Was there any serious group claiming otherwise? The powerful are usually fairly obviously moving to keep wages low, and the poor are usually complaining that the powerful are moving to keep their wages low.
The part of this that jumps out at me is how much difficulty the workers have in getting someone in to politics who is one of their own. The incentives just don't line up, and they keep wasting all their efforts on wage disputes rather than more effective bargaining strategies to get part-ownership of businesses. We can see it again here - Uber drivers are literally bringing their own car, but seem incapable of producing their own app and marketing structure.
They can have their own app but without the VC money that Uber has to run without a profit for literally years, they can’t compete. Because they actually need to be profitable!
I suspect they could make a business that would get enough sympathetic riders in a left-leaning city to be viable. It wouldn’t be outrageously highly valued, but at the end of the day, it’s driving people around in cars and there’s only so much willingness to pay there.
They wouldn’t, actually. It’s been tried and they just don’t have the network effects to be comparable to Uber. A lot of big city rideshare is visitors, tourists, business meetings, etc. who already know Uber/Lyft UI and aren’t willing to download a new phone app for each city they visit, regardless of if it’s better for the drivers.
> We can see it again here - Uber drivers are literally bringing their own car, but seem incapable of producing their own app and marketing structure.
You seem to be under the impression that Uber drivers are people with the time and money to engage in risk pursuits that cost upfront cash, with a hope of a long term payoff.
Most Uber drivers are looking for cash now, to fill their already empty pockets. In many cases Uber is little more than terribly priced equity release tool, turning the capital cost of your car and fuel back into liquid cash. If these people had the capital and time to build a business, they wouldn’t be exploited by Uber.
Exactly, the problem is that a taxi firm (+ app) would be a perfect fit for being organised as a worker's cooperative. However those workers have no way of raising the capital necessary, in the current system, to start that firm, even if it would mean better outcomes in the long run. It's perverse.
> Was there any serious group claiming otherwise? The powerful are usually fairly obviously moving to keep wages low, and the poor are usually complaining that the powerful are moving to keep their wages low.
The poor aren't complaining that the powerful are keeping their wages low; the poor are complaining that the rich pay too much in taxes and the "undeserving" (some ethnic outgroup or other) get handouts from the government.
> “For decades, Americans have experienced a populist uprising that only benefits the people it is supposed to be targeting.... The angry workers, mighty in their numbers, are marching irresistibly against the arrogant. They are shaking their fists at the sons of privilege. They are laughing at the dainty affectations of the Leawoof toffs. They are massing at the gates of Mission Hills, hoisting the black flag, and while the millionaires tremble in their mansions, they are bellowing out their terrifying demands. 'We are here,' they scream, 'to cut your taxes.”
― Thomas Frank, What's the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America
> “If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.”
> What this doctrine means for the politics of income inequality should be clear: a profound complacency. For successful professionals, meritocracy is a beautifully self-serving doctrine, entitling them to all manner of rewards and status, because they are smarter than other people. For people on the receiving end of inequality—for those who have just lost their home, for example, or who are having trouble surviving on the minimum wage, the implications of meritocracy are equally unambiguous. To them this ideology says: forget it. You have no one to blame for your problems but yourself.
> Because most of the fuses lit by Clinton and Co. didn’t actually detonate until after he had left office—and by then some science-denying Republican was in the Oval Office—they found it easy to absolve the Democrat from blame. When a Rhodes scholar was the one deregulating and cutting taxes, why, those were good times; when some idiot from Texas tried his hand at it, the world crashed and burned. Just another demonstration of the importance of a good education, I guess.
> The part of this that jumps out at me is how much difficulty the workers have in getting someone in to politics who is one of their own.
That's largely by design. Look at all the effort put into the blatant attempts at union busting by most of the major tech companies. Tired workers are always at a disadvantage in a war of attrition against wealthy companies. Doubly so when those companies are paying the people who represent us in government.
> Was there any serious group claiming otherwise? The powerful are usually fairly obviously moving to keep wages low, and the poor are usually complaining that the powerful are moving to keep their wages low.
Depends on the country. In the US, the powerful have become influential enough to make the poor fight against each other (under the guise of "The Right VS The Left") instead of realizing that both groups have a common enemy that is manipulating them very successfully.
We already have better. Labour rights are hard fought for rights that exist because employers used to be so abusive. Uber are just trying to wind back the clock, claiming that technology means that traditional labour rights are outdated.
Uber's big promise was to replace workers with automation. This failed, but you could see Waymo or another service replacing all taxi drivers. You could have automated semitrucks that drive freight on freeways and reduce the need for truck drivers.
Heck even most Burger King stores have kiosks that are replacing people.
I did some digging and found that we’ve had more people leaving the work force than entering it where I live. This is hitting jobs on the bottom end of pay first.
When driverless cars hit the road, my family will become a 1 car family (instead of 3). This is going to impact a lot of parking garages and other businesses.
> The company developed a ‘kill switch’ that would remotely encrypt its computers and devices if an office was raided by authorities, used at least two dozen times
How are they not drowning in gigantic obstruction of justice lawsuits and regulatory demands?
Obstruction is difficult to prove, costly to prosecute and they can afford the fine. Unfortunately when dealing with international groups financials come into the equation regarding prosecution as they could hold this in the courts in years and spend 10x the fine in lobbying for a change in obstruction laws.
I agree there guilty and are behaving in a borderline devil way but given they're playing with the big boys in the valley who actually has any control over them?
if so, who do you think gets that, the mug that pulled the trigger will likely take the fall rather than CEO unless you've paper writing that he issued the instruction (which isn't likely to exist, even at twitter)
A "kill switch" that engages upon unauthorized access to an office or a server rack should be standard operating procedure of any company that deals with sensitive data. Make it as hard as possible for actors like burglars or "inside actors" like cleaning staff to exfiltrate data.
For most companies, the data is more important than the service uptime.
Think about it... Would you prefer your Gmail to be down for a few hours, or for Moscow/Beijing to get a copy of all your sent/received emails cos they dumped them from Google's servers in the country?
> A "kill switch" that engages upon unauthorized access to an office or a server rack
Wouldn't a raid by police (at least if they have a warrant) be "authorized access" because they are law enforcement?
At the very least, they could trigger the kill switch when the raid first happens, but once it has been verified it is the police, the kill switch should be disengaged so they have full access.
If the police comes knocking on your door with a warrant, aren't you legally obliged to do as they say? I thought that was the entire point of a warrant.
If the data is on the premise, how would the warrant not include being able to look at the data?
That's like saying a warrant wouldn't include data found in a safe, and that would require a second warrant.
Now, if the data is remote, I'd understand it I guess. But if the kill switch simply burns the local data so only remote copies are still there, that kind of defeats the purpose of the raid in the first place.
The warrant lets law enforcement look for and seize things. It doesn't necessarily compel the target of the search to perform an action. Normally you would oblige the officers since otherwise they would just cut open your locks, but with encryption, that's probably not an available alternative.
Afaik, courts are undecided on whether you can be compelled to decrypt your own data.
Corporations are held to different standards though. They are often required to share information about themselves with the government, are constantly involved with discovery processes, and generally have different expectations of privacy.
Not necessarily. The police don't automatically have access to everything when they kick down a door. The warrant needs to state explicitly what they're after.
If the data specified by the warrant is suddenly and intentionally encrypted then they still have to provide that data or argue the obstruction angle in front of a judge. Just because a company is incorporated doesn't mean they lose all rights.
So warrant say "Uber should hand over data about transfers in/out from the companies bank account" and Uber can then hand them over a password protected CSV and say "You didn't ask for data you could read" and the police should just be like "Hah, you got us! We'll come back with another one!"?
Should there maybe be a difference between a huge incorporated company operating for profits (no matter what the consequences are) VS a private individual just wanting to go on with their day?
They have the right to privacy when they are following the law. On the other hand, if police enforcement have a legal warrant to read internal documents about how you run your business, to prevent employees from being exploited, they absolute should get access to it.
I understand having a process in place to be able to hide data from criminals stealing your data, that's not a problem. The problem becomes when companies start to hide data from legal requests, which is what Uber is in the hot for here.
That means everyone should just stop complying to lawful warrants? Or that laws in general don't work? Or that you'd rather have companies maintaining laws? We can pick & chose what laws to follow?
I'm not sure I understand the reasoning nor conclusion of your comment.
People have rights because they are humans. Companies aren’t, and as such don’t inherently deserve any rights. They are granted some rights where it’s beneficial to the society, or because of corruption (often legalized as lobbying).
The company couldn't care less about privacy. As it is not human it has no feelings. Rather it is people – real live humans – who called for said "kill switch". It is they who seek privacy, not the company.
You can remotely lock any MDM managed device, this was possible 10 years ago and you need zero development. iCloud lock even brought this to the consumer space.
It is clear that non-tech people wrote this. Any company device I used in the last 10 years was always encrypted and could be remotely locked to not boot.
Additionally most bigger companies will have "security" software like Crowdstrike on all devices which is basically a backdoor.
Uhh I don't really understand with the apathy towards the kill switch. Kill switch is there the same reason why your phone locked when you click the power button.
> Ripley operated like a “kill switch” that would lock down all the computers in an office, preventing staff from immediately providing any data to police even if they had a warrant.
I guess what's new is everything around it as well as the scope of the usage of Ripley (or the newer tool "uLocker").
We have reverted to cabs at Ft Lauderdale airport — Uber and Lyft drivers were often late, clueless, or had trunks stuffed with junk. The price was not appreciably more. Capitalism self-corrects, if no player is allowed to game the system.
The moment Uber (Grab or whatever local equivalent) appears, they undercut competition on price by operating at a loss for a while, then jack up prices. After that they aren't worth it except in crime-ridden localities or places without regulated taxi systems.
Having a human drive to pick you up and then drive you around is surprisingly expensive. At least if you are not in ultra low cost country. It is sad that the clear dumping of these services was allowed to happen.
Uber is a god-send for that use case. Even in my home city, having a fare commitment up-front, knowing I won’t have to deal with cash or cabbie-bullshit, and ease of use is worth spending more than cabs cost.
If I’m possibly going to have more than one drink with dinner, I’ll use ride sharing. Round trip ride shares aren’t that much more than weekend evening parking anyway.
It may have downsides for some, but it definitely doesn’t have downsides for all.
But don't worry now _I_ don't have to talk to my taxi driver as a human being or walk to a cab because it comes and picks _me_ up on _my_ route to work and integrates with _my_ phone...
Despite any convenience offered you fundamentally had a phone in your hand and the ability to ring a taxi if you planned ahead. This is entirely being lazy and self centred.
I don't miss the gruff taxi phone operator who would hang up on me if they couldn't hear me properly, or sent the taxi to the wrong place, or gave me a totally wrong time estimate.
The thing is, Uber is also convenient for the class of people it exploits. I've got some poorer neighbors without cars that use it all the time. Previously it was hard to get taxis to show up to this part of the city at all.
I would if it didn't mean I might have to use taxis.
The taxi experience has been so consistently horrible I'd rather walk if I could. My favorite is the routine of pretending the credit card machine is broken and trying to get me to stop at an ATM so they can get cash. Had one actually threaten to call the cops on me for not paying if I didn't do that after pretending the credit card machine was broken. Refused to drop the ruse.
Of course I must admit that most of these bad experiences were in San Francisco, a city of passive aggressiveness all the way down from the top. I have to admit that taxi experiences in New York and Boston were better, though the latter was kind of stupid expensive. Experiences in medium sized cities like Cincinnati have been hit or miss.
Everything related to transportation sucks. Most airlines suck, airports suck, train systems are incompetently run, buses are slow, cars are expensive, taxis are corrupt, Uber is abusive, and... well... I guess bikes are dangerous and horses smell.
My personnal experience.
I come back from a trip in romania - bucharest.
At first I didn't take Uber but tried for the regular Taxi from the airport.
All of them requesting ~40USD.
At the end I go with one who put the meter and indeed arrived to 200 Lei (~40 USD). I payed in euro because I didn't have enough local currency, hopefully I had some and the driver accept.
Taking some information it's way too much, but would I have argue with how the meter was operating anyway?
Now, I need to comeback to the airport at 4am.
So instead, I reserve a airport transfer from the airline itself, pay in advance something like 30 USD this time.
And... no one show up at 4am. Mobile phone of the transfer is not answering... I never heard of them *
So I install Uber, hopefully it's working, enter my visa (from my country, no need for local currency at all), after 10 minutes, someone very nice take me and I just paid like 15 USD to get to the airport, at 5 in the morning, with the invoice by mail.
How do you compete with that? Taxi business need to reflect. And every country is the same strangely, it's as universal than taxes: you can't escape!
* Edit: In fact I know what happened, and there is nothing to do, because I looked at the invoice and on the third page of the voucher PDF there, it's said that I needed to call 24h before to confirm the transfer... They don't call, you have to call. Even after the first confirmation I already did for confirming the pickup address some days before, I wasn't feeling paranoid enough. So you can't say nothing because I didn't read the last page, but it's a dumb heavy process, do people changes their mind and decide to live forever in the country frequently?
And on the other hand, plenty of stories of the opposite happening. I'm not sure how much anecdotes add to a story like this. Especially when the story here is not about if Uber is offering a better service to customers than "normal" taxis, but when the story is about that Uber is exploiting their employees (which they refuse to even call "employees").
If one business offers better service than another, but, the first business exploits their employees, which service should be investigated? I'd agree the second business should be aiming at improving their service, of course, but we also need to clamp down on businesses who are exploiting people.
They aren't quite "employees" given that they can reject my trip request without needing to provide any excuse, which by the way happens frustratingly often esp. during rush hours.
I'd like to see an actual employee do that - like a waiter in a restaurant ("nah, I won't serve you, I'm busy and don't feel like it"); you'd have a word with their boss. And when things don't work that way, we're probably talking about some form of freelancing. Like a barber renting a chair at a barbershop. He (or she) is not an employee of the barbershop owner, as implied by the fact you can't really complain to the owner if they refuse to serve you.
> They aren't quite "employees" given that they can reject my trip request without needing to provide any excuse, which by the way happens frustratingly often esp. during rush hours.
Doing so enough times will lead to Uber penalizing the driver. Does that sound like a freelancer to you?
