A Driver’s Suicide Reveals the Dark Side of the Gig Economy
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
> For taxi drivers staring down an even bleaker future of driverless cars
These are not "taxi drivers". They are human beings. They are not single-purpose machines who are incapable of doing anything else. Humans are capable of learning a variety of different skills, even if they have already learned one. Articles like this treat them like specially made parts that are only suited for one thing.
Just because we can adapt doesn't mean this transition won't be extremely difficult for society and have major consequences. Just look at the riots in Greece when people were told the age of retirement eligibility for state pensions was going from 61 to 63.
Did they complain that they now had to learn a new way to hunt bison or perhaps a new way to find food entirely? Probably some of them did. Maybe they didn't like that they were forced by circumstances to learn something new. Still, nature doesn't care whether you like what you have to do to survive or not. Adapt or die. Such is life.
This isn't nature we're talking about here. It's other humans.
When I spend 20 or 30 years of my life specializing in a particular task, and doing it to generate a large amount of wealth for my employer, who passes a much smaller amount of wealth on to me, there are and should be strings attached to that from the employer's side.
In the US at least, there are already PLENTY of strings attached from the employee side. I can't see a doctor without a job. I can't borrow money without a job. I can't smoke grass, yadda yadda yadda. And I live in an "at will" state as well.
Sorry. This is not nature we're dealing with. It's humans exploiting other humans. The "adapt or die" philosophy is not justified.
The adaptation here is not to switch or become the slave master yourself. It is to resist and fight the problematic system of exploitation in all available alternative ways.
The "job" system is enforced at as low level as getting or not credit based on whether you get paid regularly or by whom. It is enforced by preferential rated for insurance and taxes for employers. Etc.
Unfortunately the solution, which is organized resistance to these ideas, is easy to pervert or bribe away.
> I can't see a doctor without a job.
I wasn't aware doctors ran employment checks before seeing patients. I haven't been to the doctor in a long time, though.
> I can't borrow money without a job.
Uh, yeah? People who lend you money like to see that you have some means of paying it back. How is that relevant?
> I can't smoke grass
Depends on the job, but that is a legal issue. I doubt most employers would care if the law didn't force them to.
> The "adapt or die" philosophy is not justified.
This is not a philosophy, it's a statement of the reality of the situation. Circumstances change due to forces beyond your control This will happen to everyone at some point. You can stamp your feet and whine and moan and demand that someone else (Who exactly?) put them back the way they were, or you can figure out how to deal with them.
Sounds callous and egotistical.
Driving, as a job, is going away. Not much is going to change that, nor should it. What is your advice for the drivers? "Sit on your hands, and hope that someone gives you some free money at some point"? Would they not be better served by taking some action to find a new line of work now?
I think it's called capitalism.
I knew another Computer Scientist who got his EMT certificate and worked in an ambulance service for two years, but ended up coming back to IT.
If I personally leave the work force again, it would be after getting funding for a PhD. I'd gladly take a greatly reduced wage if I could be on my way towards teaching and researching in a university.
The attitude towards learning really depends on what one is learning, what the experience of learning is like, and why one is learning it.
People tend to view learning very positively when they are learning something they are intensely interested in, that they feel is very important, and when the process of learning feels effortless and fun.
When learning is painful and frustrating, when it's learning of something one is not at all interested in, that one feels indifferent or even hostile towards, that one thinks is unimportant, and when one feels forced to learn because of economic or other considerations where the power dynamic is highly skewed against the learner, and where the learner has little control over what and how they learn, yes, people tend not to like that.
So even though you want what you are learning to be important. If it is TOO IMPORTANT the scale tips in the opposite direction.
In addition to the research, one seems to find many stories of exactly this happening.
Quite the opposite is true: people don't like learning UNLESS there is a clear reward. That's even true for the video game case, where it's simply that the reward is social rather than economical.
I love to learn a new level or video game characters future is at stake. Mario's death is not a loss that triggers great anxiety for me.
Needing to get certification in a field that I am not familiar with, so that my family can stay fed and not be homeless, tends to take the "joy" out of learning for me.
