I know of no one who drives for Uber/Lyft who doesn't think they are doing well. Seriously, where did this meme come about where they are all slaves to Uber? Between what two bring in each week and their mileage deductions they are tempting me at times.
the real tripe in the gig economy is all the pontificating coming down from top how they all care about rights of people, except it only is Western people they care about while those in China and other countries get run over by their governments.
The simple fact is, no employer has to make the job solve all your financial needs. It is up to you to find the job that fulfills your requirements and you can perform safely and well. if that takes more than one job then so be it, many of us have been there before and did it. you don't get anywhere waiting for someone else to fix your life
It seems to me that if Uber is unable to pay its drivers a living wage, they don't actually have a sustainable business model. They have a business model that relies on regulatory arbitrage (avoiding minimum wage or other employee-protection laws by skirting the Independent Contractor line as much as feasible), externalized costs (letting the government pay for things like food stamps and housing assistance), and good old fashioned exploitation of the working class.
I mean, I understand that uber started because the taxi market was protectionist. But on the other hand, do taxi drivers have better pay and a better union? Often, yes. There may be a middle ground here.
(* note that this argument applies to a lot of the gig-economy jobs out there, including lyft, doordash, and so on, not just Uber)
What other job can you think of where you can work as much as you want, anytime you want? Need a break? Click a button anytime you feel like it. Take as long or as little time as you wish. Want more work? Click a button anytime you feel like it. No timecards to punch. No boss breathing down your ass for being late. Its freedom on a level beyond practically any other major job category you can think of. What more could you ask for?
Sure you're probably not going to be raising a whole family with a white picket fence on Uber alone. They NEVER claimed you could AFAIK. Its never been portrayed as anything more than supplemental income. PROTIP: Uber is a job for the bored college student looking for a little extra spending money not the main means of survival for a struggling single mother of 10 kids. If you're at the point where you're relying on CA to force Uber to pay you more so you can put food on the table or get kidney surgery you're doing it wrong and you have far bigger problems than a company that has done you no wrong other than existing and not paying very much.
Now we're going to destroy this unique business model forever because of the greed of the taxis and people who can't understand that not every single job on earth is meant to earn you a solid middle class income.
Taxi driving is not skilled labor. It simply isn't worth much; certainly not what its full-time drivers are demanding.
Can we also complain about Mechanical Turk? I'd like to earn first-world wages classifying pictures of cats full-time.
Neither scenario is what the gig economy is supposed to be about. If a job doesn't pay sustainably, don't do it.
We tried to regulate taxis such that driving one paid wages on par with costs of living, but then some asshole company undermined that with a populist smartphone app.
The fact remains that Uber drivers and the like are pretty much the definition of freelance workers and NOT regular employees.
If my neighbor puts an ad in Craig's List for someone to drive her to the grocery store for $10 and I take the job, neither she nor Craig's List owes me benefits. If I mow my neighbor's lawn, I don't expect a 401K plan out of it.
This entire movement amounts to abolishing contract work entirely, which is straight-up stupid.
This is just such a weird fight. As someone who freelanced for long stretches of time, I think there are a lot of positives about freelance / gig work, and I also think that the majority of people who take these jobs understand the position they’re in and are happy with it. They chose to freelance and drive for Uber for reasons.
The legit concern is whether Uber or any other freelance company misleads its gig workers on their earnings, and to me the best solution to that is not to force reclassify them as employees or prohibit gig work, but to regulate transparency in compensation. For example, require freelance employers to include expense tracking and calculate workers earnings after expenses. That by itself would fix most of the problems for the percentage of gig workers who don’t realize they’re extracting depreciation from their car more so than getting paid by Uber.
The other issues of healthcare, etc., the US needs to solve at a societal level, not an employer level. I think humans have a right to health care. But I don’t think people have a right to a particular job, nor an entitlement for that employer to provide a particular mix of benefits.
This idea that we need to provide our social contract / safety net exclusively via employers is so strange to me, compared to simply owning that if we want these to be rights of our citizens then the government should be providing them as tax-paid services.
One wonders if driving for Uber could compete with basic income.
The Internet keeps telling me that all Uber drivers are unhappy. I use Uber from time to time, and about 90% of the time, the driver seems super happy to be driving for Uber. They seem happy with their compensation. Maybe all the drivers are new, this is their first week, and it all sounds good on paper. But maybe they actually like the job. I don't know.
I ride Uber daily to commute to work. The article describes pretty well my experience with Uber. It is a bimodal mix of (1) people who want flexible, marginal employment and (2) people who make a living out of it. The people who make a living out of it definitely get the short end of the stick.
Gig work is already not feasible. The only reason anyone undertakes it is financial illiteracy. Uber is largely funded by the irrational sacrifice of numerous individuals of the residual value of their own cars.