Obviously, the definition will change depending on the country. Referring to a previous court case UK (Employment Tribunal: Uber BV v. Aslam), this is why they think Uber drivers are employees, not freelancers:
> Uber set the fare which meant that they dictated how much drivers could earn
> Uber set the contract terms and drivers had no say in them
> Request for rides is constrained by Uber who can penalise drivers if they reject too many rides
> Uber monitors a driver's service through the star rating and has the capacity to terminate the relationship if after repeated warnings this does not improve
With those things in mind, it's hard to not feel like Uber drivers are in fact employees of Uber, not freelancers that can freely engage in business while only being "supported" by Uber or using Ubers app.
> As a freelancer in IT: yes, 100%. If I keep rebuffing my clients, they eventually stop calling.
They might, unless you're the best freelancer in a niche, and they have no other choice.
The difference between you in that situation, and a driver "working" for Uber, is that you or your clients decide if you get any work in that situation, while for the Uber driver, Uber decides if you get any work or not.
So how should this relation work in order for you to accept that Uber drivers don't have to be regarded as employees? Should Uber not have the right to stop pairing the driver with Uber's users no matter what the driver does? Honest question.
Taxi drivers can also, and often do, reject trip requests ^_^. At least in Mexico, where I live, if you ask to go to an inconvenient zone to the driver, they may refuse to take you and you need to wait for another taxi.
I'd be penalised if, in my freelancing, I failed to keep to verbals deals etc. even where a contract permits me to walk away whenever I wanted. The test is if they derive a certain % of their income/hours from a single employer, no? At least that's what I've seen when looking at UK visas (self-employment visas in general often require a diversity of work etc.)
> Doing so enough times will lead to Uber penalizing the driver.
Apparently it doesn't hurt their profitability worse than not being free to choose their clients would. And I see pretty solid evidence of that: they're using this option extensively, I'd be surprised if they did that despite being worse off as a result.
For the waiter from my example "enough times" changes into "even once".
> Does that sound like a freelancer to you?
Well, I mean, if you were a shop trading on Amazon, and you'd keep on cancelling orders, I can imagine you could even get kicked off the platform.
I'm sure you also don't have much say when it comes to contract terms, the provision etc., and then there's the good ol' star rating just the same.
It doesn't mean Amazon is your employer though.
(By the way, a lot of Uber drivers don't drive for Uber directly. They get contracted by some smaller local company which rents them cars etc. Then even if you argue they should have employee status, it's not on Uber, one should hold that local firm accountable. But this fact is conveniently glossed over, because corporations).
> Obviously, the definition will change depending on the country.
Sure, and that's not just because along with the country comes such and such legislation - there's also the political / lobbying aspect.
When thousands of taxi drivers protest by blocking the capital (which happened in several countries), the powers that be do pay attention. Maybe it shouldn't affect how things turn out at courts, and in a perfect world it doesn't, but I think we all know that in our world it does.
So anyhow I'm not speaking for courts, only sharing how I see these things, trying to apply common sense here. Obviously at the end of the day these matters are settled in courts, but this goes without saying.
It's exactly the same discussion about cheap clothing from H&M made with child labor. The counter argument usually is "but children are not forced to work there!" - while basically true, is avoiding the exploitation point.
My personal experience is that it's been cheaper than a taxi, drivers have been nice, cars show up quickly, and the app makes it easier than telling someone on the phone, who may have trouble understanding me, where to go.
However my personal experiences have no value in a discussion of this leak. It's irrelevant whether consumers likes a companies product when discussing rules and regulations.
> It's irrelevant whether consumers likes a companies product when discussing rules and regulations.
Creating the kind of world we want to live in should be the sole purpose of rules and regulations. How people want to live shouldn't play second fiddle to what rules and regulations say. Rules and regulations can be changed.
It's not only about the comfort of the people trying to book a cheap taxi. When creating the kind of world we want to live in we also need to consider the working conditions of the drivers and the regulations society wants to impose on cabs to make sure they operate safely and without nuisance.
I’m uncomfortable to see that this statement seems genuinely needed in all of HN’s threads on this topic.
One could easily get the impression that the HN crowd find it hard to empathize with the service worker.
There’s real truth in the terrible service flaws of the previous taxi system, but the employment flaws of Uber are being smothered with the service improvements they’ve introduced. That’s not the only issue worth caring about.
I don't see why this is bad for workers? Is it the 20% cut, then what if Uber took 5% cut instead of 20%? Could easily create such a regulation for rideshare services, and then you have a job anyone can start doing at any moment with no management layers or hassle or job interviews etc, just start earning money instantly.
Having workers tie themselves to a company for 40 hours a week being the only valid way to make money is conservative thinking, be a bit progressive and see how much freedom this potentially opens up for workers.
The issue ttjjtt and others are pointing out about Uber are not around binding employees to one employer for a fixed 40 hour workweek. In fact, I'd bet ttjjtt would support labor laws which limit a businesses ability to punish employees for moonlighting.
The issue is, like amazon's mechanical turk, that Uber is cutting corners, costs, and wages for their "employees" in ways that are both legal and illegal while secretly lobbying to make it easier for them to reduce benefits.
This is a market leader using their position to harm their workers. "Conservative thinking" is that "why do we need all these labor rules and protections for employees? They signed up for it!" Progressive thinking is "Maybe we shouldn't let businesses set the rules for how they treat employees?"
> Progressive thinking is "Maybe we shouldn't let businesses set the rules for how they treat employees?"
Right, so make regulators get off their asses and start draft up some reasonable regulations where workers can work freely like they can with uber and mechanical turk? Just banning that sort of freedom entirely is conservative thinking, since it aims to preserve the shitty situation we have where everyone needs to have a "job". Today people can't even imagine a society where you don't have a job, you just go and do things that are useful and get rewarded the full fruit of your labour, that sort of thing is possible with Ubers offerings and a bit of regulations, why go all in on preventing that future from happening?
Uber works great for users, we know that. Uber would also work great for drivers if the drivers got a larger cut. So what is the problem, just regulate it and everything gets better than under the old Taxi systems. Why is this so hard to imagine? And no, this is not over regulating at all, at least not more than for example limiting how many Taxi's are allowed to operate in the city etc which is already happening.
> Right, so make regulators get off their asses and start draft up some reasonable regulations where workers can work freely like they can with uber and mechanical turk?
Did you read the article?
The issue is 2 fold.
1. Uber is lobbying heavily for regulators to NOT do that.
2. We have an entire political party in the US (Republicans) that are "anti-regulation" and fight tooth and nail against new regulations.
If we want "regulators" to make things better, we need to put in regulators that want to regulate.
> We have an entire political party in the US (Republicans) that are "anti-regulation" and fight tooth and nail against new regulations.
This doesn't matter on a state level, for example democrats could easily create such regulations in New York or California if they wanted to.
> Uber is lobbying heavily for regulators to NOT do that.
Yes, every corporation lobbies for laws that favors them, this is nothing new. Lobbying isn't corrupt, politicians making under the table deals with corporations is the bad part, lobbying is just corporations telling politicians what kind of laws the corporation would want.
> Lobbying isn't corrupt, politicians making under the table deals with corporations is the bad part, lobbying is just corporations telling politicians what kind of laws the corporation would want.
And then paying money to politicians who offer to do what the corporations want. Lobbying (at least as practiced in the US, where it is considered "free speech" for corporations to "donate" money to politicians they like) is very clearly legalized corruption - there really is no other valid way to look at it.
We actually have a taxi app in Czechia (Liftago) that works as an auction. Drivers offer rates based on their distance, preference wrt. to the destination and can offer higher rates when they are confident in their cars or lower rates when they ride something older.
Yes, it is slightly more expensive than Uber, but the drivers have been vetted by the municipal government, proved their ability to speak the local language and know their way around the city and are insured to be able to pay you off if they crash.
Unlike Uber, they are - in fact - independent contractors. They are actually proud about their freedom.
Uber, OTOH, works here mostly by way of these shady folk who rent cars to disadvantaged immigrants who barely speak the language, collecting most of their earnings, forcing them to drive north of 12 hours per day before they return to Poland or Ukraine in 6 months.
> > Progressive thinking is "Maybe we shouldn't let businesses set the rules for how they treat employees?"
> Right, so make regulators get off their asses and start draft up some reasonable regulations where workers can work freely like they can with uber and mechanical turk? Just banning that sort of freedom entirely is conservative thinking, since it aims to preserve the shitty situation we have where everyone needs to have a "job".
Trying to pass such regulations runs against massive lobbying efforts by companies. Amazon, Uber don't care about giving employees flexibility. They are free to give workers the flexibility, nothing is preventing them from doing it. They use this model to reduce benefits to give their workers. It is incredibly hard to pass regulations against these lobbying efforts. However regulations that companies need to give their workers benefits do already exist, that's why Ubers operations were deemed illegal in places.
> Today people can't even imagine a society where you don't have a job, you just go and do things that are useful and get rewarded the full fruit of your labour, that sort of thing is possible with Ubers offerings and a bit of regulations, why go all in on preventing that future from happening?
The argument is that the future is that people don't have the choice of " just go and do things that are useful and get rewarded the full fruit of your labour," but instead are locked into highly unfavourable situations, with no choice (because of their economic situation) and at the same time skirting around tax obligations, just to enrich the investor class behind Uber.
That did already happen, just look at what Über did with the Uber Black loans where drivers got enticed into car loans with promises of guaranteed income, just for Uber to reduce the fares. This is essentially the same as how servdom in Russia worked.
> So what is the problem, just regulate it and everything gets better than under the old Taxi systems. Why is this so hard to imagine?
That's the whole point about the Uber leaks. Uber was not willing to work under the existing worker protection frameworks, they even exited markets where they were forced to (e.g. Switzerland).
One could easily get the impression that the HN crowd find it hard to empathize with the service worker.
HN is obviously not a hive mind, but in in general, for facets of the HN crowd, the investor class, those with conservative/libertarian views on labor, business owners, etc. the default view is simply to not empathize with the service worker.
Just because people disagree with progressive policies doesn't mean they aren't empathizing with a particular demographic. This particular framing is lazy and frustratingly common. A pretty obvious counterpoint: one can believe that raising the minimum wage drives unemployment among lower class workers while also raising the cost of living--this is an eminently empathetic viewpoint with respect to service workers, etc.
For whatever it's worth, I tend to err a bit toward the "more regulation" end of the spectrum, but I don't feel the need to believe that the world is simple and everyone who doesn't subscribe to my simplistic view is morally deficient.
> A pretty obvious counterpoint: one can believe that raising the minimum wage drives unemployment among lower class workers while also raising the cost of living--this is an eminently empathetic viewpoint with respect to service workers, etc.
Except this counterpoint is not based on real evidence but largely based on purely theoretical arguments which have been shown numerous times to be way too simplistic.
That's irrelevant (and anyway, I'm not sure economists collectively agree with you), the parent claimed that conservatives and libertarians don't empathize. Even if our hypothetical conservative/libertarian is incorrect about the dynamics of minimum wage regulations, the counterpoint still demonstrates empathy.
I'm more uncomfortable with how willing people are to sound insightful for caring about workers, and then end the thought there, without ever asking if they were treated any better as taxi drivers. (Usually no -- at least the in the US, they used the "independent contractor" trick and it was much harder to come on and off shifts.)
The problem with your response is it relies on several bad faith assumptions without evidence.
Your inference that Uber is net neutral to net positive for workers rights is a statement I’ve never heard a taxi driver express or seen seriously or convincingly made in an online discussion.
I’d like to hear more evidence. until then it seems like a comforting thought for a libertarian rather than a sober description of reality.
I didn’t make such assumptions, it was a comment about evidentiary standards, calling out people like you who place an unequal burden on the two positions, and didn’t even realize something could be wrong in the status quo it was being compared to. You validate that charge when you immediately shift the burden (again) to whether I personally can make the case in that direction.
> we also need to consider the working conditions of the drivers and the regulations society wants to impose on cabs to make sure they operate safely and without nuisance
I agree. But we also need to consider when well-intentioned measures are corrupted or fail entirely. That was the case with taxis before Uber. It remains the case with many of Uber's competitors. Uber is no paragon. But the neither is the status quo. This is far from a bimodal argument.
This is the most reasonable statement on the topic I've seen.
The fact is that Uber/Lyft created a new market even when the product existed a long time. In NYC, you could always get a car service to come and pick you up, but you had to know them, have a pre-existing relationship, etc. If you do, even today, it's cheaper than Uber, but it's a hassle.
Also in NYC, taxis are terrible in comparison to Uber. They're usually dirty/unkept, the drivers are sometimes "off". Taxi owners weren't focused on the service- they were focused on the medallion, the right to have a taxi. That's where the real value was.
The taxis were/are essentially anonymous, so there's no incentive to do anything more than the bare minimum in terms of cleanliness, repair or customer service.
Uber, for all its extreme faults, flipped that on its head, with driver and rider visibility, and that changed everything.
Uber has many problems- handicap inaccessibility, driver treatment, a ton of evidence against them regarding deliberate manipulation and probable lying to regulators, but "bring back the old ways" clearly weren't working either.
In Germany at least it's less about safety and more about keeping competition at bay. Operating a taxi requires you to buy a "token" on the black market for around USD 50.000 and by law only token owners are allowed to pick up and drive around people. Rates are set by the municipality as well.
The market needs to break up and become more free.
Similarly, until a few years ago it was forbidden to operate busses between cities.
Uber has some negative aspects but opening up the market and allowing healthy competition is certainly a huge positive.
It's neither a minimum or a maximum, it's the rate. X amount of Euros for Y amount of kilometers (as calculated by the meter while actually driving, which leads to taxi drivers often chosing the 'scenic route'). Maybe extra fees for night drives, or for driving to the airport, or for coming to the pickup place at all (which makes taxis prohibitively expensive in nonurban settings).
That only applies if you’re running a taxi – a transport service (not actually a taxi) can be run by anyone with a Personenbeförderungsschein (just a special driving license) and proper insurance.
There’s a lot of competition on the German market for taxi-alternatives, many of which started long before Uber (and are often cheaper as well).
Agreed, but it's a balance, and in many parts of the world, transportation user needs had been disregarded for so long that there was wide popular support for breaking with the status quo and rebalancing power in favor of the user. Everyone who was an adult city dweller pre-Uber has taxi horror stories at the ready, of not getting picked up, of being overcharged, of unsafe driving, of dirty cars, of feeling threatened or disrespected by the driver — and not feeling like they had any effective recourse. This is what caused the market to be ripe for disruption, the users' sense of powerlessness in the face of a bunch of local players set in their ways and gripped by local worker politics, in the way that most industries are thankfully not.
