If they don't like how they are treated, they can stop driving for Uber. It's not my moral responsibility to police Uber's business practices for the sake of their drivers.
It's an especially important point to make w/r/t/ food delivery, because delivery drivers for incumbent providers are absolutely not treated well. These are some of the workers we hear about in horror stories about people not being able to schedule child care because their work schedules change at the drop of a hat.
Again, apply this same logic to child labor. "Our family is happy to be able to make ends meet, even if it means our child has to work instead of going to school. We can eat more often than we did before." That's a compelling argument for sending your kid to work, but it's also a compelling indictment of the society that is failing to take care of those people. Ban the kids from working and then figure out another way to solve the problem of their hunger.
As others have said, try asking Uber drivers if they would like benefits and better pay. I've talked to many many Uber drivers, too, and even though they are clearly not being enslaved many of them see problems with various aspects of the current Uber model.
Also: let's retain fidelity to the original argument. It's not "some" Uber drivers who say they're happy. Every Uber driver I've ever talked to --- and I ask most of them --- says they're happier at Uber than at previous driving jobs. I think that's what the original commenter said as well.
If you look at my comment history, you'll find that I'm not exactly an Uber apologist (I think just take my word on that though). But I think they get a somewhat unfair ding on this particular issue.
I've talked to many Uber drivers who are in the middle of an endless shift because its the only way they can make enough money for everything to work out positively for them. I've talked to one Uber driver who had switched between black cars and black SUVs and UberX because the careful balance between the overhead of the cars and the amount he earns and gas prices etc. meant that he spent a year breaking even while driving full time. My experience is mostly in Chicago, in case that matters.
Being broke is worse than being underemployed, but working constantly because you aren't being compensated fairly is still a failure on the part of the employer.
It's great that rich people also wish they were richer but that's not really relevant. It's also great that you've talked to a bunch of Uber drivers wherever you live and travel to and that they've decided to represent themselves as happy, but that's not really scientific enough to end an argument or to carve out an exception to established laws on independent contractors.
As a sidenote, I appreciate that you aren't an Uber apologist, and didn't mean to imply that you were— I take your reasoning in good faith even if I disagree with you.
Actually, it is! You're not a neutral party just because you didn't make the policy. You tacitly support their policies by choosing their service. You can tacitly disapprove by choosing another service. This is the basis of things like boycotts, which actually can and do have effects on company policies.
Think about Chick Fil-A or something like that. You can choose to support a company that has policies that are bad news or you can choose not to.
do you think the drivers with a bad experience would stick around at Uber? or would they probably leave?
There's little to no obligation to stay an uber driver, you can literally quit without notice any day.
Even if Uber had a strictly enforced "no complaining about Uber" rule with a system in place to correlate people relaying complaints to the likely subset of drivers, you'd expect at least a few stories.
In fact: Uber drivers somewhat regularly break Uber's serious, overt rules. For instance: I've had drivers ask for money at the end of a ride (if you rate a trip zero stars, Uber will ping you to ask why, and if you tell them you got asked for money, they'll refund it). This has happened to me on three different occasions. So your logic requires us to believe that Uber drivers will flout the most important rule on the platform (all commerce goes through the Uber app), but assiduously adhere to an unstated rule about saying nice things about Uber.
The simplest explanation seems compelling in this case. Uber doesn't do an especially great job at taking care of drivers, but the package as a whole is much better for drivers than the cab and livery companies, and Uber drivers are pretty happy to have the new option.
A driver who stopped working at Uber would have no opportunity to express their complaints to you.
Try talking to Lyft drivers or drivers on other platforms who used uber in the past.
The only explanation I could come up with is that Uber does something to suppress those kinds of comments, and so I related why I thought that wasn't a satisfactory explanation.
[edit] Also, try asking "how do you like being considered a contractor vs full time with health benefits" -- I've found that perfectly "happy" drivers will give you an earful about this.
The ones that have chosen to participate and be Uber drivers seem to be pretty happy about it (or at least the ones I've talked to).
A lot of the Uber drivers I've talked to are part time. For example, the other day, I talked to a grandmother who literally just liked driving around. Uber X gave her a way to pay off her car, doing what she loved. Whenever she got bored, she would just log off and head home. She had nothing bad to say about her job at all.
[0] http://www.glassdoor.com/GD/Reviews/Uber-Reviews-E575263.htm...