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Comment by rashkov | Hacker News Reader

I think there's a pro-Uber case to be made here. Uber suspended surge pricing at a time when many people were trying to get to the protest at the airport, and while the airtrain was shut down which is what connects the subway system to the airport. Furthermore Uber offered to compensate its drivers who are affected by the ban, if they get stuck outside of the country.

Edit: Maybe Uber mis-stepped by honoring requests for rides FROM the airport, but given the above I don't think they're doing this to grab money. It's actually a little sad to see the knee-jerk response by people lashing out at a company that is trying to help, in this instance.

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Travis Kalanick, Uber's CEO, made public statements indicating that Uber must work with the Trump administration. Four days later Uber stepped up as scrubs while the rest of the New York's taxi service protested Trump's deplorable racist actions. It's hard to pretend this is a coincidence.

I'm not denying that, and I feel weird defending Uber at all, but then you'd also need to account for why they offered to compensate their drivers affected by this travel ban, and why would they lower their surge pricing. I'm okay with saying that they're trying to play both sides of this.

Which in the context of a strike, isn't possible. The purpose of these kind of labor actions is to force a clarification about with whom one holds solidarity, in this case refugees and immigrants.

Breaking the strike is breaking the strike. They did not hold with refugees and immigrants, even after the taxi drivers explicitly asked them to do so. Everything else is just trying to mitigate damage to the point where people forget/engage in apologetics to obfuscate the choice they made.

With us or against us is some bullshit logic. This is not a binary issue.

Get some free PR by condemning the EO while actually offering support to Trump administration by removing pressure by nullifying the strike.

Now that's being a hypocrite on a grand grand scale.

Turning off surge reduces supply. That's not "nullifying the strike" - quite the opposite. It's weaker than it could have been, but it's also exactly what Lyft did.

Well, I'm glad you said what you said even though, as you admit, you feel weird defending Uber. Actions are much more louder and substantive than words and if Uber does good things, I am glad that this forum still has members who will rightfully point that out (instead of it devolving into an echo chamber)

I have heard this called racist a few times and at risk of sounding like a pedant or an apologist I respectfully object.

Creating abusive policy targeted at people from certain countries seems xenophobic, isolationist, draconian, cruel, stupid.

Racism is a far more evil concept than any of those.

Abusing and rationalizing the abuse of people because you have made a generalization based on their geography, ideology or culture is certainly wrong.

Abusing and rationalizing the abuse of people because you believe they are genetically inferior is on a different level of depravity.

When we use "racism" as a catchall term for all bigotry and bias, we do it at the peril of diluting its power when that particular flavor of shitheaded thinking needs to be classified.

Question: when the USA refused to take in many Jewish refugees from Hitler's Germany, was that merely isolationist and cruel? Or racist too? After all, anti-Semitism was rife in the 1930's USA--plenty of businessmen like Henry Ford were more than happy to republish the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which certainly played a role in American willingness to help the Jews.

Or does it even matter? I don't see how you can try to create a ranking of "minor evil" or "far more evil."

"Abusing and rationalizing the abuse of people because you have made a generalization based on their geography, ideology or culture is certainly wrong." --

What kind of generalization is it though?

This is a strawman. People call Trump racist, but this is an unconstitutional action with clearly racial motives.

Arguing against this being called "racism" is completely missing the point.

What Trump is doing is unamerican and unconstitutional. Arguably an impeachable offense.

There is nothing in the Constitution that supports your assertion. You have been tricked--a radical, violent ideology, wrapped in a religion is out to harm all those who will not submit to it. How many Christians, non-believers, and generally alternative people have to be murdered until you figure this out? Also, Islam is not a race.

And please, un-American? Our self-preservation is now un-American?

Everything uber does is about money and they aren't afraid to flout the law / custom and "disrupt". They swooped in during a strike. They are scabs. They are obviously doing it to grab money. Their CEO is buddy buddy with Trump.

How much money can they make during a 1 hour strike? Lowering their prices seems like the opposite of making money to me

A one hour strike at one of the busiest airports on the East Coast with NO taxis available? Probably a lot.

The point is you hold a strike to STOP work, not work for less money. That's called scabbing and is the opposite of solidarity.

Should the company decide on behalf of the workers whether they must join a strike? Shouldn't Uber drivers be the ones to make that decision?

Drivers are only allowed to turn down a limited number of rides before they are no longer allowed to be uber drivers for the day.

It was an one hour strike. Surely they could have driven far from the airport (to avoid getting tagged by the algorithm) for that time.

Can't they just turn off the app for an hour?