In the process, Uber clearly behaved illegally and unethically towards its workers and government regulators. That's been known for a while. Could it have been different? Maybe, maybe not. Sometimes governments don't listen until they're forced to.
Now about the working conditions of cab drivers, honestly in many places they were already being screwed over by local oligopolies (for a prime example of this, see for example the NYC medallion auction scams which defrauded individual drivers of hundreds of thousands of dollars). In the Uber story, drivers got shuttled from one shitty situation to another probably just about as shitty.
Hopefully the new set of players in that space now abide by the local rules, and also the regulators learn from their failures and get on top of the industry without forgetting about their users too much.
Sure, rules and regulations could changed, but we need to not only consider what is best for our own life but for others too.
Many rich people wouldn't suffer if Uber could just forcefully employ people at will, keeping them hostage, if Uber could arrange something like that. But that hurts the people who are being kept hostage. When we create/remove/modify regulations, both sides of the coin needs to be considered.
In this case, it's less about how good/bad Uber is for passengers and more about how Uber is exploiting their employees. Even if everyone loved Uber as a passenger, we can't allow them to exploit other human beings.
The first, glaring reason is because Uber refuses to treat them as employees, and instead force them to work as contractors/freelancers, even though they clearly are employees by any reasonable measure.
Most of the Uber drivers I've spoken to, don't like how Uber is treating them. But, I'm not gonna pretend I've spoken to all of them, and I haven't spoken to any of them in the US (mostly South America, Asia and Europe).
But since you apparently sit on a trove of data (as you're so sure of this) that I don't have access to, could you share a bit the results and your methodology?
Do you order stuff on Amazon, ever? Any other big retail shop? Buying only fair-trade food if its not from your neighbor farmer? Dressed only in provably ethically sourced cotton?
And I presume you obviously don't use those pesky child-labor-by-Foxconn phones/other devices like Apple; heck it would be hard to find any electronic device using ie rare metals that were sourced by standards you seemingly want others to adhere to. So I presume you typed this on some wooden computer sending pigeon packets.
We can go much deeper. You will inevitably fail eventually the same standards you are expecting from others here, probably pretty quickly. Its just about which battle one decides to pick up and push hard enough. You picked Uber for some reason, others for around gazillion reasons stated in this thread do not consider them the most important topic given the overall benefits to whole society.
> Creating the kind of world we want to live in should be the sole purpose of rules and regulations.
I don't think anyone would disagree with that. I think the point is that Uber can do shitty things that should be punished and provide a good service that should be encouraged.
To put it another way, the world I want to live in gives you a fair chance of running a competitive business without having to be mega rich and chummy with the leaders of the countries you operate in.
Except that the idea Uber is doing shitty things is strictly the narrative of those that want to see Uber fail. But it’s obvious drivers and customers find utility in working for Uber otherwise there are competitors they can hop to extremely easily. Or they can just stop driving for Uber instantly.
The idea that Uber is creating slaves that have no agency is the typical elitist arrogance, sitting in their ivory towers, picturing all these poor Uber drivers suffering when it’s simply not the case.
Uber is a big company. They can do good and bad things. I personally really like the service they offer, but that shouldn't mean we should let them get away with it if they do something shitty. For example, in Amsterdam they did the following after one of their services was found to be illegal by the local courts
> Uber identified police officers through data mined from the app and then, using an internal tool called “greyball”, served them a fake view of the UberPop app, populated with ghost cars that wouldn’t stop for them. They could also block anyone from booking in certain zones, like around police stations, using a tool called “geofencing”. [1]
Fair enough if you disagree with the court ruling, but they should abide by the law like everyone else.
>Fair enough if you disagree with the court ruling
if you disagree with a court ruling, and then set up intentionally a system to avoid the police detecting you continue your behaviour, you should be punished to the maximum extent of the law. The people who orchestrated that behaviour should have money confiscated from their illegal enrichment, and jail time for purposely working to circumvent a legal order for a court. And if not back then, today.
They pushed against unfair laws, betting they wouldn’t get punished and guess what? They were right.
They broke through all of those unfair laws and now we live in a system that benefits from them breaking the rules for the better. Seriously, you think the taxi monopoly was so much better than now? That’s laughable!
They are allowed to push the boundaries against unfair laws. Which protesters have done countless times. Do you think that prochoice activists should follow the laws when constitutional rights are stripped from them?
Should the Dutch farmers who are being regulated out of business sit idly by while all their hard work goes to nothing?
Uber chose to break the rules against an illegal taxi monopoly and I’m thrilled they did because otherwise no one would have been able to break it. Because they put their necks out on the line we have a driving service around the world that would never have existed if we didn’t have them pushing the boundaries.
I would, for a large number of reasons, at the basic level no one really agrees what the "world should be" thus your regulations for a utopia would not match mine.
Further government has proven through out history to be very poor at creating the kind of word "we want the live in"
Instead government, the law, "rules and regulations" should be about impartial conflict resolution and protection of natural rights not attempting to create some kind of Utopia that it can never achieve and will make everyone life worse in the attempt
> Creating the kind of world we want to live in should be the sole purpose of rules and regulations.
And the first requirement for this is that rules and regulations are followed.
Establish a culture in which there is no consequence for disobeying the rules and regulations and I guarantee that the most regular offenders are not those who's practices you agree with.
The best case scenario here is that there are heavy consequences for those who broke the rules, but the rules are revisited and altered to make things more in line with consumer needs.
What you're discovering here is the difference between the rules, as written, and the actual rules. This is always the case, always. The real speed limit is 10-15 mph faster than the posted limit. The school dress code says no mid-riff shirts, but plenty of girls are wearing them. The PM rules say I can't have more than 2 active user stories assigned to me, but I have 7. If you're attractive you can say all sorts of crazy shit to women, but not if you're ugly.
As an autistic person I found this very hard to grasp when I was young. Now I understand that rules must be discovered as an emergent property, they cannot be read from a manual or law book. What matters is the culture that enforces whatever rules you want. Otherwise you get tons of laws on the books people don't enforce.
Seems like you're addressing the difference between the concept of Social Contract and the concept of Law.
The Social Contract is exactly what you described: the implicit permissions and offenses that a body of people will tolerate. It is, by definition, equal to the current will of the people, and as you said requires discovery. But it requires constant discovery, as the list of permissions and offenses may change over time, and is not necessarily consistent.
Law is an explicit agreement on what permissions and offenses that body of people will tolerate. Ideally it would match the social contract's list of permissions and offenses, but in reality it will always be lagging behind, and it's a social responsibility to try and keep it up to date. Unlike the Social Contract, the law is codified and constant, requiring no discovery.
In small groups of people, coexisting with just the social contract can be all you need. But as the group grows, it becomes less and less possible to predict what the current body of permissions is, leading to people committing offenses without malicious intent; there was no way for them to know beforehand that an action was an offense. And because the body of permissions changes constantly, it's also not something that can be relied on practically after the discovery. We must always suffer the anxiety of taking an action that will condemn us.
Law provides an easier means to get along by providing a constant and predictable list of permissions and offenses. It changes too, but only by announcement, allowing the populace to stay abreast of the updates. This offers a relief to the anxiety presented in a strictly Social Contract setting, and encourages people to act and be involved in daily life rather than avoidant of it.
The offenses you're describing seem to fall under the concept of De minimis[1], which establishes that there are offenses to a rule that just aren't worth acting on. We all know they're against the law, but not necessarily against the spirit of the law, and the cost of acting on those offenses are greater than the benefits. So we allow them to happen, by virtue of the Social Contract overriding the Law in minor circumstances.
But that doesn't mean that the rules and regulations aren't important and larger offenses should never be acted on. The Law is still the Law and for good reason. Ignore it, and that anxiety returns to plague anyone without the power to force their will.
the first requirement for this is that rules and regulations are followed.
Unfortunately when you have regulatory capture by special interests groups, this ensures that no progress ever happens because the organization with the most lobbying money is always guaranteed to win.
There is an inherent pricing discussion happening here. The op noted that they paid $15 for Uber and $40 for a taxi. While it’s a given that the Uber was a better experience, it’s not a given that the Ubers price is a sustainable one.
The Uber driver circling at 5 am may not be turning a profit with $15 airport rides. This business may only be sustainable for as long as VC money flows, and drivers are willing to go bust.
> business may only be sustainable for as long as VC money flows, and drivers are willing to go bust
Uber makes something like a 36% variable margin [1]. Even adding back sales & marketing we find a positive, if small, margin. They lose about 11% per ride. But that varies wildly region to region. (New York, for example, is profitable.)
Drivers' economics are more precarious. But the "as long as VC money flows" argument hasn't made sense since Uber's 2019 IPO.
> Drivers' economics are more precarious.
> They lose about 11% per ride.
So on net, they may be out something like 11-30% per ride dependent on location. Those are awful economics. More concerning would be busy season/dry season dynamics for Uber drivers. If there are months where rides decline in frequency or become more concentrated - then driver economics may be substantially worse than the average would have you believe.
Can you please stop with the false narrative that Uber is using VC money? They haven’t gotten any new investor money since pre-ipo several years ago. It’s a disingenuous lie to keep claiming “as long as VC money flows”. There isn’t and hasn’t been for years.
They still lose Billions per year no? Looks like they recorded a 6 Billion dollar Q1 loss. It may not be VC money anymore, but to claim that they are self-funding would be extremely wrong.
Not really relevant, for me at least, because the price isn't really the real issue. I would be glad to pay $20 or even $25, that's not my point, but my main point was the trust and reliance. And maybe because I've worked some year as a freelancer a long time ago I have a natural aversion for Uber. But no way I'm not using them or any other competing app next time I'm in a foreign country.
I wasn't implying the rules and regulations shouldn't benefit consumers. If you think taxi services shouldn't have X regulation then change the regulation.
Exactly. Vanishingly few people argue with the customer experience. It's the flaunting of the law and exploitation of drivers that's the problem. I'm saddened that the cheaper price is always mentioned because we all know how it got there.
There's also the safety issue. If you're in another country, anyone could just throw a sticker on their car. It's much scarier for women. Even if its a legit driver, it would be hard to track down an offender. With Uber, at least you know who the driver is, that they passed some kind of screen and have a history and reporting them is a lot easier.
It’ll be cheaper than taxis until taxis are almost dead/forgotten then it will get more expensive than taxis were. Cause that’s how cornering a market works.
I'm not a frequent taxi user but to me it's the most reliable mode of transportation which I always have as backup in mind when I need to get somewhere really on time. The additional luxury is cool but probably I'm fine without it, it puzzles me how dissatisfied some people are with taxis
My personal experience recently. Needed a taxi to the airport. Opened uber, it said about £90, which seemed a bit expensive. Tried a local minicab company, there were no cars. Opened uber again, the price had gone up to about £150. Tried another local company, they were there within 10 mins and wanted £60. Opened uber again, the price had gone up to about £250.
Sounds like free market is working. Demand goes up so does the price. Everyone wins. Hopefully the drivers get better price and the consumer can choose if they want a ride or not.
True, there should be no need for automated system, but instead it should be auction for next available driver slot. So those who pay more get the ride faster.
How do you propose dispensing a limited number of drivers to a larger number of customers? There are really only two solutions: get more drivers or get fewer customers.
Surge pricing can incentivize more drivers to come online. I don’t see how you can reduce the customers in a short timeframe.
The problem is not necessarily the principle, it's that surge pricing is opaque, governed by algorithms which attempt to maximise profit for Uber, not by simple supply and demand.
Surge pricing is not about profit for Uber. Uber wants to minimize surge pricing as it implies the market place is unbalanced. I.e. not enough drivers. Obviously with demand spikes you cannot magically produce more drivers so surge pricing does happen. But it is not a good user experience. In the ideal state drivers are busy all the time maximizing their earnings and riders can get a reliable ride.
Yeah, except that Uber and Lyft just keep most of the surge for themselves and obfuscate that fact from the riders and the drivers
You end up with a surly asshole driver and a surly asshole rider who both think the other is screwing them, when in fact it was the silicon valley douchebags
All these stories make me glad I live in a city with a dedicated train to the airport for 4 euros. If it costs 60 bucks to get from the airport to downtown, I would blame the city planners more than anyone.
You know, after breaking the taxi mafia my city started to create transport lines to the airport... Now we have buses (we didn't), and an specialized "road train" system is on the way.
Japan’s taxi companies just banded together and made an Uber like app to call taxies (including paying ahead, so you know exactly what it’s going to cost).
I never need to take an uber any more. The cars and drivers are all professional, and they’re often closer than any Uber.
They (Uber) solved it by completely dominating the food delivery landscape with Uber Eats.
> Japan’s taxi companies just banded together and made an Uber like app to call taxies (including paying ahead, so you know exactly what it’s going to cost).
Yes, it's called a worker's cooperative, a it's exactly how huge chunks of the economy should be organised. Unfortunately (as pointed out elsewhere in the thread) it is often impossible for workers to raise capital to build an enterprise in this model, even if it would mean a more efficient organisation.
In my country, I get the opposite experience. Most Uber drivers are from Bangladesh and other faraway countries - and it would be great if they knew the local language. Sometimes they don't even speak English. They don't even own the cars they drive: they are farmed like animals, sleeping many people in one room etc. - and they have to give a part of their salary to people who brought them here. I feel sorry for them, and I really support the ones who drive UberEats, but when they start transporting people, it's a completely different story.The worst happens when they cause an accident, there are many videos of them running away. I don't blame them at all, I realize their life at home was even worse. But I blame the people who made this situation possible and put the lives of others at risk.
I don't know when your anecdote is from, nor what Uber's timeline/strategy is/was in Romania, but...
They are (in)famous for using lots and lots of venture capital money to subsidize their fares for customers when entering new markets, using those low prices as loss-making user acquisition, and then eventually (and likely gradually) raising their prices once they have enough regular users - often having killed off some of the local competition who couldn't compete with the VC-subsidized prices Uber arrived with.
> How do you compete with that? Taxi business need to reflect. And every country is the same strangely, it's as universal than taxes: you can't escape!
Reflecting doesn't do much when your competitor can afford to sell every journey at a loss until you go out of business before then putting their prices up to what you're currently charging.
