Uber is treating its drivers as sweated labour, says report | Hacker News Reader

Uber is treating its drivers as sweated labour, says report

theguardian.com

10 pointshaliou7 comments

If you find yourself making less than minimum wage, then get a job making minimum wage. They aren't that hard to find.

While that still leaves the problem of not being paid nearly enough at least you get breaks, predictable pay, and the ability to slack off a bit without directly losing money.

I find it hard to feel sorry for people who latch on to a losing strategy and never look at other options.

> “Minicab drivers throughout the UK have been exploited by operators for years but Uber’s entry to the market has accelerated a race to the bottom.”

My fellow taxicab drivers found it easy to complain about the company I drove for, but I thought they tried to be as fair as possible. For example, on my fourth day of driving the dispatching system went down for a good part of the day. I was given a credit for that day's lease, so I did pretty well.

The independent contractor model was adopted by the taxi industry because initiative is what makes the difference between making money and not. If the company paid drivers minimum wage, there'd be no incentive to work the system to make as many trips as possible.

I think limousine companies, and those blue airport shuttle vans, are able to pay their drivers hourly because they have scheduled pickups, and the driver can be rated on making it to his/her pickups on time / etc.

Maybe that's odd in the States but here in Canada most jobs that an individual can get without a degree or experience would fit into the category of sweated labour. Many people are working multiple jobs to get by because a single income simply isn't enough. The uber drivers are not being forced to drive for uber, they are driving out of their own free will, given this, I don't know how reasonable for someone else to step in and take away what is likely a means to supplement income for a lot of these people until they can find something better.

Throughout most of the post-Depression decades, even unskilled labor received close to a living wage—that's what the point of a minimum wage is. A (mostly mandatory) high school diploma was about the highest education you really needed to be a productive member of civic society. Once that contract started breaking down and the education arms race began in earnest during and after the Vietnam war, we have seen a modern reversion to Victorian attitudes towards work and unskilled labor especially. People are expected to engage in what amounts to indentured servitude in taking on massive student loans, and castigated for not investing in their own future if declining to engage in this.

There is a subtle genius in setting up an economy in which you promote the idea of a meritocracy, divert economic gains at first to those that jump through educational hoops as a demonstration of merit, and over time set an ever-increasing minimum bar for participation in economic gains, while at the same time pushing the marginalized to take on the cost of education which was formerly borne by society at large as an common good. I've got to hand it to high capital—they took a beating after the Depression era reforms, but they know how to play a long con.

Many people are working multiple jobs to get by because a single income simply isn't enough. The uber drivers are not being forced to drive for uber

I see a contradiction in those two statements, and a direct relation to the article. "Not being forced to drive for Uber" seems to ignore a lot, starting with why the drivers took the job in the first place (which your own comment even stated).

Yes they are forced to take the job by circumstance, I meant they aren't forced to take the job by uber or some other entity. But if they are forced to take the job by circumstance, I imagine depriving them of that job would leave them in dire circumstances. I doubt uber could stay competitive if they paid higher wages, as I understand it that company is bleeding money:

>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-25/uber-lose...

The issue with driver compensation almost always depends significantly on the costs employees are incurring to drive these trips.

In particular those drivers that buy or lease a car just to drive for Uber seem to struggle. The money seems fine if you already have a car.

I realise that Uber does a bunch of things to undermine this such as encouraging drivers to lease cars and having stringent requirements on the type of car they are driving, but maybe we should be complaining more about that than the revenue they get from Uber.

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