The thing is that here in the US, we (collectively) tend to define a large part of our identity by the job that we do. We are definitely more than just cab driver, just developers, and just data scientists. We are also parents, musicians, woodworkers, authors, gamers, teachers, pilots, and a number of innumerable things. Yet before we even stop to ask what people do for fun, we ask, "What do you do," with an implicit "For money?" tacked on the end.
This turn of phrase tickled me.
Attachment to stories keeps us where we are, good or bad..
Often seeing a therapist or clinical social worker doesn't mean someone will tell you what to do. They'll help you see options you can't.
"I'm so sick of my career" "Well then go back to school." "I can't, I have to live and provide." "Well there are night programs and scholarships and grants."
The medallion system is probably the worst part of this. Either the state needs to come in and offer some form of debt relief (which they failed to do in 2008 with outright fraud in the housing market; bailing out lenders and screwing over homeowners) or taxi drivers need to declare bankruptcy. This is the worst option, because they could forfeit all their savings, retirement investments, housing .. everything because what was sold to them as a sound investment didn't pan out.
What I want to know is: can an Uber/Lyft driver earn that $80k/year, or even $60/year if they drove full time (and minus what they have to pay in comparable health coverage).
The thing I hate to say, but is the reality, is that the Taxi drivers might just need to stick it out. They should get into jobs they can live on, but keep paying off the medallions/permits.
Uber is not sustainable. Lyft has already increases rates in a lot of cities to be more livable (I think they realize a lot of people will use them just to avoid Uber). If Uber's IPO doesn't do well, it could be dead in a few years, and ride sharing services will have to start charging sustainable prices to not end up like them. Prices will probably be cheaper than cabs, but more expensive than what they are now.
If they can switch fields and still make the principal/interest payments on those permits, they might just need to bank on them being sellable one day or sell them at a loss when they retire.
If this were reduced to say 12h total it is (barely) workable but now were talking about a part time job which can sustain the person for a few years. That mythical beast exists only in a few specialties. (All of them high tech and very well paid. Not something you would expect a typical taxi driver to be able to pull off without education and training.)
Here in the UK we have people who have become, kinda, qualified tradesmen in a few weeks. Some of them go on to be fairly proficient, others still get by when (atm) demand far outstrips supply.
The temporary lack only pertains too skilled technicians and nor people who can install and uninstall a ready made module.
However, there's still plenty of old buildings around and, in the UK at least, a real shortage of people with the necessary skills to maintain them.
In the context of the tread, a middle-aged taxi driver, looking at a future of redundancy, only has to worry about the next 15 years or so, not how things are going to play-out in the distant future. Maybe?
Operating elevators was not.
We're ruining these people's lives in the same way that we ruined the lives of those who were talented at manually separating cotton. In a way, I feel bad for these people, in the same way anybody who has to re-evaluate their identify and path in life and develop a new skillset or profession. And frankly, most of the people on this site have a stable career path, savings, and little threat to their immediate survival (at the very least), so we probably can't really even empathize, but still - that's the entire point of survival - adaptation to meet the needs of a changing world.
Trying to flesh this out. In the case of taxi drivers that need to adapt shouldn't they have the benefits of the same environment?
Ride sharing services are unencumbered by the regulations/laws facing taxi drivers. The taxi drivers "environment" doesn't allow the adaptation.
Had Uber needed to follow the regulations/laws in place for taxis in a city like New York would they have succeeded?
There are several classes of taxi/limousine in NYC regulations and the medallion'ed yellow cabs are only one of them, ubers just count as a different kind. I think as a livery cab ("black car") where the number of them was never fixed like the medallions were. Distinction is you're only allowed to hail yellow (and green) cabs on the street. Black cars have to scheduled and or sent from a dispatch, which uber counts as.
BTW, the black cars pre-uber were notorious for brazenly ignoring the hailing law, they would show up where the yellow cabs didn't and you could still "hail" them and you would have to play hardball negotiation on the price like you were in a third world country or else they would try to demand an abusive price.. Much more clearly illegally competing with the yellow cabs but not centralized into a single corporate villain and therefore more difficult to feel outraged towards.
If I were a taxi driver 5 years ago, I would have began driving for Uber and potentially looking for other career paths and finding opportunities to invest. I think there are a lot of people who come over with families and poor language skills and taxi driver is the obvious job. I really would not want to be a person in that position.