Yes, in some places Uber's arrival did either bring a better service or scare local taxis into doing better (e.g. lots of local firms now offer app-based booking and are just as reliable as Uber), and in some places taxis were so overpriced that Uber could genuinely offer a better service for a lower price and be profitable. But the vast majority of the times they offer cheaper prices, especially when it's such a big difference as in your story, it's a temporary (perhaps for months or years) strategy not something to expect to stay cheap. Enjoy using their services half paid for by investors while you can!
Edit: There don't seem to be many recent news articles that go into details, as it was known about so many years ago that most articles talking about these leaks just acknowledge this to be fact (e.g. in this very article we're in comments thread of, "At the same moment as Uber’s service deteriorates and the subsidy that helped it decimate taxis evaporates [... continues on about other stuff]")
But here's an interesting snippet from a court case that alleged this against them in the US where the judge basically agreed but said it wasn't to be point of being illegal. From https://casetext.com/case/sc-innovations-inc-v-uber-techs-2
> The Court held that Sidecar's allegation of a relevant market—app-based ride-hailing services, excluding taxis—was sufficiently plausible to survive a motion to dismiss. Id. at 10-11. The Court also rejected suggestions by Uber that Sidecar had not alleged below-cost pricing, id. at 12, as well as arguments that Uber's delayed entry to the non-limousine ride-hailing market and asserted pro-competitive purposes were sufficient for dismissal at the pleading stage, id. at 16-18. The Court nevertheless dismissed Sidecar's Sherman Act claims for failure to provide sufficient allegations of market power, particularly its failure to allege "that Uber has the power to raise market prices above competitive levels simply by reducing its own output, or that Lyft"—allegedly Uber's only remaining competitor—"could not respond to such a reduction by increasing its own output." Id. at 12-14. Absent such allegations, the Court held that Sidecar alleged no more than a "disciplined oligopoly," which the Ninth Circuit has held insufficient to state a claim for either monopolization or attempted monopolization, due to "a gap in the Sherman Act that allows oligopolies to slip past its prohibitions,"
Uber experience is really different in each country.
In south of France, Uber is half the price of taxis (for ride to airport I pay 30e from my place, while taxi is 70+), and cars are always very nice.
In Poland, regular taxis are often cheaper. Although usually regular taxis are so-so cars. But, UberX is even worse: often very bad cars, scratched, even crushed, driven by foreigners who can't speak the language. Uber Premium are good cars with good drivers, but are more expensive than taxis (although, they are nicer).
France made me pro-Uber. The taxis in Paris are arrogant, entitled and even bullies. I've seen them smoke in the car, refuse to turn down the radio, and other shenanigans. Not to mention they're often not around when you need them.
Maybe Big Taxi needed a shakeup worldwide.
Although the other day I sat in sick in a Lyft before work, and I ended up getting only 5 dollars credit for the privilege of smelling all day around people.
> France made me pro-Uber. The taxis in Paris are arrogant, entitled and even bullies. I've seen them smoke in the car, refuse to turn down the radio, and other shenanigans. Not to mention they're often not around when you need them.
I'm… speechless… Can I ask how often and during which time period you took the Taxi in Paris? I've never had or even heard of such experience, I always had the same quality of service of Taxi in Paris as in Germany. (= very good quality) I'll admit that I just take it twice a year when I go visit my aunt. But my brother lived for 7 years in Paris in the 2000s, and I've never heard him complain outside of the price. I'm genuinely surprised by what you're saying (Yes I am a native french speaker), if you didn't have such a good comment history I would have assumed you were an Uber comment farm account.
In the US, taxis are one of the few types of business that are even less ethical than Uber. They are a necessary service, or Uber is, but I don't know what about it makes people so dishonest.
My personal experience in Perth, Western Australia -
My partner and I need to get home from where she works, we use the uber app, and it quotes us $35. It's a little pricey for a 12 minute journey, but whatever. A driver accepts.
We watch as that driver drives in circles, then appears to come towards us, then turns away again. There is no extra stop listed. He keeps doing it, just going round and round, stopping for a while, driving away again. After 15 minutes of this, we cancel to see if we can re-book with a different driver. Suddenly - "Surge pricing!" it's now $45.
So we install the local cab app (Thanks Swan Taxis), their app is definitely worse, but we get a quote for $25 and the cab arrives in under 5 minutes.
How do you compete with that? Uber business need to reflect. It's the same every time.
At 40USD you got 'scammed', even with the meter, as the regular price should not go over 20$. Up until ~2016 the airport taxi business was the wild west, with a lot of shady/unauthorized drivers operating there. Things got much better now, unauthorized cabs can't access the Arrivals area, there are machines to order an authorized cab and authorities clamped down on the use of buggy taxi meters.
I agree with complaints about the taxi industry in many cities. However this article is about the workers at these companies, not the consumer experience.
Especially in countries where you might reasonably expect to be ripped off by the likes of taxi drivers, Uber is great because it just eliminates all haggling over fees, tips, etc. You know what you pay ahead of time and there's a big incentive for the driver to honor the deal and get their tip plus five star rating.
There are similar applications for different markets of course. But Uber has the international brand recognition. Worth investigating what app works best before you go somewhere.
So you're saying that you're OK with the trade-off that instead of a taxi driver possibly charging you higher for a trip, you're willing to let Uber exploit their own employees?
Since the story here is not about if Uber is better/worse for passengers but if Uber is a good/bad employer, it sounds like that's what you're saying.
Yes, absolutely, I'll take a company that exploit their employees over an overregulated industry keeping competition out while encouraging shady business practices like haggling and scamming tourists and locals alike, any time of the day.
If the choice to have good service + no exploitation arise, I'll take that one, and it's coming thanks to Uber bursting the taxi monopoly, but in the meanwhile no regrets, taxis had it coming.
Exactly, I've been scammed a few times too often for me to shed any crocodile tears for old school taxi drivers. Most Uber drivers I've dealt with seem happy enough with the steady flow of rides and tips. Eager even. I don't think that Uber is actually that un-popular with drivers.
Kiss your wife goodbye as you enter your car "bye honey! On my way to being exploited by Uber!"
Drive away and open your exploitation app. Accept a ride, go to the person: "who's the person that's going to participate in my exploitation together with Uber today? Oh, there he is!". Drive him to the place he needs to be, drive away.
"Ok, do I want to be exploited some more today?"
Decide to be exploited on a few more rides and return home.
Now being serious, if you're an Uber driver and let's say that in the short term that's your best option, why would it be better for him to have this option striped from him? Why do you think anyone else should make that call except him?
In your strawman, the only options available for regulators is to do nothing and allow exploitation, or remove one exploitative industry and force the exploited further into poverty.
There are multiple avenues available, the least of which is to pass sweeping legislation to force corporations into compliance with basic human decency standards.
I think it's a fair deal and nobody is under any obligation to work as an Uber driver other than because they think it's worth their time and a fair deal. This is not slavery or exploitation.
Apparently, lots of drivers seem to think it's not such a bad deal. I sure am not going to shed any crocodile tears for the lost business for the taxi drivers that have had the privilege to rip me off in the past. Happened a little too often for me to do that.
There's a lot of sentiment around jobs, job security (which is an illusion), and people paying into social insurances. I'd say that's all fine and something to sort out by different countries. Meanwhile, it seems plenty of people make decent money driving around as Uber drivers and this is not really Uber's problem to sort out. The gig economy certainly challenges some established values. But fundamentally, there seem to be plenty of people willing to take those gigs. That's why that works.
Either way, that doesn't invalidate the value proposition of offering passengers a fair price for a ride before they enter the car. Whether it's Uber or somebody else offering that deal, it sure beats haggling with some shady characters in the middle of the night about a ride from A to B. Been there done that & no thanks. Not going back to that. Uber sure looks like magic when you use it in situations like that. Wnip out phone, ride shows up, and teleports you home. Great value. Anything less is a rip off deal, frankly. I've probably paid too much for that service on some occasions but I like it none the less.
Instead of going all socialist on Uber, maybe hold your local politicians accountable to be more competent. This is happening on their watch after all. There seem to be lots of people that have issues with Uber but not a lot of them seem to be able to do anything about that legally. Why is that? What's blocking that after all these years of scrutiny, court cases, lobbying, rule changes, etc.? If Uber is doing something illegal here, by all means drag them into court and fix it. But if not, maybe change the legal situation to normalize what they and other business do? Apparently, the problem is that Uber is still around after years of legal proceedings in many countries. Maybe, that's because they aren't actually doing that much wrong at all and are providing a decent service to customers via an army of drivers willing to earn some money that way?
I don't understand this comment. The article is about attacks on worker's rights. Your comment is a personal anecdote about how taxis sucked in a trip you had. What is the relation between the two, and how is this not flagrant off-topic?
here is my opinion. taxis have been a shady business (esp in eastern europe) for way too long. something like uber was simply bound to come and shake things up. uber offered a customer friendly service and employed people that needed to earn some extra cash. but here is the problem: they were too good. they killed the taxi industry, whose workers didnt drive taxis for extra cash but to provide for their familys. so now you have taxi drivers without work. who do they turn to for employment? they turn to uber/bolt or whoever killed their previous employer. so now uber doesnt employ people who just need to earn extra cash but drivers who use this occupation as sole means to provide for their family. and you know what? uber sucks as that type of employer
So because you have bad experience with taxis you feel entitled to exploit unprivileged workers instead?
I don't doubt that taxis can be problematic in many places. Typically they reflect the social conditions of where they operate. Inequality, poor education, corruption in general mean that taxis in such location are not a good experience.
And then highly paid people like many HN readers are just not willing to do the math: A taxi driver (or Uber driver) will not be able to drive all working day long. They have to wait for new passengers a significant part of their working time. So expect that when you use them you need to pay at least twice the rate for a normal employee. Deprecation and maintenace for a car is not cheap. And again the customer also needs to pay it for the time the vehicle is not moving, not just for the time they are travelling. The latter is even worse for Uber. Private cars don't have several drivers. Traditional taxis have (at least in this country), just to compensate for big part of fixed costs. Of course Uber externalizes those costs to their drivers.
American strawberry farms would not exist without illegal immigration, that’s just a fact. No one would buy domestic strawberries picked by someone making an American wage when the imported strawberries cost half as much.
So the American government / society works according the same principles as Uber does. Let's take the earnings ourselves by exploiting others in weak positions. They can stand for the costs and the risks.
A more civilized way of solving the problem is by customs. Foreign products don't have unfair advantages and the country can use the collected money to produce public services.
That's a bit of a stretch. Finnish agriculture (which is rather small) has not been able to live without Ukrainian and Vietnamese workers for several years. But there are legal frameworks to get them the required permits. It's not free of problems, all kind of exploitation happens. But then the rules will be tightened again.
I think it's the same over most of Western Europe, with domestic workers alone farming could stop.
> And then highly paid people like many HN are just not willing to do the math: A taxi driver (or Uber driver) will not be able to drive all working day long. They have to wait for new passengers a significant part of their working time.
This dynamic changes significantly though when your have app-mediated taxi interactions, instead of waving down a taxi in the street. Taxi drivers end up drastically more efficiently allocating their time, since they don't have to drive around hoping for customers to miraculously appear - instead they just drive directly to the closest customer every time.
They can also manage their time to work only when & where there is demand for their services in the moment, instead of driving around the wrong area looking for non-existent customers. You'd also expect that by providing a more convenient/cheaper/better service, this would create more demand for taxis in turn, which makes it easier to find passengers, and so driver time can be even better utilized.
None of that requires either Uber specifically or a ruthless gig-worker model - any other app-based taxi service would provide the same benefits - but I think it does make a clear argument for why app-powered taxis in general should be able to bring taxi prices down and provide a better customer experience, without necessarily destroying taxi driver's livelihoods.
That has never existed in any of the 3 countries I have lived in. Taxis were always ordered by phone. At least since the 1960s drivers were offered trips via radio by the taxi switchboard, in 2000s the available trips appeared on a screen on the dashboard.
Well, it might depend also on the density, but at least outside of massive city centers some kind of booking has always been required.
> None of that requires either Uber specifically or a ruthless gig-worker model
Exactly.
> a clear argument for why app-powered taxis in general should be able to bring taxi prices down
We are on HN, so I assume few would resist to use IT to optimize a problem. However, my expectations of how much such systems really save costs in the end would be rather moderate. Don't underestimate human optimization if experienced drivers pick their rides from a list. As mentioned, technology for that has existed since the 1960s. Does Uber really offer anything better for the driver?
> How do you compete with that? Taxi business need to reflect.
Did you read the article? The reason this worked for you is that you benefited from exploiting some underpaid soul that was up at 5 in the morning to barely scrape by.
My personal experience. I come back from a trip in Romania. Arrive at Seatac, open the Uber app, it costs $100 for a trip to my house. Wait for my luggage to arrive, I open the app again, it's $120. I go outside the terminal and I find a town car service which was $60 for the same trip.
Rewind 1 day, In Bucharest, I arrive at the hotel via taxi and tell the driver that I need to go to the airport at 4 in the morning. He's like 'great, I just started my shift. Here's my phone number, call me when you wake up, I'll be at the hotel within 15 minutes'. And he was.
I would say that pricing has a lot to do with the feasibility of taking a taxi.. having just visited India here is my comparison of cost for 1 hour to the airport:
Denmark, using taxi 230 USD, need to call hours in advance.
San Francisco, using Uber 40-50 USD.
India, using Uber 10-20 USD.
In Denmark taxis are so expensive there is few of them, so not only is the crazy expensive, it's very hard to find one when you need it.
The local taxis in my town don't seem to every want to take fares. They seem to be eternally waiting for a better offer and grumpy if you try to take what they consider to be a small trip. Never had that issue with Uber drivers.
Shocking stuff like this, weaponising drivers against city governments to do Uber's bidding to lobby:
> MacGann insists that Uber drivers were seen by some at the company as pawns who could be used to put pressure on governments. “And if that meant Uber drivers going on strike, Uber drivers doing a demo in the streets, Uber drivers blocking Barcelona, blocking Berlin, blocking Paris, then that was the way to go,” he said. “In a sense, it was considered beneficial to weaponise Uber drivers in this way.”
> The files show MacGann’s fingerprints on this strategy, too. In one email, he praised staffers in Amsterdam who leaked stories to the press about attacks on drivers to “keep the violence narrative” and pressure the Dutch government.
