesn't pay sustainably, don't do it.
We tried to regulate taxis such that driving one paid wages on par with costs of living, but then some asshole company undermined that with a populist smartphone app.
So your argument is allow economic abuse instead of regulating against it? No thank you. I like regulation; with it, we get a better society, not Mad Max Race To The Bottom driven by apathetic consumers and psychopathic businesses.
EDIT: I do see the problem, and still believe regulation is the answer (in this case, California legislation [1]).
"If signed into law, the legislation will codify a landmark April 2018 California Supreme Court ruling, which introduced a three-part test to determine which workers businesses can reasonably classify as independent contractors and which must be treated as genuine employees. Workers considered employees are entitled to key labor protections and benefits—such as a minimum wage, overtime pay, and protections under antidiscrimination laws—which many gig-economy companies have long resisted."
This will decapitate gig economy companies in California.
No, I'm for regulation, but Uber drivers themselves are actually the problem here.
We had a regulated industry. Its labor force had collective bargaining power. Its labor pool was capped to limit surplus labor and everyone could get paid fairly.
Uber came along, organized a bunch of scabs willing to work for pennies to undermine all that, devalued the labor the existing industry provided and now those scabs are complaining they're not paid enough.
I think you get my point and I do get yours. I don't believe in exploitation and support efforts to mitigate it.
One negative outcome of that particular regulation will be the games that start getting played to beat around that three-part test, like Walmart delegating hours just a few short of qualifying employees for benefits. We've seen this play out before and I have my doubts about its effectiveness.
I had a couple passengers who'd tried their hands at taxi driving and couldn't make money. It takes a while to figure out the ropes, where to go for the big fares that pay the bills, etc. Being able to deal with problematic people is a challenge too.
> It simply isn't worth much;
Except when you have somewhere you need to go, and no vehicle to get you there. Having someone to drive you home from the bar is invaluable when you're wasted.
> certainly not what its full-time drivers are demanding.
Economic cancer has many symptoms.
App-based dispatch simplifies driving people around for money. It also hides the cost of driving. If people don't keep track of their mileage and expenses, app drivers are probably losing their shirts on their vehicles' depreciation. The taxi company kept most of its vehicles on the road for 400,000 miles. I doubt many ride-share vehicles will make it past 200,000, as parts on cars are always breaking, and it's expensive to pay someone full shop rates ($75+/hour) to fix it for you. Our crew of 3-4 drivers put 100,000+ miles a year on the taxi we shared. That cab had a head gasket replaced, a battery pack, and a used engine was transplanted when the head gasket failed again. It was totaled in an accident at around 475,000 miles (this was after I had to quit), soon after the owner had paid it off.
I wasn't the best at maximizing my income because I was more interested in people and their stories than the bottom line. I made enough to pay my rent and keep afloat, even after the vulture capitalists arrived with their "not-a-taxi" service.
> We tried to regulate taxis such that driving one paid wages on par with costs of living,
Arizona's regulations are for safety (background checks for drivers, basic vehicle maintenance, etc) and consumer protection (calibrated taxi meters).
> but then some asshole company undermined that with a populist smartphone app.
> I cannot imagine a scenario where fares do not go through the roof,
That's what needs to happen if Uber is to actually generate a profit instead of burning through other people's money.
They lose money on every ride; they're MoviePass, except they can hang on by dangling the pipe dream of "self-driving" transport in front of investors. A glittering future where they don't have to bother with pesky humans asking for due process when they're dismissed.
The assumption here is that what consumers expect is reasonable, realistic, and sustainable, which ain't necessarily so. If some billionaire gave away chocolate bars for a couple of years then stopped, would we have any sympathy for people who thought that they should still get free chocolate all the time? The ride hailing companies have deliberately underpriced their product.
At some point their chickens will come home to roost. If you take a price that's too low and multiply it by tremendous numbers of units sold, way more than the competition even, you [still end up with not enough money][0].
I have no trouble. People who make bad financial decisions... not necessarily catastrophically bad, just bad... tend to make other ones, like trying to pay off their debts by becoming an Uber driver because they bought Uber's propaganda lock, stock, and barrel. Being unable to pay off the car could very well be merely an exemplar of a larger problem.