Yes, I absolutely think that whether or not it was Travis Kalanick or any other tech entrepreneur rolling the initial die, but that it's inevitable that in 10 years we're going to press a button on our phone and a self-driving car will pick us up with less people owning vehicles. It was a great idea that was going to succeed unless it was deliberately quashed. The concept of a taxi driver will be memory in 20 years from now.
Unfortunately for lots of people, where do you find the time to learn how to do something else? Are there jobs overflowing with compassion that will hire you with no experience and teach you for months? Are there lots of places to live where you don’t need money for rent, food, health care, etc. while you find your next career? You see the problem.
I can't help but feel that your statement is highly misleading or possibly outright false. The US population is estimated around 323 million. That would make social safety net spending at an average of $8,173 per PERSON per year.
That's incredibly difficult to believe.
Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid consist of almost 50% of the federal budget. If you include "Other," which includes other welfare programs such as veterans benefits, federal food stamps, as well as "Non-defense," which includes additional veterans benefits/housing/health, you can see that a very large percentage of the federal budget is on social safety nets.
And again, that is only federal. The amount of money locally and statewide that is put into affordable housing, homeless shelters, planned parenthood, etc at the local level contributes to what amounts to a nontrivial amount spent on social safety nets.
Social Security and Medicare are not particularly redistributive, so I don't think it's appropriate to include them either. The terms "welfare" or "safety net" implies to me taking from the well off and helping a relatively small number who are in need.
But then, again, the US is going to look pretty good compared to others.
(and I would like to add that there are plenty of economists saying that in fact most or all of a country's military budget is a social welfare program, as it's a job-of-last-resort for young people, which definitely helps them)
You'd never know it from the contempt for the deceased individual drenching this discussion.
Not only are humans capable of serial careers, they are capable of having lives outside of their careers, and emotional experiences which completely exceed the context of the role they play within their careers.
Would it kill folks here to dredge up a mote of sympathy for those whose time has gone by? Ever see "Death of a Salesman"?
that has always been true, however looking at my father and friends' experiences it seems it was a lot easier in the past to switch to completely different careers due to entry level jobs being widely available, previous experience not being as important, career paths where joining entry level and being "promoted from within" were the norm rather than the exception, and the "youth cult" where a new graduate is seen as a safer hiring bet compared to a 40+ hire did not exist. In addition the workplace was seen as the workplace, the place you go to work, which you leave and go home to live your life, it wasn't seen as a "24/7 place" where you have to "culture fit" and you are always available.
Nowadays everybody wants previous experience, and the specific experience for your particular position too, because you have to "hit the ground running" from day 1 and the "a single bad hire can doom your company". You also should not be too old, or too experienced, be good at the interviewing gauntlet (which often has little to do with the actual job) and you must fit in whatever arbitrary "culture" the prospective company has. This means it can get difficult to switch jobs in the same industry, let alone move to something unrelated.
Talking about our field, everybody knows that if you have a 10-15 years solid track record in several different languages and environments you could be adding value in most companies after a couple months ramp-up, but would you even be invited to an interview if you don't have a specific X years of experience in language Y with Z1,Z2,Z3... libraries? I mean, some job postings I've seen even express preference for candidates familiar with a particular IDE, if that is not treating people like single-purpose machines I don't know what is...
If you are in your 50s, with health insurance tied to your disappearing job, knowing there is no safety net and you're a few months away from living on the sidewalk, don't you think you would be desperate? If there was a safety net where you could live somewhere while you are retrained and have a chance, of course you would take it, but in today's world that doesn't seem to be in the cards.
Personally I feel compassion for people that have made a living doing something they love for 30 years only to find that livelyhood made obsolete virtually overnight.
Unfortunately, learning new skills is time consuming. There is no pause button on life while you research a new job. I don't know the percentage off hand, but I would not be surprised if more than half of Americans live paycheck to paycheck.
Perhaps if you had a year of runway, were smart (as in able to learn quickly), you could weather such a catastrophe and keep your dignity along with a place to live.
It's possible to have compassion for people and disagree with them at the same time.
A lot of countries are looking at UBI others are looking at options for having more people working less hours and sharing the jobs. Whatever the solution the future is very scary, I can't think of many jobs that won't be disrupted by automation and AI.
Self sufficiency is a fallacy. There are degrees of dependence, and if you lose enough of your dependencies, you may find yourself the subject of such an article.