Uber was weaponising their workers (while fighting as hard as possible to not call them workers and pay for workers' benefits) against local governments, they were behaving like a tech-mafia, a mob with sprawling power across the globe.
> weaponising drivers against city governments to do Uber's bidding to lobby
This dismisses drivers' expressed preferences and actions in favor of a chosen narrative. Drivers protested the measures purporting to help them. They polled against them in California. They voted against them.
Claiming they were all brainwashed by corporate requires extraordinary evidence. (It is akin to dismissing a unionization vote by claiming the union brainwashed the workers.)
taxi drivers weaponized themselves like this in france at some point, they probably learned from this tactic because i think it got uber banned in paris or something
I don't have a link to any source, it was some years ago and it might have changed since
I believe many of these of 2010s startup unicorns/companies (in the contractor/gigging space) will go down in history the same way as modern day robber barons.
The ideas were good - use your leftover time/space/goods, and earn some money. We'll cover the tech, just pay us x% of the cut.
But then it became obvious that these types of ventures were in direct conflict with various labor laws across the globe. So they begin to skirt the laws, pitting their laborers against governments, all while exacerbating the sectors. And turns out it's hard to subsidies certain businesses with VC money forever.
Where did things go wrong? Maybe when people starting treating gigging economy as a full-time thing. Maybe they thought they could offer cheap and awesome service forever. Maybe they thought they could remain in the grey area of the law forever, or at least until they gained enough power to change the laws.
I used to use airbnb, now it sucks. I'm back to hotels.
I used to use uber, now it sucks. I'm back to using taxis.
I used to use delivery services, now they suck. I just pick up my own food at a fraction of the cost.
I - the consumer - obviously enabled all these things. Ok, enough rambling...
Add Netlix to the pile. Each of these services leveraged a brief window of technological advantage before the trundling entrenched industries and governments caught up. Now that they have, they must compete on a dramatically different front. The initial technical challenges are now dwarfed by the challenge of fighting multinational Suarons.
This strange arc of the last decade has shown me that a sizable chunk of information technology has matured to the point of being a commodity. For those that have worked in the field reaching back further than a decade, this begets an ennui, as our labors redirect less towards the question of what is possible and increasingly more towards the petty struggles of bureaucracy and maximization of profit and labor exploitation.
We had (have?) a moment that was more fleeting than we realized.
All of the examples you gave are wrong (as in, bad behaviour, rather than incorrect!) but it's worth noting that they are tactics similar to those employed by many other groups seeking to create pressure in other situations - including by taxi drivers fighting against the ride-sharing companies.
Demonstrations, blocking streets, keeping stories in the press - all time -honoured tactics. I guess the outrage here is a private for-profit organsation adopting such behaviour more usually associated with political parties and pressure groups?
I read somewhere about the history of the modern corporation, I think it was in Sapiens. The motivating factor for introducing the corporation was to create an entity which cannot be held accountable the same way a person can. It is therefore unsurprising that corporations behave in an amoral fashion, that is in a sense, the point.
Indeed. The mainstream cultural response to the amorality of corporations was regulation. It wasn't a perfect solution (thanks to regulatory capture), but it was, at least, a reasonable way to balance different interests in society. The point of tech startups seems to have generally been to take an existing regulated industry (taxis, hotels, etc.), sprinkle magic computer dust over it, and claim that now the industry regulations don't apply because now it's a "tech" company. And then, of course, there are also the end runs around general-purpose regulations like the minimum wage and overtime. It's not at all surprising that the results have generally been disastrous.
> MacGann insists that Uber drivers were seen by some at the company as pawns who could be used to put pressure on governments. “And if that meant Uber drivers going on strike, Uber drivers doing a demo in the streets, Uber drivers blocking Barcelona, blocking Berlin, blocking Paris, then that was the way to go,” he said. “In a sense, it was considered beneficial to weaponise Uber drivers in this way.”
How is that wrong? Uber gives people jobs. People have a right to compete with taxi drivers. The city should not be taking those jobs away.
Reading threads about Uber I have realized that I probably have traveled only to cities where you do not need taxi. I've used taxi less that 10 times in my life and Uber 0. Most Airports I have visited were serviced by train.
Uber took over my local airport, a 100$ fare home now costs $200+ when, as you'd expect, a plane load of people call for an Uber all at once. 'Surge pricing'.
Now there's a rank for exactly FIVE (count em FIVE) taxis, a 15 minute walk from the terminal exit and a line a couple hundred meters long for the bus. This isn't a small regional airport. This is the international/domestic airport for a city of 5 million people.
Absolute madness and just another point of frustration I have to endure now when travelling.
And yet another reason why using high speed rail is a much better experience than air travel. No need to take any taxis when you get off the train in the city center. (I know the US passenger rail infrastructure sucks and trains are worse for ultra long distances)
Our dependency on a car for all forms of transportation is what created this opportunity for a corrupt taxi business and Uber to disrupt that corrupt taxi business.
Some businesses are expensive, because they offer a very high coverage. In my country, traditional cab companies needed to offer their service pretty much 24/7 if needed, in order to operate. This, of course, meant that the expenses were thrown onto the customers.
When Uber and the likes came, this disrupted the industry. But the big difference here is that the Uber drivers obviously only
A) worked during peak hours and peak days.
B) only used it as a side hustle, which meant not staying up at 3AM waiting for customers. Sure, in large cities, there probably are some of those drivers, too - but they're not obligated to that.
Traditional cabs couldn't compete on price, and had to either start laying off drivers, or close shops all-together.
Then the gov. budget, and started opening up to more uber-friendly laws around the taxi industry. They are no-longer obligated to offer 24/7 service, nor do you need to work for a cab company.
In the end, I (living out in a rural place) end up paying the same rates as before, but with zero options should I need a cab 04-05 in the morning. Not really a problem until you need one, like catching a very early flight, getting stuck somewhere after a party, or whatnot.
That's a lot of emotion for 10 taxi rides. I'm not sure if I've ever met someone who has taken fewer cab rides. I've taken hundreds, and somehow missed this hellscape that Uber boosters keep informing me of.
I like walking or using public transport systems, and I spent most of my time living in big cities.
but sometimes I had to, or I was curious to explore this option, and I've been disapointed.
The worst experience was a drunk cab driver, smelling like he vomited just before taking the course. I had to stop him midway as it felt really unsafe.
They were disruptive, and sure you can quote 100 times they admitted they were flying in the face of local regulations. So were automobiles when they came out; so were airplanes. UPS, FedEx fought with regulations protecting the Post Office. EBooks were a conundrum - were existing contracts for paper books meaningful any more?
Sure I feel for drivers, they had a hard time. Definitely they got the raw end of the deal.
For me, your use of automobiles and airplanes does not help your argument. In my opinion, those industries got way too powerful and negatively shaped our entire society's infrastructure at a colossal magnitude. It's really very regrettable that those changes came about.
Ridesharing companies are doing the same. They promised less cars but now there are more. People getting into crazy debt to just drive around the streets looking for clients, creating more traffic and more pollution.
It's difficult to feel bad for the legacy taxi industry. It's one of the most corrupt industries and totally resistant to market entrants. This business is ruthless and workers were exploited in the previous system. A corrupt system encourages corrupt behavior. Do people remember what it was like before Uber?
Before Uber, I had personal experiences with taxis in Chicago and London trying to scam and bully me when visiting. Taxis in my hometown would never show up when called. Not to even mention the racial discrimination that was ubiquitous with legacy taxis.
You're completely missing the point of the story that is coming out here.
No matter if Uber is better/worse for the passengers, they cannot (shouldn't?) exploit their own employees. It's not worth allowing any human to be exploited, even if you get a better service for something.
>> It's difficult to feel bad for the legacy taxi industry. It's one of the most corrupt industries and totally resistant to market entrants.
Comments like this are frustrating. The taxi “industry” is made up of lots of small players in every city and small town around the world, each with different regulations and offerings. It’s not some massive conglomerate. Your experience with taxis in the place you use them can be completely different to the experience one town over not to mention in another country.
When self driving cars finally arrive everywhere, they'll be done for. I can't wait for the political battle of "keep the jobs so people can continue being occasionally exploited by transportation".
> Do people remember what it was like before Uber?
Yes. In London there were tons of minicab companies. They were cheap and shitty, but they were there, and you could pay for better ones. There were also heavily regulated black cabs. Uber have probably increased the quality of the market, but at the cost of many more cars on the crowded streets, and the VC funding driving competitors out of business. Further, they fucked around evading rules and reduced safety for passengers by (for instance) failing to background check their drivers, failing to ensure adequate insurance etc. They were cheaper than most competitors when they started out, now I'm not so sure.
In Southampton, UK there were and still are multiple cab firms. They didn't really have apps. Now they do. The uber cars are usually cleaner and newer, but if you want service at a particular time, you still book the cab, because they'll send someone to you specially rather than just searching on a cron job. There is no real price difference.
In Perth, there were multiple cab firms, their cars were crappy and their apps still are. For a while uber was cheaper and more convenient, they drove some of the cab firms out of business. Now uber must not pay as much, because there are barely any drivers and half the time they don't even bother to take the job. If they do take the job, they often cancel it or just fuck around to try and make you cancel and trigger surge prices. Uber is now usually the expensive option. Cabs are resurgent and similar to how they ever were, which was actually fine.
Basically, as far as I can tell, Uber were 'good' because they threw VC money at everything. Now that's starting to dry up, they're getting unreliable because they can't keep attracting drivers. And frankly we should never have allowed them to use billions of investor dollars to distort world markets, nor allowed them to avoid tax by using an already well-worn excuse (oh they aren't employees!) in the first place.
Besides the "kill switch" story which may or may not be illegal depending on what actually happened, beyond the layers of journalism - I want to comment on the War on Workers.
Currently in my country there aren't a lot of places to work if you're young and untrained. But services like uber, bolt and various food delivery end up creating an unofficial floor for the wage of somebody willing to work. You don't need credentials or exams - you just need basic skills, time and will - and at least with food delivery services, you're a bicycle and 24 hours away from making money.
Now, maybe where some of you live things are different. Maybe you can afford the extra friction of employment, maybe you don't need that safety "wage floor" because anybody can get employed at any time. Maybe you live in heaven, I don't know. I was born beyond the Iron Curtain and I'm actually ready to believe that some countries somewhere are heaven. But everywhere I could see with my own eyes: there are people that can make money with this kind of freelance services, that would most definitely suffer if formal employment was the only game in town.
I can imagine Uber using different employment schemes in different countries, complying with local law. Maybe a gig based system is actually benefecial to society in some countries, like you claim, while it's not in others.
Assuming full information symmetry. Predatory voluntary employment like pyramid schemes exist where workers are coerced through misleading rather than force
Which is more relevant in an employment scenario, with higher friction and barriers of entry. In gig economy, worse case scenario is you stop doing it.
I'm really sick of everyone pretending that these big, bad tech companies came along and screwed over workers, as if it's some novel revelation. Countless other industries have been doing far worse for far longer with far greater ramifications - and they still are today. Uber is merely continuing a great American tradition. If we don't like it, blame the politicians who refuse to regulate them and other industries that take advantage of workers. Or continue waving a fist at big companies as if they care.
Well, the issue is that companies like Uber and AirBNB used the fig leaf of being a "tech company" to evade the existing regulations on their respective existing industries. Of course we should blame the politicians who let them get away with it, as well as the companies lobbying for it.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 292 ms ] threadThe part of this that jumps out at me is how much difficulty the workers have in getting someone in to politics who is one of their own. The incentives just don't line up, and they keep wasting all their efforts on wage disputes rather than more effective bargaining strategies to get part-ownership of businesses. We can see it again here - Uber drivers are literally bringing their own car, but seem incapable of producing their own app and marketing structure.
You seem to be under the impression that Uber drivers are people with the time and money to engage in risk pursuits that cost upfront cash, with a hope of a long term payoff.
Most Uber drivers are looking for cash now, to fill their already empty pockets. In many cases Uber is little more than terribly priced equity release tool, turning the capital cost of your car and fuel back into liquid cash. If these people had the capital and time to build a business, they wouldn’t be exploited by Uber.
The poor aren't complaining that the powerful are keeping their wages low; the poor are complaining that the rich pay too much in taxes and the "undeserving" (some ethnic outgroup or other) get handouts from the government.
> “For decades, Americans have experienced a populist uprising that only benefits the people it is supposed to be targeting.... The angry workers, mighty in their numbers, are marching irresistibly against the arrogant. They are shaking their fists at the sons of privilege. They are laughing at the dainty affectations of the Leawoof toffs. They are massing at the gates of Mission Hills, hoisting the black flag, and while the millionaires tremble in their mansions, they are bellowing out their terrifying demands. 'We are here,' they scream, 'to cut your taxes.”
― Thomas Frank, What's the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America
> “If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.”
― Lyndon B. Johnson
> What this doctrine means for the politics of income inequality should be clear: a profound complacency. For successful professionals, meritocracy is a beautifully self-serving doctrine, entitling them to all manner of rewards and status, because they are smarter than other people. For people on the receiving end of inequality—for those who have just lost their home, for example, or who are having trouble surviving on the minimum wage, the implications of meritocracy are equally unambiguous. To them this ideology says: forget it. You have no one to blame for your problems but yourself.
> Because most of the fuses lit by Clinton and Co. didn’t actually detonate until after he had left office—and by then some science-denying Republican was in the Oval Office—they found it easy to absolve the Democrat from blame. When a Rhodes scholar was the one deregulating and cutting taxes, why, those were good times; when some idiot from Texas tried his hand at it, the world crashed and burned. Just another demonstration of the importance of a good education, I guess.
That's largely by design. Look at all the effort put into the blatant attempts at union busting by most of the major tech companies. Tired workers are always at a disadvantage in a war of attrition against wealthy companies. Doubly so when those companies are paying the people who represent us in government.
Depends on the country. In the US, the powerful have become influential enough to make the poor fight against each other (under the guise of "The Right VS The Left") instead of realizing that both groups have a common enemy that is manipulating them very successfully.
This is a widespread issue across many essential areas of human life - like housing (Airbnb), or the environment (pollution).
Tax everything the amount it costs to clean up the pollution it causes
Heck even most Burger King stores have kiosks that are replacing people.
Are the kiosks to replace people or due to the lack of people?