When I was a cab driver I picked up a guy first thing in the morning and took him to the airport. He told me that he worked for an insurance company and they were flying him out to somewhere in India to train someone to do his job. I pointed out that when his job moved overseas he would be made redundant. My customer told me that it wasn't important because of two things. One, if he didn't do it someone else would. Two, he got the free holiday anyway.
Working for UBER in any capacity is self-harm.
This company is bent on taking VC money and subsidising the workers who are paving the way for their own redundancy.
Not just UBER, others too. When robots/ai/automatons take all our jobs, how do we earn money to live on?
On a different note, this everyone-jumping into the gig-economy of driving/riding for these services seem to be scary for their personal growth. Assume, I'm a bike-driver for Uber Eats (Today @ 2019), What would be I'm if i continue doing this after 5 years? It's the same Uber Eats driver. But if in a corporate set up, At least I can become something like a junior Accountant to Account or there's a career growth.
This growth seems completely invisible in this gig economy and during my conversation with a lot of recently joined Uber Drivers (in Bangalore, India) pretty much many are frustrated and trying to get into a different business that offers growth and stability.
Will this gig-economy destabilize global economy? I don't know. But I don't think a full-time Uber Eats driver is getting any benefit in long term.
I think it sucks that Uber drivers aren't direct employees of Uber. Were they once upon a time? I forget. Anyhow, it's just a bullshit game for Uber to avoid regulations. It'd be much better for everyone involved if drivers could just be salary employees.
Sure. But can anyone honestly argue that driving for Uber/Lyft is the only employment option they have? I mean, what would they have done before those companies existed?
Uber and lyft have to dictate the price the end user pays. Nobody would use the service if they had to collect bids from a bunch of drivers each time they wanted to go somewhere. As a result they wouldn’t have an effective pool of customers needed to attract drivers.
I agree with others. These “gig economy” jobs are a different classification of worker that doesn’t currently exist. Dunno what the details should be but they aren’t quite contractors and they aren’t quite employees.
California could have taken the lead and helped define this new classification...
I totally get the negative consequences of gig jobs: no benefits, security and so forth. But whenever I take an Uber or Lyft (maybe 100 in the US and UK) I ask the driver how they feel about the job. Almost all of them are happy with it - some gripe about the pay but they like the flexibility. It's possible they aren't thinking far enough ahead - and I'm talking to the self selected group who didn't get a disabling injury or illness and fall into poverty.
What a low effort rebuttal. Why are you comparing gig work to indentured servitude? Is Uber forcing people to drive cars? If your argument is people don’t have any other options, is that really uber’s fault or is that fault of the society?
Isn't that up to the workers? Uber drivers know they don't get benefits. It's meant to be a side-hustle not a full-time job. No one forces anyone to drive for Uber or Lyft. I don't find it exploitive in the slightest bit.
I know I’ll probably take heat for this, but I really don’t understand this idea of Uber “exploiting” drivers.
Being an Uber driver isn’t like other jobs where you have set hours to work, bad working conditions, manipulative managers, etc... No one is keeping you from getting another job and doing Uber on weekends, or doing Uber never. I can’t think of another job where you are more free to do what you want and make your situation better.
Seems pretty straight forward to me, but I know many people disagree. What exactly is Uber doing to exploit drivers?
Do any of the naysayers ever actually talk to their uber/lyft drivers? I've never met a single one with bad things to say about the job. Most seem to enjoy the social aspect, and many foreigners take it as an opportunity to practice English while making some spare cash.
Who are you people to presume that these rational agents need to be restricted from earning money in a way that they deem convenient? Especially when their work is at will and unforced? Do you really feel that there is some kind of net good to the loss of work that comes with forcing uber to pay minimum wage, when it means that many content drivers will lose work?
The problem is much bigger than the existence of these gig economy services. The deeper issue is that demand for unskilled labor has become weak enough that, for many people, this is their best option relative to their skill set. Working conditions are terrible, but I don't think it would be a good thing for the world if Uber and the rest of the gig economy services magically disappeared one day: it would simply put the drivers into a financial tailspin with no real chance of escape. Moreover, Uber and Lyft are in a race to the bottom in terms of prices, and neither can unilaterally raise driver wages without pushing riders to the other app. The global economic rat race to drive down prices is unrelenting.
I suspect that universal basic income will become extremely popular in the public view, bordering on necessity, to offset the rise in inequality in the United States.
the real tripe in the gig economy is all the pontificating coming down from top how they all care about rights of people, except it only is Western people they care about while those in China and other countries get run over by their governments.
The simple fact is, no employer has to make the job solve all your financial needs. It is up to you to find the job that fulfills your requirements and you can perform safely and well. if that takes more than one job then so be it, many of us have been there before and did it. you don't get anywhere waiting for someone else to fix your life
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