I've had a couple friends of the family I've been watching on similar paths. It's not like they're "handing their money over to scammers" or anything catastrophically stupid, but they make a kinda bad decision, then compound it with some other kinda bad decisions about what jobs to take, and then make some more kinda bad decisions, and before you know it, they're losing their house and declaring bankruptcy. The tears might not just be about this particular thing, but the increasingly undeniable recognition they're on a snowball's path down a slope they've done everything in their power to make avalanche-prone.
The people I know aren't screwing up by thinking they can make lots of money by being Uber drivers without running the math for themselves (that is, it may work for some people but you really have to run the math and be sure before doing it), but it's the sort of thing that would fit right in to their life story right now.
> We drivers have zero rights. Zero. Uber/Lyfts' idea to start a driver association is going to do nothing for us. The culture of these co's is that we don't matter, that we are junk, replaceable, & deserve nothing. We have to fight together to win this.
Lots of those platforms have a simple business model: Outsource the risk to individual partakers, with that, lowers the price for consumers, but market it as"disrupting".
As long as the individuals to whom the risk is deferred to, are either locked in, or can cover their risks easy enough, there is no problem.
In this, Uber seems to be really pushing the envolope on the amount of risk they can externalize, before their individual risk-takers form a union or walk away.
I'm really glad I saw this. These are the types of things that I think the media should cover. Instead, we get the same weather, traffic and political BS every day.
Unfortunately, it looks like few other people will see this on HN -- it's already flagged to the second page even though it should easily be the #1 post right now.
In this case, a union doesn't make much sense. If a strong union was formed, the drivers would then be organized enough to form their own co-op. Uber doesn't really own the means of production here. The drivers do. It's not like a Walmart or something where the drivers would need a lot of capital to start a co-op. Wouldn't the capital they need be pretty minimal?
> Wouldn't the capital they need be pretty minimal?
Hard to say. Uber seems to employ large numbers of extremely expensive silicon valley engineers doing god-knows-what. Maybe those are necessary to run a successful ride dispatching app?
On the other hand, groups like Lyft, Ride Austin, and Curb seem to have cloned Uber's main app.
Interesting, isn't it. I get that huge scale is very hard, and I'm sure the iterative small optimisations become increasingly difficult... but the MVP of an Uber-like app wouldn't seem to be hugely complex?
If other firms are started like a co-op with an app clone like Ride Austin, it could lead to drivers wearing a dozen hats or "employers" and flipping between platforms depending on pricing which may benefit Uber/Lyft who can subsidize costs to undercut competition. Investors may then choose to go with an established firm like Uber as they already are in this cycle and may projects in the works that become the real money maker like self driving technology.
The problem with a co-op is that it lacks deep venture capital money bags to fund prices cheap enough to compete with rich companies. Lyft and Uber are both okay loosing money on each ride to maintain market dominance. A co-op doesn’t have that luxury.
Uber owns and controls access to their platform, which is effectively the means of production. If you just own a car, it's hard to hire that out on your own to make money. Every Uber driver is dependent on rides being funneled to them through the Uber platform.
> Every Uber driver is dependent on rides being funneled to them through the Uber platform.
A driver can easily switch to Lyft (many already drive for both Uber and Lyft), or to whatever new platform comes along tomorrow and offers better terms to the driver than Uber does.
Lyft owns and controls access to their own platform in precisely the same way that Uber does theirs. The "means of production" here are never owned by the actual drivers, but rather, by the companies that own and operate the platforms.
The platform is not hard, at least from a software standpoint. Moreover, they can take advantage of several years of the market leaders having done a lot of the UX refinement work and making mistakes.
Realistically, I could see a MVP-grade ordering/dispatch/registration/billing/accounting platform costing well less than a million dollars.
Hell, open source it and each community's drivers can spin up its own locally-owned Lyft/Uber clone. It makes sense as a geographical natural monopoly, and building at that level may avoid some scale-to-infinity technical problems. The New York co-op can build clever features and share them with Chicago without worrying that undermines their viability.