IMO the lack of people is due to salary. If they were paying 400 dollars an hour, I'd sign up.
These things are a godsend, for multiple reasons:
- no wasting time trying to establish a common language with the cashiers, particularly when you're not in your home country
- no nearly exploding in line behind a ten people group haggling with the cashier over how many cheeseburgers they want
- if you are in a large group, the inverse of the above: no need to fear pissing off everyone behind you
- you actually see your entire order prior to payment and can make sure the cashier didn't fail to register an item
But when fully driverless cars eventually do hit the road then it will indeed be the end of the taxi driver (and of most drivers for that matter).
How are they not drowning in gigantic obstruction of justice lawsuits and regulatory demands?
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/security/informatio...
I agree there guilty and are behaving in a borderline devil way but given they're playing with the big boys in the valley who actually has any control over them?
If violence is not a solution, you're not using enough.
Think about it... Would you prefer your Gmail to be down for a few hours, or for Moscow/Beijing to get a copy of all your sent/received emails cos they dumped them from Google's servers in the country?
Wouldn't a raid by police (at least if they have a warrant) be "authorized access" because they are law enforcement?
At the very least, they could trigger the kill switch when the raid first happens, but once it has been verified it is the police, the kill switch should be disengaged so they have full access.
Only when you’re legally obligated to do so, which is probably often not the case.
Generally, but not always, a separate court order would be required to force you to decrypt your servers.
That's like saying a warrant wouldn't include data found in a safe, and that would require a second warrant.
Now, if the data is remote, I'd understand it I guess. But if the kill switch simply burns the local data so only remote copies are still there, that kind of defeats the purpose of the raid in the first place.
Afaik, courts are undecided on whether you can be compelled to decrypt your own data.
Corporations are held to different standards though. They are often required to share information about themselves with the government, are constantly involved with discovery processes, and generally have different expectations of privacy.
You can lock it remotely at a moments notice as well and it'll remain encrypted against law enforcement attempts to unlock it.
Should you be held accountable for owning such a device?
MDM managed Windows, macOS laptops are such devices as well.
See how easy is it to reframe a feature in a nefarious way?
If the data specified by the warrant is suddenly and intentionally encrypted then they still have to provide that data or argue the obstruction angle in front of a judge. Just because a company is incorporated doesn't mean they lose all rights.
If it's not stated that they are raiding the office to grab data, what could the raid even be for?
They don't have to hand over their entire database, and as a customer, I wouldn't want them to.
They don't have to let them grab whatever the want and root around in data not covered in the warrant.
I understand having a process in place to be able to hide data from criminals stealing your data, that's not a problem. The problem becomes when companies start to hide data from legal requests, which is what Uber is in the hot for here.
I'm not sure I understand the reasoning nor conclusion of your comment.
Surely you're not advocating that every company should have to turn over all of its information without a warrant
Turns out, there are laws and the above would be 100% illegal.
It's like if I told you "I use Veracrypt" what for? Am I bring investigated?
What hope there is about this sort of thing comes from the fact that they can't quite yet do to us as a profession what they do to taxi drivers.
It is clear that non-tech people wrote this. Any company device I used in the last 10 years was always encrypted and could be remotely locked to not boot.
Additionally most bigger companies will have "security" software like Crowdstrike on all devices which is basically a backdoor.
People tend to bring up unresolved issues like that when the opportunity calls for it. I'd say for good reasons.
> Ripley operated like a “kill switch” that would lock down all the computers in an office, preventing staff from immediately providing any data to police even if they had a warrant.
I guess what's new is everything around it as well as the scope of the usage of Ripley (or the newer tool "uLocker").
Actually, Uber has been great for consumers. Being able to travel internationally and still have a single app that can do your transport is amazing.
In addition, there is data that Uber cuts down on drunk driving and the associated trauma and deaths.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamasurgery/fullarticle/278...
If I’m possibly going to have more than one drink with dinner, I’ll use ride sharing. Round trip ride shares aren’t that much more than weekend evening parking anyway.
It may have downsides for some, but it definitely doesn’t have downsides for all.
Despite any convenience offered you fundamentally had a phone in your hand and the ability to ring a taxi if you planned ahead. This is entirely being lazy and self centred.
The taxi experience has been so consistently horrible I'd rather walk if I could. My favorite is the routine of pretending the credit card machine is broken and trying to get me to stop at an ATM so they can get cash. Had one actually threaten to call the cops on me for not paying if I didn't do that after pretending the credit card machine was broken. Refused to drop the ruse.
Of course I must admit that most of these bad experiences were in San Francisco, a city of passive aggressiveness all the way down from the top. I have to admit that taxi experiences in New York and Boston were better, though the latter was kind of stupid expensive. Experiences in medium sized cities like Cincinnati have been hit or miss.
Everything related to transportation sucks. Most airlines suck, airports suck, train systems are incompetently run, buses are slow, cars are expensive, taxis are corrupt, Uber is abusive, and... well... I guess bikes are dangerous and horses smell.
That is not the case everywhere. There are plenty of walkable places with good public transport systems.
As the saying goes:
"A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars. It's where the rich use public transportation."
> Uber’s real impact has been to make life worse for virtually everyone it touches.
Are we just going to ignore the millions of satisfied riders and drivers?
TBH, I don't feel this article belongs on HN, it's pure politics and basically a repost of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32045906
Taking some information it's way too much, but would I have argue with how the meter was operating anyway?
Now, I need to comeback to the airport at 4am.
So instead, I reserve a airport transfer from the airline itself, pay in advance something like 30 USD this time.
And... no one show up at 4am. Mobile phone of the transfer is not answering... I never heard of them *
So I install Uber, hopefully it's working, enter my visa (from my country, no need for local currency at all), after 10 minutes, someone very nice take me and I just paid like 15 USD to get to the airport, at 5 in the morning, with the invoice by mail.
How do you compete with that? Taxi business need to reflect. And every country is the same strangely, it's as universal than taxes: you can't escape!
* Edit: In fact I know what happened, and there is nothing to do, because I looked at the invoice and on the third page of the voucher PDF there, it's said that I needed to call 24h before to confirm the transfer... They don't call, you have to call. Even after the first confirmation I already did for confirming the pickup address some days before, I wasn't feeling paranoid enough. So you can't say nothing because I didn't read the last page, but it's a dumb heavy process, do people changes their mind and decide to live forever in the country frequently?
If one business offers better service than another, but, the first business exploits their employees, which service should be investigated? I'd agree the second business should be aiming at improving their service, of course, but we also need to clamp down on businesses who are exploiting people.
They aren't quite "employees" given that they can reject my trip request without needing to provide any excuse, which by the way happens frustratingly often esp. during rush hours.
I'd like to see an actual employee do that - like a waiter in a restaurant ("nah, I won't serve you, I'm busy and don't feel like it"); you'd have a word with their boss. And when things don't work that way, we're probably talking about some form of freelancing. Like a barber renting a chair at a barbershop. He (or she) is not an employee of the barbershop owner, as implied by the fact you can't really complain to the owner if they refuse to serve you.
Doing so enough times will lead to Uber penalizing the driver. Does that sound like a freelancer to you?
Obviously, the definition will change depending on the country. Referring to a previous court case UK (Employment Tribunal: Uber BV v. Aslam), this is why they think Uber drivers are employees, not freelancers:
> Uber set the fare which meant that they dictated how much drivers could earn
> Uber set the contract terms and drivers had no say in them
> Request for rides is constrained by Uber who can penalise drivers if they reject too many rides
> Uber monitors a driver's service through the star rating and has the capacity to terminate the relationship if after repeated warnings this does not improve
With those things in mind, it's hard to not feel like Uber drivers are in fact employees of Uber, not freelancers that can freely engage in business while only being "supported" by Uber or using Ubers app.
As a freelancer in IT: yes, 100%. If I keep rebuffing my clients, they eventually stop calling.
They might, unless you're the best freelancer in a niche, and they have no other choice.
The difference between you in that situation, and a driver "working" for Uber, is that you or your clients decide if you get any work in that situation, while for the Uber driver, Uber decides if you get any work or not.
Apparently it doesn't hurt their profitability worse than not being free to choose their clients would. And I see pretty solid evidence of that: they're using this option extensively, I'd be surprised if they did that despite being worse off as a result.
For the waiter from my example "enough times" changes into "even once".
> Does that sound like a freelancer to you?
Well, I mean, if you were a shop trading on Amazon, and you'd keep on cancelling orders, I can imagine you could even get kicked off the platform.
I'm sure you also don't have much say when it comes to contract terms, the provision etc., and then there's the good ol' star rating just the same.
It doesn't mean Amazon is your employer though.
(By the way, a lot of Uber drivers don't drive for Uber directly. They get contracted by some smaller local company which rents them cars etc. Then even if you argue they should have employee status, it's not on Uber, one should hold that local firm accountable. But this fact is conveniently glossed over, because corporations).
> Obviously, the definition will change depending on the country.
Sure, and that's not just because along with the country comes such and such legislation - there's also the political / lobbying aspect.
When thousands of taxi drivers protest by blocking the capital (which happened in several countries), the powers that be do pay attention. Maybe it shouldn't affect how things turn out at courts, and in a perfect world it doesn't, but I think we all know that in our world it does.
So anyhow I'm not speaking for courts, only sharing how I see these things, trying to apply common sense here. Obviously at the end of the day these matters are settled in courts, but this goes without saying.
Plenty of businesses give their employees discretion on which customers to serve.
They don't have to reflect, politicians work hard day and night to ensure there is never any competition.
You probably don't take taxis enough
However my personal experiences have no value in a discussion of this leak. It's irrelevant whether consumers likes a companies product when discussing rules and regulations.
Creating the kind of world we want to live in should be the sole purpose of rules and regulations. How people want to live shouldn't play second fiddle to what rules and regulations say. Rules and regulations can be changed.
There’s real truth in the terrible service flaws of the previous taxi system, but the employment flaws of Uber are being smothered with the service improvements they’ve introduced. That’s not the only issue worth caring about.
Having workers tie themselves to a company for 40 hours a week being the only valid way to make money is conservative thinking, be a bit progressive and see how much freedom this potentially opens up for workers.
The issue ttjjtt and others are pointing out about Uber are not around binding employees to one employer for a fixed 40 hour workweek. In fact, I'd bet ttjjtt would support labor laws which limit a businesses ability to punish employees for moonlighting.
The issue is, like amazon's mechanical turk, that Uber is cutting corners, costs, and wages for their "employees" in ways that are both legal and illegal while secretly lobbying to make it easier for them to reduce benefits.
This is a market leader using their position to harm their workers. "Conservative thinking" is that "why do we need all these labor rules and protections for employees? They signed up for it!" Progressive thinking is "Maybe we shouldn't let businesses set the rules for how they treat employees?"
Right, so make regulators get off their asses and start draft up some reasonable regulations where workers can work freely like they can with uber and mechanical turk? Just banning that sort of freedom entirely is conservative thinking, since it aims to preserve the shitty situation we have where everyone needs to have a "job". Today people can't even imagine a society where you don't have a job, you just go and do things that are useful and get rewarded the full fruit of your labour, that sort of thing is possible with Ubers offerings and a bit of regulations, why go all in on preventing that future from happening?
Uber works great for users, we know that. Uber would also work great for drivers if the drivers got a larger cut. So what is the problem, just regulate it and everything gets better than under the old Taxi systems. Why is this so hard to imagine? And no, this is not over regulating at all, at least not more than for example limiting how many Taxi's are allowed to operate in the city etc which is already happening.
Did you read the article?
The issue is 2 fold.
1. Uber is lobbying heavily for regulators to NOT do that.
2. We have an entire political party in the US (Republicans) that are "anti-regulation" and fight tooth and nail against new regulations.
If we want "regulators" to make things better, we need to put in regulators that want to regulate.
This doesn't matter on a state level, for example democrats could easily create such regulations in New York or California if they wanted to.
> Uber is lobbying heavily for regulators to NOT do that.
Yes, every corporation lobbies for laws that favors them, this is nothing new. Lobbying isn't corrupt, politicians making under the table deals with corporations is the bad part, lobbying is just corporations telling politicians what kind of laws the corporation would want.
And then paying money to politicians who offer to do what the corporations want. Lobbying (at least as practiced in the US, where it is considered "free speech" for corporations to "donate" money to politicians they like) is very clearly legalized corruption - there really is no other valid way to look at it.
Yes, it is slightly more expensive than Uber, but the drivers have been vetted by the municipal government, proved their ability to speak the local language and know their way around the city and are insured to be able to pay you off if they crash.
Unlike Uber, they are - in fact - independent contractors. They are actually proud about their freedom.
Uber, OTOH, works here mostly by way of these shady folk who rent cars to disadvantaged immigrants who barely speak the language, collecting most of their earnings, forcing them to drive north of 12 hours per day before they return to Poland or Ukraine in 6 months.
> Right, so make regulators get off their asses and start draft up some reasonable regulations where workers can work freely like they can with uber and mechanical turk? Just banning that sort of freedom entirely is conservative thinking, since it aims to preserve the shitty situation we have where everyone needs to have a "job".
Trying to pass such regulations runs against massive lobbying efforts by companies. Amazon, Uber don't care about giving employees flexibility. They are free to give workers the flexibility, nothing is preventing them from doing it. They use this model to reduce benefits to give their workers. It is incredibly hard to pass regulations against these lobbying efforts. However regulations that companies need to give their workers benefits do already exist, that's why Ubers operations were deemed illegal in places.
> Today people can't even imagine a society where you don't have a job, you just go and do things that are useful and get rewarded the full fruit of your labour, that sort of thing is possible with Ubers offerings and a bit of regulations, why go all in on preventing that future from happening?
The argument is that the future is that people don't have the choice of " just go and do things that are useful and get rewarded the full fruit of your labour," but instead are locked into highly unfavourable situations, with no choice (because of their economic situation) and at the same time skirting around tax obligations, just to enrich the investor class behind Uber.
That did already happen, just look at what Über did with the Uber Black loans where drivers got enticed into car loans with promises of guaranteed income, just for Uber to reduce the fares. This is essentially the same as how servdom in Russia worked.
> So what is the problem, just regulate it and everything gets better than under the old Taxi systems. Why is this so hard to imagine?
That's the whole point about the Uber leaks. Uber was not willing to work under the existing worker protection frameworks, they even exited markets where they were forced to (e.g. Switzerland).