You mitigate the risks you can, within reason. I can do something about the possibility of social security failing and not having a pension. There's not much I can personally do about the US economy completely collapsing. I guess I could buy a farm and learn small-scale farming and stock up on canned goods and ammunition, but at some point you have to balance preparing for the future with living your life in the present.
In a vacuum, that logic holds. But remember that the government has made taxi driving very regulated for a long time. To become a driver you had to buy their medallion and follow all of their regulations. These regulations imposed a high fixed cost and many recurring costs on taxi drivers. Yes of course these regulations were also beneficial to taxi drivers by restricting their competition, but the point is that this deal was struck between the industry and the government and a lot of individuals staked their livelihood on the details here.
Now the same city governments are basically saying "thanks for all that investment, we are deleting it" when they let Uber and Lyft come in. The city officials also did this with an uncharacteristic speed, basically capitulating immediately in a world where it takes years and years to get anything done. Taxi drivers were rightly surprised and individually harmed, they played by the rules as they were written and were told to fuck off by a bunch of VC-funded engineers with big lawyers and bigger budgets.
This is not a good precedent.
Also, re: the "speed" at which this happened. Seems like driving for Uber or Lyft (less money but on your own time) would in theory be a great way for drivers to transition to something else.
If you're only analyzing this from the side of the drivers, I would agree. As someone who has used public transpiration my whole life, the service that taxis provide has been average to blatantly discriminatory.
I have stories from Washington D.C., New York City, Chicago, and L.A. where I've not been able to get a ride because of how I look. In some cases I've been denied rides at cab stands and been forced to walk to a friends house (over a mile). I've had to ask caucasian women to hail a cab and then do a quick swap to get a ride. I've been asked "where I'm going" and then been told "no sorry I'm not going there." I've been given a joy ride around a city, using my iPhone to realize that the driver is doing loops and taking me out of the way to run up the fare.
Not all taxi drivers were like this, but I have real experiences that make it difficult for me to empathize with a community that really didn't care about my dollar in the first place. I can't speak for riders that never had problems getting a cab, but the traditional U.S. taxi market was barely accessible to me; Uber and Lyft were never like that.
I'll also say that I work at Uber now. Part of my motivation for working here is motivated by my personal experiences and a desire to improve transportation for everyone.
Capitalism is just the aggregation of all these micro-transactions. Most of the time, intervening in this system means preventing win-win transactions between consenting adults.
And War is Peace. Ignorance is Strength.
The natural end state of capitalism is an efficient and aggressive monopoly or cartel. (Including a cartel with the government.)
How is lack of proper options freedom?
I have issues with both. It's obviously not a monopoly. Apart from Uber AND Lyft, you have regular taxi's, public transit, personal cars, bicycles and the ability to walk.
As for price dumping, again -- if rich VC's want to compete with each other to subsidize my rides and my drivers wages -- I'm not going to complain about it. Uber and Lyft are the epitome of options vs what was going on in the NYC taxi scene before them.
Those rich VCs get their money from somewhere. Usually us poor suckers who do not get paid the proper wage. Even a free taxi does not offset it.
Today, many people are proposing socialism/communism, which ironically is just a system where the state has a monopoly on almost everything and there is no anti-trust organization to break up that monopoly.
Sounds like this guy didn't really believe in a free market and wanted the politicians to make sure supply was tightly controlled so that he could profit from reduced competition. I'm sorry but I can provide no sympathy for someone with this mentality because I'm quite sure he saw no issue with restricted competition and a very, very significant barrier to entry when he was able to profit from it (those medallions cost more than most people's houses in NYC).
Now back to the free market, Uber is operating at a loss. They're undercutting Taxis and taking huge hits to keep their business running. That kind of pricing is illegal, and we've seen companies like airlines get into huge trouble for operating at a loss to try to kill smaller airlines. It's literally anti-competitive.
If the playing field were fair, it'd be different. But it's not. Uber constantly ignores laws on an international scale, under the name of "disruption." They might be laws you don't like, but they do exist for a reason, and somewhere you have to draw a line.
I haven't read that book, but your statement about markets only existing with the state strikes me as very odd. Conceptually, no government is required for a simple barter system - you and I can simply agree to trade X for Y. Perhaps that is key point - if you want to use "money", then the state is required. Although even then you can theoretically just use gold/silver coins.