It will never get better for gig economy. They are basically mturks until automation is ready. It sucks and it is sad, but the problems are bigger than any one company in the US and ultimately the responsibility of the government. Gig economy jobs were never meant to be people's bread and butter. Also if the price went up much people wouldn't pay for it anymore.
> Gig economy jobs were never meant to be people's bread and butter
This is the same talking point people use when arguing against raising wages for retail or fast food workers.
Reality shows that, like retail jobs, gig economy jobs are many Americans' bread and butter. Pandora's box has already been opened.
> Also if the price went up much people wouldn't pay for it anymore.
Doubt it. Investor money allows gig economy companies to undercut their competition. Five years ago I could get across town for $5 via Uber or Lyft. Now, the costs average to about $18 for the same trip. I doubt that my driver's compensation more than tripled during that time like my trip's cost did.
There's plenty of room for gig economy workers to increase their pay. Companies that take poverty-level pay for their workers as a given, like Uber, might not survive, but other players will pop up in that space to eat their lunch.
Why do so many people always default to "the government will fix it" instead of expecting people to take responsibility for themselves?
Everyone has the same 168 hours each week. Even with 12 hour days, 8 hours of sleep, 3 hours for meals, 7 days a week, that still leaves 21 hours to do things to change your circumstances. You only need to keep that up long enough to get into better circumstances that buy you more time.
I worked a few years under similar circumstances. It's totally doable, but you have to plan and have to budget your time.
You also need health, genuine opportunity and limited other drains on your energy - don't have anyone sick that needs you, and don't have any children. If you've already lost your health, or have someone relying on you as a carer, or are living somewhere without real opportunity (or perhaps very vulnerable to something that'll get you fired or deeper in inescapable debt - one car maintenance issue, one missed bus, one day off sick), well...
Also, you need the ability to plan and budget your time. These are real skills, and if you don't have them, nobody's going to teach you, so you're also out of luck there.
Fair enough. I'm as atheist as they come, but I honestly think things worked better when we left those cases you mentioned to the church instead of to government. At least the church operates on the model of "god helps those that help themselves" so there is a genuine effort from those providing relief to get people off the relief instead of letting them become dependent. When the government does it, they are just administering a narcotic, often indefinitely.
The stories linked sound a lot like the stories of people trying to get support from Google for ... well, anything except big-money GCP issues, really.
Well, anyway the whole thing of having drivers there is temporary. They are just there to hold market share for these companies to let them start making money properly when the self-driving taxis arrive and drivers are all terminated in the end (maybe Uber Black will still have them). They aren't just expendable - they are a stopgap solution as a whole.
It's not a tinder box. It's a meat grinder. It's an optimized capitalist instrument: extract labour from people at the lowest cost possible to keep expanding.
64 comments
[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 128 ms ] threadPlease enlighten us about how Uber can exist if no one treats it as a job based on the data we currently have. I look forward to your insightful response.
Why is it the drivers' responsibility to subsidize a corporate entity's existence?
How much of themselves should they give to prop up an unsustainable business model?
The money flows up, not down. When Uber eventually collapses, the CEO will fuck off with his golden parachute and all anyone else will have to show for their work is a heavily-depreciated Kia.
I think this is why.
The drivers certainly deserve better, however, I think the toothpaste is out of the tube when it comes to what consumers expect and are willing to pay.
It's better to have an Uber idling at some corner than a traditional taxi driving furiously while trying to find a new ride.
That's what the Uber drivers do in the cities I have lived or visited.
Taxi drivers are the most aggressive and dangerous drivers ever. Almost all crashes I have seen involve one or two taxis.
You can't ignore that externality when discussing the only alternative to taxis we have now.
Even if the cars are fully electric, they're still dangerous as you point out (until the time they become fully self-driving). So it's best to eliminate as many of them as possible. And a simple tool to do so is to increase taxes on all for-hire vehicle rides, thus targeting taxis and rideshares equally.
It also requires to rebuild some cities, something that is way too expensive.
It's hard from the outside to say about price sensitivity (although I'm sure Uber and Lyft have run lots of experiments). Personally, I take Uber, Lyft, taxis, or a private car (or a rental car, public transit etc.) mostly based on what's most convenient to me. But this is predominantly just business travel. I'm sure many daily users have a different calculus.