I think this sort of protest requires organization. Uber's surge pricing (which I assume drivers didn't know would be suspended in time to plan a protest) basically guarantees seamless scabbing, so the opportunity cost of the protest becomes unreasonable.

This is not about how much money they can make.

This is about showing their support to the government, their allies.

Is Elon Musk buddy-buddy with Trump as well, because they're on the same advisory board? Are you going to rant against Tesla too?

HN seems unwilling to confront this issue. People are complaining about Thiel, but Musk has been a darling for years.

HN seems unwilling to confront this issue.

Please don't throw out generalizations like this, particularly as you're a member of the HN community yourself. If you feel strongly about this particular issue, write up a blog post making your case, and submit it to HN, or have someone submit it for you.

Considering that Musk is competing against the entire petroleum industry (major supporters of Trump) with SolarCity and Tesla, I'd be surprised if the "friendship" was anything other than convenience.

Cognitive dissonance at its finest.

The taxi strike was part of the protest at the airport. Offering reduced pricing was a way to hurt the taxi workers who were losing money to show solitary with the protest.

If Uber was trying to help, they should have said so.

edit: Re-reading this, and I realize I missed your point. You're absolutely right -- they did not say "we are cutting surge pricing in support of the protest".

This was my original post for posterity:

"They did say so. This was their tweet:

'Our CEO's reaction to immigration order: "We'll compensate drivers impacted by the ban pro bono for next 3 months." http://ubr.to/standingup'"

They're helping their own workers. While a good thing, the rest of ther message is complete PR and sending ubers to JFK undermines the strikes, because it's such an easy way for them to make a profit.

Turning off surge pricing sends fewer Ubers to JFK! They make less money, not more with surge pricing off! Makes no sense!

Someone else in this thread pointed out that the headlines would be really bad for Uber if they said something like "Uber surges 500% while breaking airport taxi strike". It seems like they were trying to cover themselves, while not outright joining the strike, as if to triangulate towards the center.

If you mean the third option was to disable all service from JFK?

Though I don't think the regular taxi companies or Lyft did that either.

That is exactly what the Taxi strike did.

>"NO PICKUPS @ JFK Airport 6 PM to 7 PM today," the union wrote in a subsequent tweet that was retweeted over 10,000 times. "Drivers stand in solidarity with thousands protesting inhumane & unconstitutional #MuslimBan."

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/the-scene-at-jfk-as-taxi-d...

The objection is not that Uber didn't join the strike but that Uber reduced their prices to undermine the strike and get new customers.

> That is exactly what the Taxi strike did.

No it's not. The union encouraging != the taxi companies somehow forcing it.

The union and the taxi companies are not the same thing.

> Uber reduced their prices to undermine the strike

Uber reducing prices to normal levels means fewer drivers anyway! Fewer rides! This makes no sense! Why would Uber even bother with some Machiavellian scheme to get a hundred or two extra rides? Makes no sense!

>Why would Uber even bother with some Machiavellian scheme to get a hundred or two extra rides?

Getting that first install is critical, because once someone installs the Uber app they are unlikely to go back to taxi cabs. 200 extra riders might not be a big group, but they tell their friends and family and it spreads. This is especially true if the rides are discounted since everyone loves to talk about how much money they saved by taking an Uber instead of a taxi. Think of the ride sharing market in NYC, more than half the cars on the roads are taxis.

tl;dr Uber has employed viral marketing like this for years and it works.

Offering normal pricing means drivers get paid less, reduces opportunity cost of joining in strike. Or, drivers who participate in strike get paid $0 either way so it doesn't affect them. Uber drivers who don't participate in strike will get sent to JFK less often because of lack of extra incentive due to surge pricing.

"A strikebreaker (sometimes derogatorily called a scab, blackleg, or knobstick) is a person who works despite an ongoing strike."

Things were moving so fast at the time, I guess I had my doubts that Uber was even aware of the strike, but I suppose that may be naive and that the taxi association probably contacted Uber about this.

I'm definitely coming around to the idea that Uber is simply playing both sides of this, and that it gives them too much credit to assume good intentions of them removing surge pricing.

They lowered prices in response to the strike. They were aware it was going on. If they had left surge pricing in effect that could be argued to be ignorance of the strike, but they didn't.

The whole Uber paying drivers stuck outside the country came after the perhaps well-intended surge pricing debacle. To me, that move is textbook Crisis Management. And having driven for Uber, their SOP is to never do anything that favors drivers. They don't even think of drivers, who pay to use their network, as customers.

> Uber suspended surge pricing at a time when many people were trying to get to the protest at the airport

That means less people could travel to airport for protests. Suspending surge pricing reduces availability of cabs. You understand that right ?

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