HN is obviously not a hive mind, but in in general, for facets of the HN crowd, the investor class, those with conservative/libertarian views on labor, business owners, etc. the default view is simply to not empathize with the service worker.
For whatever it's worth, I tend to err a bit toward the "more regulation" end of the spectrum, but I don't feel the need to believe that the world is simple and everyone who doesn't subscribe to my simplistic view is morally deficient.
Except this counterpoint is not based on real evidence but largely based on purely theoretical arguments which have been shown numerous times to be way too simplistic.
I’d like to hear more evidence. until then it seems like a comforting thought for a libertarian rather than a sober description of reality.
You’re on the internet arguing with imaginary strawmen for your amusement. It’s not time well spent.
I agree. But we also need to consider when well-intentioned measures are corrupted or fail entirely. That was the case with taxis before Uber. It remains the case with many of Uber's competitors. Uber is no paragon. But the neither is the status quo. This is far from a bimodal argument.
The fact is that Uber/Lyft created a new market even when the product existed a long time. In NYC, you could always get a car service to come and pick you up, but you had to know them, have a pre-existing relationship, etc. If you do, even today, it's cheaper than Uber, but it's a hassle.
Also in NYC, taxis are terrible in comparison to Uber. They're usually dirty/unkept, the drivers are sometimes "off". Taxi owners weren't focused on the service- they were focused on the medallion, the right to have a taxi. That's where the real value was.
The taxis were/are essentially anonymous, so there's no incentive to do anything more than the bare minimum in terms of cleanliness, repair or customer service.
Uber, for all its extreme faults, flipped that on its head, with driver and rider visibility, and that changed everything.
Uber has many problems- handicap inaccessibility, driver treatment, a ton of evidence against them regarding deliberate manipulation and probable lying to regulators, but "bring back the old ways" clearly weren't working either.
The market needs to break up and become more free.
Similarly, until a few years ago it was forbidden to operate busses between cities.
Uber has some negative aspects but opening up the market and allowing healthy competition is certainly a huge positive.
And was there any other requirements? Like required training or mandating mandatory supply at all times?
There’s a lot of competition on the German market for taxi-alternatives, many of which started long before Uber (and are often cheaper as well).
In the process, Uber clearly behaved illegally and unethically towards its workers and government regulators. That's been known for a while. Could it have been different? Maybe, maybe not. Sometimes governments don't listen until they're forced to.
Now about the working conditions of cab drivers, honestly in many places they were already being screwed over by local oligopolies (for a prime example of this, see for example the NYC medallion auction scams which defrauded individual drivers of hundreds of thousands of dollars). In the Uber story, drivers got shuttled from one shitty situation to another probably just about as shitty.
Hopefully the new set of players in that space now abide by the local rules, and also the regulators learn from their failures and get on top of the industry without forgetting about their users too much.
Many rich people wouldn't suffer if Uber could just forcefully employ people at will, keeping them hostage, if Uber could arrange something like that. But that hurts the people who are being kept hostage. When we create/remove/modify regulations, both sides of the coin needs to be considered.
In this case, it's less about how good/bad Uber is for passengers and more about how Uber is exploiting their employees. Even if everyone loved Uber as a passenger, we can't allow them to exploit other human beings.
Anything else?
But since you apparently sit on a trove of data (as you're so sure of this) that I don't have access to, could you share a bit the results and your methodology?
And I presume you obviously don't use those pesky child-labor-by-Foxconn phones/other devices like Apple; heck it would be hard to find any electronic device using ie rare metals that were sourced by standards you seemingly want others to adhere to. So I presume you typed this on some wooden computer sending pigeon packets.
We can go much deeper. You will inevitably fail eventually the same standards you are expecting from others here, probably pretty quickly. Its just about which battle one decides to pick up and push hard enough. You picked Uber for some reason, others for around gazillion reasons stated in this thread do not consider them the most important topic given the overall benefits to whole society.
"Yet you participate in society. Curious! I am very intelligent."
https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/
I don't think anyone would disagree with that. I think the point is that Uber can do shitty things that should be punished and provide a good service that should be encouraged.
To put it another way, the world I want to live in gives you a fair chance of running a competitive business without having to be mega rich and chummy with the leaders of the countries you operate in.
The idea that Uber is creating slaves that have no agency is the typical elitist arrogance, sitting in their ivory towers, picturing all these poor Uber drivers suffering when it’s simply not the case.
> Uber identified police officers through data mined from the app and then, using an internal tool called “greyball”, served them a fake view of the UberPop app, populated with ghost cars that wouldn’t stop for them. They could also block anyone from booking in certain zones, like around police stations, using a tool called “geofencing”. [1]
Fair enough if you disagree with the court ruling, but they should abide by the law like everyone else.
[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-f2971465-73d2-4932-...
if you disagree with a court ruling, and then set up intentionally a system to avoid the police detecting you continue your behaviour, you should be punished to the maximum extent of the law. The people who orchestrated that behaviour should have money confiscated from their illegal enrichment, and jail time for purposely working to circumvent a legal order for a court. And if not back then, today.
They broke through all of those unfair laws and now we live in a system that benefits from them breaking the rules for the better. Seriously, you think the taxi monopoly was so much better than now? That’s laughable!
Should the Dutch farmers who are being regulated out of business sit idly by while all their hard work goes to nothing?
Uber chose to break the rules against an illegal taxi monopoly and I’m thrilled they did because otherwise no one would have been able to break it. Because they put their necks out on the line we have a driving service around the world that would never have existed if we didn’t have them pushing the boundaries.
I would, for a large number of reasons, at the basic level no one really agrees what the "world should be" thus your regulations for a utopia would not match mine.
Further government has proven through out history to be very poor at creating the kind of word "we want the live in"
Instead government, the law, "rules and regulations" should be about impartial conflict resolution and protection of natural rights not attempting to create some kind of Utopia that it can never achieve and will make everyone life worse in the attempt
And the first requirement for this is that rules and regulations are followed.
Establish a culture in which there is no consequence for disobeying the rules and regulations and I guarantee that the most regular offenders are not those who's practices you agree with.
The best case scenario here is that there are heavy consequences for those who broke the rules, but the rules are revisited and altered to make things more in line with consumer needs.
As an autistic person I found this very hard to grasp when I was young. Now I understand that rules must be discovered as an emergent property, they cannot be read from a manual or law book. What matters is the culture that enforces whatever rules you want. Otherwise you get tons of laws on the books people don't enforce.
Seems like you're addressing the difference between the concept of Social Contract and the concept of Law.
The Social Contract is exactly what you described: the implicit permissions and offenses that a body of people will tolerate. It is, by definition, equal to the current will of the people, and as you said requires discovery. But it requires constant discovery, as the list of permissions and offenses may change over time, and is not necessarily consistent.
Law is an explicit agreement on what permissions and offenses that body of people will tolerate. Ideally it would match the social contract's list of permissions and offenses, but in reality it will always be lagging behind, and it's a social responsibility to try and keep it up to date. Unlike the Social Contract, the law is codified and constant, requiring no discovery.
In small groups of people, coexisting with just the social contract can be all you need. But as the group grows, it becomes less and less possible to predict what the current body of permissions is, leading to people committing offenses without malicious intent; there was no way for them to know beforehand that an action was an offense. And because the body of permissions changes constantly, it's also not something that can be relied on practically after the discovery. We must always suffer the anxiety of taking an action that will condemn us.
Law provides an easier means to get along by providing a constant and predictable list of permissions and offenses. It changes too, but only by announcement, allowing the populace to stay abreast of the updates. This offers a relief to the anxiety presented in a strictly Social Contract setting, and encourages people to act and be involved in daily life rather than avoidant of it.
The offenses you're describing seem to fall under the concept of De minimis[1], which establishes that there are offenses to a rule that just aren't worth acting on. We all know they're against the law, but not necessarily against the spirit of the law, and the cost of acting on those offenses are greater than the benefits. So we allow them to happen, by virtue of the Social Contract overriding the Law in minor circumstances.
But that doesn't mean that the rules and regulations aren't important and larger offenses should never be acted on. The Law is still the Law and for good reason. Ignore it, and that anxiety returns to plague anyone without the power to force their will.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_minimis
Unfortunately when you have regulatory capture by special interests groups, this ensures that no progress ever happens because the organization with the most lobbying money is always guaranteed to win.
The Uber driver circling at 5 am may not be turning a profit with $15 airport rides. This business may only be sustainable for as long as VC money flows, and drivers are willing to go bust.
Uber makes something like a 36% variable margin [1]. Even adding back sales & marketing we find a positive, if small, margin. They lose about 11% per ride. But that varies wildly region to region. (New York, for example, is profitable.)
Drivers' economics are more precarious. But the "as long as VC money flows" argument hasn't made sense since Uber's 2019 IPO.
[1] https://gadallon.substack.com/p/pool-is-back
So on net, they may be out something like 11-30% per ride dependent on location. Those are awful economics. More concerning would be busy season/dry season dynamics for Uber drivers. If there are months where rides decline in frequency or become more concentrated - then driver economics may be substantially worse than the average would have you believe.
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/uber-posts-nearly-6-billio....
Rules and Regulations are extremely hard to change, thats why we have companies like Uber popping up in the first place.
Surge pricing can incentivize more drivers to come online. I don’t see how you can reduce the customers in a short timeframe.
You end up with a surly asshole driver and a surly asshole rider who both think the other is screwing them, when in fact it was the silicon valley douchebags
https://reittiopas.hsl.fi/reitti/Central%20Railway%20Station...
I never need to take an uber any more. The cars and drivers are all professional, and they’re often closer than any Uber.
They (Uber) solved it by completely dominating the food delivery landscape with Uber Eats.
Are most of the silicon valley programmers on this forum native Thai citizens?
In Bangkok taxis are super cheap for everyone and it never happened to me that someone tried to cheat me (and I am quintessential white man)
Yes, it's called a worker's cooperative, a it's exactly how huge chunks of the economy should be organised. Unfortunately (as pointed out elsewhere in the thread) it is often impossible for workers to raise capital to build an enterprise in this model, even if it would mean a more efficient organisation.
They are (in)famous for using lots and lots of venture capital money to subsidize their fares for customers when entering new markets, using those low prices as loss-making user acquisition, and then eventually (and likely gradually) raising their prices once they have enough regular users - often having killed off some of the local competition who couldn't compete with the VC-subsidized prices Uber arrived with.
> How do you compete with that? Taxi business need to reflect. And every country is the same strangely, it's as universal than taxes: you can't escape!
Reflecting doesn't do much when your competitor can afford to sell every journey at a loss until you go out of business before then putting their prices up to what you're currently charging.
Yes, in some places Uber's arrival did either bring a better service or scare local taxis into doing better (e.g. lots of local firms now offer app-based booking and are just as reliable as Uber), and in some places taxis were so overpriced that Uber could genuinely offer a better service for a lower price and be profitable. But the vast majority of the times they offer cheaper prices, especially when it's such a big difference as in your story, it's a temporary (perhaps for months or years) strategy not something to expect to stay cheap. Enjoy using their services half paid for by investors while you can!
Edit: There don't seem to be many recent news articles that go into details, as it was known about so many years ago that most articles talking about these leaks just acknowledge this to be fact (e.g. in this very article we're in comments thread of, "At the same moment as Uber’s service deteriorates and the subsidy that helped it decimate taxis evaporates [... continues on about other stuff]")
But here's an interesting snippet from a court case that alleged this against them in the US where the judge basically agreed but said it wasn't to be point of being illegal. From https://casetext.com/case/sc-innovations-inc-v-uber-techs-2
> The Court held that Sidecar's allegation of a relevant market—app-based ride-hailing services, excluding taxis—was sufficiently plausible to survive a motion to dismiss. Id. at 10-11. The Court also rejected suggestions by Uber that Sidecar had not alleged below-cost pricing, id. at 12, as well as arguments that Uber's delayed entry to the non-limousine ride-hailing market and asserted pro-competitive purposes were sufficient for dismissal at the pleading stage, id. at 16-18. The Court nevertheless dismissed Sidecar's Sherman Act claims for failure to provide sufficient allegations of market power, particularly its failure to allege "that Uber has the power to raise market prices above competitive levels simply by reducing its own output, or that Lyft"—allegedly Uber's only remaining competitor—"could not respond to such a reduction by increasing its own output." Id. at 12-14. Absent such allegations, the Court held that Sidecar alleged no more than a "disciplined oligopoly," which the Ninth Circuit has held insufficient to state a claim for either monopolization or attempted monopolization, due to "a gap in the Sherman Act that allows oligopolies to slip past its prohibitions,"
In south of France, Uber is half the price of taxis (for ride to airport I pay 30e from my place, while taxi is 70+), and cars are always very nice.
In Poland, regular taxis are often cheaper. Although usually regular taxis are so-so cars. But, UberX is even worse: often very bad cars, scratched, even crushed, driven by foreigners who can't speak the language. Uber Premium are good cars with good drivers, but are more expensive than taxis (although, they are nicer).
Maybe Big Taxi needed a shakeup worldwide.
Although the other day I sat in sick in a Lyft before work, and I ended up getting only 5 dollars credit for the privilege of smelling all day around people.
I'm… speechless… Can I ask how often and during which time period you took the Taxi in Paris? I've never had or even heard of such experience, I always had the same quality of service of Taxi in Paris as in Germany. (= very good quality) I'll admit that I just take it twice a year when I go visit my aunt. But my brother lived for 7 years in Paris in the 2000s, and I've never heard him complain outside of the price. I'm genuinely surprised by what you're saying (Yes I am a native french speaker), if you didn't have such a good comment history I would have assumed you were an Uber comment farm account.
My family also despises the taxis and they've dealt with them their whole lives.
My partner and I need to get home from where she works, we use the uber app, and it quotes us $35. It's a little pricey for a 12 minute journey, but whatever. A driver accepts.
We watch as that driver drives in circles, then appears to come towards us, then turns away again. There is no extra stop listed. He keeps doing it, just going round and round, stopping for a while, driving away again. After 15 minutes of this, we cancel to see if we can re-book with a different driver. Suddenly - "Surge pricing!" it's now $45.
So we install the local cab app (Thanks Swan Taxis), their app is definitely worse, but we get a quote for $25 and the cab arrives in under 5 minutes.
How do you compete with that? Uber business need to reflect. It's the same every time.