But there's also the fact that, if Uber doubles their prices tomorrow and Lyft doesn't, a lot of people will presumably shift to the cheaper ride especially given that most of the drivers are the same. (Of course, Lyft could follow suit. At which point, they probably get accused of price fixing.)
However, I suspect a lot of the users of these services are pretty price sensitive, both encouraging a race to the bottom for pricing among the services and leading people to drop them entirely if pricing is too high. And once they're considered more of a luxury service, the supply/demand may well drop to the point where a lot of areas with sufficient density today no longer have.
That said, at least for my travel, I mostly rent when I want the flexibility of renting a car or Uber/Lyft just isn't practical, not based on which is cheapest. And I take ride-share/cabs/private car when rental is inconvenient and doesn't buy me anything. (e.g. just going from airport into a city).
With that in mind, revisit page 8 of uber's S1 document(link below), where their momentum towards profitability depends of a circle of arrows where
more drivers/driver availability → lower fares/wait times → more riders → more driver opportunity/earning potential → more drivers
Now just turn the arrows backwards and swap out less/more lower/higher ; if something like unionization occurs that's the path through which uber will (according to their own rubric) spiral down to 0.
The only way they could prevent hemorrhaging drivers and users once that spiral started would be to burn through VC money at a faster rate.
S1 document - https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1543151/000119312519...
If you can't pay your first world employees a first world living wage, Bye Felica.
If the only problem you have with this is that this exposes modern slavery in your back yard then you have a problem.
I highly encourage workers in third world countries to unionize and fight for a living wage locally through activism and political engagement.
Can we also complain about Mechanical Turk? I'd like to earn first-world wages classifying pictures of cats full-time.
Neither scenario is what the gig economy is supposed to be about. If a job doesn't pay sustainably, don't do it.
We tried to regulate taxis such that driving one paid wages on par with costs of living, but then some asshole company undermined that with a populist smartphone app.
EDIT: I do see the problem, and still believe regulation is the answer (in this case, California legislation [1]).
"If signed into law, the legislation will codify a landmark April 2018 California Supreme Court ruling, which introduced a three-part test to determine which workers businesses can reasonably classify as independent contractors and which must be treated as genuine employees. Workers considered employees are entitled to key labor protections and benefits—such as a minimum wage, overtime pay, and protections under antidiscrimination laws—which many gig-economy companies have long resisted."
This will decapitate gig economy companies in California.
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/california-lawmakers-move-protec...
We had a regulated industry. Its labor force had collective bargaining power. Its labor pool was capped to limit surplus labor and everyone could get paid fairly.
Uber came along, organized a bunch of scabs willing to work for pennies to undermine all that, devalued the labor the existing industry provided and now those scabs are complaining they're not paid enough.
Do you not see the problem with this?
One negative outcome of that particular regulation will be the games that start getting played to beat around that three-part test, like Walmart delegating hours just a few short of qualifying employees for benefits. We've seen this play out before and I have my doubts about its effectiveness.
I had a couple passengers who'd tried their hands at taxi driving and couldn't make money. It takes a while to figure out the ropes, where to go for the big fares that pay the bills, etc. Being able to deal with problematic people is a challenge too.
> It simply isn't worth much;
Except when you have somewhere you need to go, and no vehicle to get you there. Having someone to drive you home from the bar is invaluable when you're wasted.
> certainly not what its full-time drivers are demanding.
Economic cancer has many symptoms.
App-based dispatch simplifies driving people around for money. It also hides the cost of driving. If people don't keep track of their mileage and expenses, app drivers are probably losing their shirts on their vehicles' depreciation. The taxi company kept most of its vehicles on the road for 400,000 miles. I doubt many ride-share vehicles will make it past 200,000, as parts on cars are always breaking, and it's expensive to pay someone full shop rates ($75+/hour) to fix it for you. Our crew of 3-4 drivers put 100,000+ miles a year on the taxi we shared. That cab had a head gasket replaced, a battery pack, and a used engine was transplanted when the head gasket failed again. It was totaled in an accident at around 475,000 miles (this was after I had to quit), soon after the owner had paid it off.