There are similar applications for different markets of course. But Uber has the international brand recognition. Worth investigating what app works best before you go somewhere.
Since the story here is not about if Uber is better/worse for passengers but if Uber is a good/bad employer, it sounds like that's what you're saying.
If the choice to have good service + no exploitation arise, I'll take that one, and it's coming thanks to Uber bursting the taxi monopoly, but in the meanwhile no regrets, taxis had it coming.
Wake up, decide it's a good day to be exploited.
Kiss your wife goodbye as you enter your car "bye honey! On my way to being exploited by Uber!"
Drive away and open your exploitation app. Accept a ride, go to the person: "who's the person that's going to participate in my exploitation together with Uber today? Oh, there he is!". Drive him to the place he needs to be, drive away.
"Ok, do I want to be exploited some more today?"
Decide to be exploited on a few more rides and return home.
Now being serious, if you're an Uber driver and let's say that in the short term that's your best option, why would it be better for him to have this option striped from him? Why do you think anyone else should make that call except him?
There are multiple avenues available, the least of which is to pass sweeping legislation to force corporations into compliance with basic human decency standards.
Apparently, lots of drivers seem to think it's not such a bad deal. I sure am not going to shed any crocodile tears for the lost business for the taxi drivers that have had the privilege to rip me off in the past. Happened a little too often for me to do that.
There's a lot of sentiment around jobs, job security (which is an illusion), and people paying into social insurances. I'd say that's all fine and something to sort out by different countries. Meanwhile, it seems plenty of people make decent money driving around as Uber drivers and this is not really Uber's problem to sort out. The gig economy certainly challenges some established values. But fundamentally, there seem to be plenty of people willing to take those gigs. That's why that works.
Either way, that doesn't invalidate the value proposition of offering passengers a fair price for a ride before they enter the car. Whether it's Uber or somebody else offering that deal, it sure beats haggling with some shady characters in the middle of the night about a ride from A to B. Been there done that & no thanks. Not going back to that. Uber sure looks like magic when you use it in situations like that. Wnip out phone, ride shows up, and teleports you home. Great value. Anything less is a rip off deal, frankly. I've probably paid too much for that service on some occasions but I like it none the less.
Instead of going all socialist on Uber, maybe hold your local politicians accountable to be more competent. This is happening on their watch after all. There seem to be lots of people that have issues with Uber but not a lot of them seem to be able to do anything about that legally. Why is that? What's blocking that after all these years of scrutiny, court cases, lobbying, rule changes, etc.? If Uber is doing something illegal here, by all means drag them into court and fix it. But if not, maybe change the legal situation to normalize what they and other business do? Apparently, the problem is that Uber is still around after years of legal proceedings in many countries. Maybe, that's because they aren't actually doing that much wrong at all and are providing a decent service to customers via an army of drivers willing to earn some money that way?
And Uber drivers aren't even considered working for Uber, so no social benefit and health care from Uber.
I don't doubt that taxis can be problematic in many places. Typically they reflect the social conditions of where they operate. Inequality, poor education, corruption in general mean that taxis in such location are not a good experience.
And then highly paid people like many HN readers are just not willing to do the math: A taxi driver (or Uber driver) will not be able to drive all working day long. They have to wait for new passengers a significant part of their working time. So expect that when you use them you need to pay at least twice the rate for a normal employee. Deprecation and maintenace for a car is not cheap. And again the customer also needs to pay it for the time the vehicle is not moving, not just for the time they are travelling. The latter is even worse for Uber. Private cars don't have several drivers. Traditional taxis have (at least in this country), just to compensate for big part of fixed costs. Of course Uber externalizes those costs to their drivers.
These are the same Dick Cheney acolytes saying “we need illegal immigration or else strawberries will cost too much.”
That's a bit of a stretch. Finnish agriculture (which is rather small) has not been able to live without Ukrainian and Vietnamese workers for several years. But there are legal frameworks to get them the required permits. It's not free of problems, all kind of exploitation happens. But then the rules will be tightened again.
I think it's the same over most of Western Europe, with domestic workers alone farming could stop.
This dynamic changes significantly though when your have app-mediated taxi interactions, instead of waving down a taxi in the street. Taxi drivers end up drastically more efficiently allocating their time, since they don't have to drive around hoping for customers to miraculously appear - instead they just drive directly to the closest customer every time.
They can also manage their time to work only when & where there is demand for their services in the moment, instead of driving around the wrong area looking for non-existent customers. You'd also expect that by providing a more convenient/cheaper/better service, this would create more demand for taxis in turn, which makes it easier to find passengers, and so driver time can be even better utilized.
None of that requires either Uber specifically or a ruthless gig-worker model - any other app-based taxi service would provide the same benefits - but I think it does make a clear argument for why app-powered taxis in general should be able to bring taxi prices down and provide a better customer experience, without necessarily destroying taxi driver's livelihoods.
That has never existed in any of the 3 countries I have lived in. Taxis were always ordered by phone. At least since the 1960s drivers were offered trips via radio by the taxi switchboard, in 2000s the available trips appeared on a screen on the dashboard.
Well, it might depend also on the density, but at least outside of massive city centers some kind of booking has always been required.
> None of that requires either Uber specifically or a ruthless gig-worker model
Exactly.
> a clear argument for why app-powered taxis in general should be able to bring taxi prices down
We are on HN, so I assume few would resist to use IT to optimize a problem. However, my expectations of how much such systems really save costs in the end would be rather moderate. Don't underestimate human optimization if experienced drivers pick their rides from a list. As mentioned, technology for that has existed since the 1960s. Does Uber really offer anything better for the driver?
Did you read the article? The reason this worked for you is that you benefited from exploiting some underpaid soul that was up at 5 in the morning to barely scrape by.
My personal experience. I come back from a trip in Romania. Arrive at Seatac, open the Uber app, it costs $100 for a trip to my house. Wait for my luggage to arrive, I open the app again, it's $120. I go outside the terminal and I find a town car service which was $60 for the same trip.
Rewind 1 day, In Bucharest, I arrive at the hotel via taxi and tell the driver that I need to go to the airport at 4 in the morning. He's like 'great, I just started my shift. Here's my phone number, call me when you wake up, I'll be at the hotel within 15 minutes'. And he was.
Glad Uber got you where you wanted to go though, put your email in your bio and maybe they’ll ask you to write a tweet for them.
Denmark, using taxi 230 USD, need to call hours in advance.
San Francisco, using Uber 40-50 USD.
India, using Uber 10-20 USD.
In Denmark taxis are so expensive there is few of them, so not only is the crazy expensive, it's very hard to find one when you need it.
Uber did grow the market.
> MacGann insists that Uber drivers were seen by some at the company as pawns who could be used to put pressure on governments. “And if that meant Uber drivers going on strike, Uber drivers doing a demo in the streets, Uber drivers blocking Barcelona, blocking Berlin, blocking Paris, then that was the way to go,” he said. “In a sense, it was considered beneficial to weaponise Uber drivers in this way.”
> The files show MacGann’s fingerprints on this strategy, too. In one email, he praised staffers in Amsterdam who leaked stories to the press about attacks on drivers to “keep the violence narrative” and pressure the Dutch government.
Uber was weaponising their workers (while fighting as hard as possible to not call them workers and pay for workers' benefits) against local governments, they were behaving like a tech-mafia, a mob with sprawling power across the globe.
What the actual fuck?
This a scandal of huge proportions.
This dismisses drivers' expressed preferences and actions in favor of a chosen narrative. Drivers protested the measures purporting to help them. They polled against them in California. They voted against them.
Claiming they were all brainwashed by corporate requires extraordinary evidence. (It is akin to dismissing a unionization vote by claiming the union brainwashed the workers.)
I don't have a link to any source, it was some years ago and it might have changed since
The ideas were good - use your leftover time/space/goods, and earn some money. We'll cover the tech, just pay us x% of the cut.
But then it became obvious that these types of ventures were in direct conflict with various labor laws across the globe. So they begin to skirt the laws, pitting their laborers against governments, all while exacerbating the sectors. And turns out it's hard to subsidies certain businesses with VC money forever.
Where did things go wrong? Maybe when people starting treating gigging economy as a full-time thing. Maybe they thought they could offer cheap and awesome service forever. Maybe they thought they could remain in the grey area of the law forever, or at least until they gained enough power to change the laws.
I used to use airbnb, now it sucks. I'm back to hotels.
I used to use uber, now it sucks. I'm back to using taxis.
I used to use delivery services, now they suck. I just pick up my own food at a fraction of the cost.
I - the consumer - obviously enabled all these things. Ok, enough rambling...
This strange arc of the last decade has shown me that a sizable chunk of information technology has matured to the point of being a commodity. For those that have worked in the field reaching back further than a decade, this begets an ennui, as our labors redirect less towards the question of what is possible and increasingly more towards the petty struggles of bureaucracy and maximization of profit and labor exploitation.
We had (have?) a moment that was more fleeting than we realized.
Demonstrations, blocking streets, keeping stories in the press - all time -honoured tactics. I guess the outrage here is a private for-profit organsation adopting such behaviour more usually associated with political parties and pressure groups?
Seriously though, this kind of BS is not normal corporate behavior. When they do it to individuals it's a huge scandal. E.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsafe_at_Any_Speed#Industry_r... or Or more recently https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBay_stalking_scandal
This is effectively Uber at war with multiple sovereign and local governments. It's fucking insane.
Uber is a more efficient mafia that won over the old mafia.
How is that wrong? Uber gives people jobs. People have a right to compete with taxi drivers. The city should not be taking those jobs away.
Now there's a rank for exactly FIVE (count em FIVE) taxis, a 15 minute walk from the terminal exit and a line a couple hundred meters long for the bus. This isn't a small regional airport. This is the international/domestic airport for a city of 5 million people.
Absolute madness and just another point of frustration I have to endure now when travelling.
Bus 3% Taxi 14% Metro 27% Train 33% Car 23%
Too much regulation and a generally awful experience for users.
I used Taxis less than 10 times in my life ant it was almost always too expensive and frankly unpleasant.
I honestly despised Taxis and wanted this old system to die, I don't think my case is an outlier.
Regulation is always a two edged sword, in this case I think it created an opportunity for disruption.
But it is much easier to say so now.
And we can't all live in megacities, but there are certainly better solutions than relying exclusively on cars.
When Uber and the likes came, this disrupted the industry. But the big difference here is that the Uber drivers obviously only
A) worked during peak hours and peak days.
B) only used it as a side hustle, which meant not staying up at 3AM waiting for customers. Sure, in large cities, there probably are some of those drivers, too - but they're not obligated to that.
Traditional cabs couldn't compete on price, and had to either start laying off drivers, or close shops all-together.
Then the gov. budget, and started opening up to more uber-friendly laws around the taxi industry. They are no-longer obligated to offer 24/7 service, nor do you need to work for a cab company.
In the end, I (living out in a rural place) end up paying the same rates as before, but with zero options should I need a cab 04-05 in the morning. Not really a problem until you need one, like catching a very early flight, getting stuck somewhere after a party, or whatnot.
but sometimes I had to, or I was curious to explore this option, and I've been disapointed.
The worst experience was a drunk cab driver, smelling like he vomited just before taking the course. I had to stop him midway as it felt really unsafe.
What's next, a global war on drugs, terror or poverty?
Sure I feel for drivers, they had a hard time. Definitely they got the raw end of the deal.
Ridesharing companies are doing the same. They promised less cars but now there are more. People getting into crazy debt to just drive around the streets looking for clients, creating more traffic and more pollution.
Before Uber, I had personal experiences with taxis in Chicago and London trying to scam and bully me when visiting. Taxis in my hometown would never show up when called. Not to even mention the racial discrimination that was ubiquitous with legacy taxis.
No matter if Uber is better/worse for the passengers, they cannot (shouldn't?) exploit their own employees. It's not worth allowing any human to be exploited, even if you get a better service for something.
Comments like this are frustrating. The taxi “industry” is made up of lots of small players in every city and small town around the world, each with different regulations and offerings. It’s not some massive conglomerate. Your experience with taxis in the place you use them can be completely different to the experience one town over not to mention in another country.
When self driving cars finally arrive everywhere, they'll be done for. I can't wait for the political battle of "keep the jobs so people can continue being occasionally exploited by transportation".
Yes. In London there were tons of minicab companies. They were cheap and shitty, but they were there, and you could pay for better ones. There were also heavily regulated black cabs. Uber have probably increased the quality of the market, but at the cost of many more cars on the crowded streets, and the VC funding driving competitors out of business. Further, they fucked around evading rules and reduced safety for passengers by (for instance) failing to background check their drivers, failing to ensure adequate insurance etc. They were cheaper than most competitors when they started out, now I'm not so sure.
In Southampton, UK there were and still are multiple cab firms. They didn't really have apps. Now they do. The uber cars are usually cleaner and newer, but if you want service at a particular time, you still book the cab, because they'll send someone to you specially rather than just searching on a cron job. There is no real price difference.
In Perth, there were multiple cab firms, their cars were crappy and their apps still are. For a while uber was cheaper and more convenient, they drove some of the cab firms out of business. Now uber must not pay as much, because there are barely any drivers and half the time they don't even bother to take the job. If they do take the job, they often cancel it or just fuck around to try and make you cancel and trigger surge prices. Uber is now usually the expensive option. Cabs are resurgent and similar to how they ever were, which was actually fine.
Basically, as far as I can tell, Uber were 'good' because they threw VC money at everything. Now that's starting to dry up, they're getting unreliable because they can't keep attracting drivers. And frankly we should never have allowed them to use billions of investor dollars to distort world markets, nor allowed them to avoid tax by using an already well-worn excuse (oh they aren't employees!) in the first place.
Currently in my country there aren't a lot of places to work if you're young and untrained. But services like uber, bolt and various food delivery end up creating an unofficial floor for the wage of somebody willing to work. You don't need credentials or exams - you just need basic skills, time and will - and at least with food delivery services, you're a bicycle and 24 hours away from making money.
Now, maybe where some of you live things are different. Maybe you can afford the extra friction of employment, maybe you don't need that safety "wage floor" because anybody can get employed at any time. Maybe you live in heaven, I don't know. I was born beyond the Iron Curtain and I'm actually ready to believe that some countries somewhere are heaven. But everywhere I could see with my own eyes: there are people that can make money with this kind of freelance services, that would most definitely suffer if formal employment was the only game in town.