I wasn't the best at maximizing my income because I was more interested in people and their stories than the bottom line. I made enough to pay my rent and keep afloat, even after the vulture capitalists arrived with their "not-a-taxi" service.
> We tried to regulate taxis such that driving one paid wages on par with costs of living,
Arizona's regulations are for safety (background checks for drivers, basic vehicle maintenance, etc) and consumer protection (calibrated taxi meters).
> but then some asshole company undermined that with a populist smartphone app.
populist subsidized smartphone app.
That's what needs to happen if Uber is to actually generate a profit instead of burning through other people's money.
They lose money on every ride; they're MoviePass, except they can hang on by dangling the pipe dream of "self-driving" transport in front of investors. A glittering future where they don't have to bother with pesky humans asking for due process when they're dismissed.
At some point their chickens will come home to roost. If you take a price that's too low and multiply it by tremendous numbers of units sold, way more than the competition even, you [still end up with not enough money][0].
[0]:http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0135.html
I've had a couple friends of the family I've been watching on similar paths. It's not like they're "handing their money over to scammers" or anything catastrophically stupid, but they make a kinda bad decision, then compound it with some other kinda bad decisions about what jobs to take, and then make some more kinda bad decisions, and before you know it, they're losing their house and declaring bankruptcy. The tears might not just be about this particular thing, but the increasingly undeniable recognition they're on a snowball's path down a slope they've done everything in their power to make avalanche-prone.
The people I know aren't screwing up by thinking they can make lots of money by being Uber drivers without running the math for themselves (that is, it may work for some people but you really have to run the math and be sure before doing it), but it's the sort of thing that would fit right in to their life story right now.
Lots of those platforms have a simple business model: Outsource the risk to individual partakers, with that, lowers the price for consumers, but market it as"disrupting".
As long as the individuals to whom the risk is deferred to, are either locked in, or can cover their risks easy enough, there is no problem.
In this, Uber seems to be really pushing the envolope on the amount of risk they can externalize, before their individual risk-takers form a union or walk away.
Unfortunately, it looks like few other people will see this on HN -- it's already flagged to the second page even though it should easily be the #1 post right now.
Hard to say. Uber seems to employ large numbers of extremely expensive silicon valley engineers doing god-knows-what. Maybe those are necessary to run a successful ride dispatching app?
On the other hand, groups like Lyft, Ride Austin, and Curb seem to have cloned Uber's main app.
A driver can easily switch to Lyft (many already drive for both Uber and Lyft), or to whatever new platform comes along tomorrow and offers better terms to the driver than Uber does.
Realistically, I could see a MVP-grade ordering/dispatch/registration/billing/accounting platform costing well less than a million dollars.
Hell, open source it and each community's drivers can spin up its own locally-owned Lyft/Uber clone. It makes sense as a geographical natural monopoly, and building at that level may avoid some scale-to-infinity technical problems. The New York co-op can build clever features and share them with Chicago without worrying that undermines their viability.
This is the same talking point people use when arguing against raising wages for retail or fast food workers.
Reality shows that, like retail jobs, gig economy jobs are many Americans' bread and butter. Pandora's box has already been opened.
> Also if the price went up much people wouldn't pay for it anymore.
Doubt it. Investor money allows gig economy companies to undercut their competition. Five years ago I could get across town for $5 via Uber or Lyft. Now, the costs average to about $18 for the same trip. I doubt that my driver's compensation more than tripled during that time like my trip's cost did.
There's plenty of room for gig economy workers to increase their pay. Companies that take poverty-level pay for their workers as a given, like Uber, might not survive, but other players will pop up in that space to eat their lunch.
Why do so many people always default to "the government will fix it" instead of expecting people to take responsibility for themselves?
Everyone has the same 168 hours each week. Even with 12 hour days, 8 hours of sleep, 3 hours for meals, 7 days a week, that still leaves 21 hours to do things to change your circumstances. You only need to keep that up long enough to get into better circumstances that buy you more time.
I worked a few years under similar circumstances. It's totally doable, but you have to plan and have to budget your time.
Also, you need the ability to plan and budget your time. These are real skills, and if you don't have them, nobody's going to teach you, so you're also out of luck there.
community > government