Ah but we never started with barter. That's the myth the book goes into. The very earliest systems of money were all credit based. Money came about through war (you conquer an area, leave a garrison, force people who have never used coins to pay taxes, coins they only get from soldiers) and barter only appeared when a state failed.
Barter only exists in the void left by states. There is no evidence trading oxen for grain every existed. It's too small scale. Early pre-historical civilizations were more likely to be communistic where everyone helped everyone else (native american tibes were like this .. more like ant colonies).
Even when a barter market emerged, it semi-state like thing had to rise with it. It's a really good book; highly recommended.
I forget what it's called, but there's a type of market where people belonging to different, warring societies find ways to negotiate and trade by using something like dead drops necessarily without ever meeting face to face. Edit, found it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_trade
Anti-competitive practices are bad in theory, but I think a lot of time the effects are overstated and businesses trot them out as a convenient excuse to get government to regulate their competition. The political and legislative process is pretty messed up. You can't just assume government will be able to wave a magic wand and fix it with no side effects. Keep in mind the original NYC medallion system was put in place via regulation, and it's the root of many of these problems.
There was a lot of similar anti-competitive talk around firms like Walmart and Barnes and Noble. Neither could have been THAT anti-competitive, seeing as how both are now having trouble competing with companies like Amazon. And meanwhile, consumers have enable to enjoy low prices and get more for their money.
During the pre Uber/Lyft days, a driver himself told me how he worked: Basically, give enough rides till he get's his next meal's money or a bit more. Thats the kind of job security they had. Of course, they were benefiting from the regulatory bubble before Uber and Lyft deflated it instead of popping it.
I feel bad for those who joined the taxi industry just before Uber/Lyft juggernaut started, and were probably singed the worst.But I guess such things happen for those who join industries that are about to be disrupted..
The incumbent Taxi and Limo drivers didn't realize that with Uber and Lyft, they (cab drivers) had lesser political clout, to get favorable terms in regulations.
However, it also means that in the short term, the people doing the work that has been disrupted are going to be impacted. And while a few Stanford grads can push an app at the click of a button, it takes humans much longer to adapt to the changes engendered, particularly if they’ve been doing the same job in the same city for 30 years, supporting a family with that income, and all of a sudden that job only generates a fraction of the money it once did.
Ideally, the society in which this occurs would have a number of safety nets (public healthcare, housing/food assistance, cheap/free education, reliable and affordable public transportation, etc) to ensure that those people do not suffer too much because of the transition.
Put simply, the US does not have many of these safety nets. Labor protection laws are a joke - the US still has no laws mandating paid maternity leave, for one example amongst many. Healthcare is a disaster, meaning that if you are unemployed and get seriously sick, it could literally spell the end of your life. Education is very expensive, making a professional reconversion hard to fathom for most. And housing prices in large cities are spiraling out of control, meaning that if you can’t make rent, homelessness is often the next step.
Uber, and so many companies like it, are improvements in some ways - who knows how long it would have taken for taxi companies to let people summon a car from a tap of a button on their phone. But in doing so, they’re also destroying the livelihoods of many. If the taxes that Uber paid were put to good use by the US government to offer support in all the ways we’ve seen above to those affected, it wouldn’t be as much of a problem. But here we are.
Also, when one is scrambling to make ends meet, it's not always so easy to be more proactive. Surviving in such situations consumes a lot of mental, emotional, and temporal resources.
It'd require radical changes in so many things, including the American attitude to social welfare (which is shameful compared to our European counterparts where people who disabilities get enough to buy houses and maintain a decent standard of living).
They would instantly go from severely underpaid to completely unemployed. Considering that a market disrupter like Uber has affected them to this extent, do people honestly believe 100,000 new jobs would be available once automation takes their jobs?
This is a bigger societal problem than just livery drivers, what do we do when there is no work for people? What do we do when technology drives the market value of an individuals labor to zero?
To be clear, I don't believe letting them kill themselves is a good answer.
Just because historically there was job replacement with the innovation doesn't mean that we'll see that in the coming century. If we are unprepared it could threaten our society for decades.
A completely driver-less future might happen, but it won't be with the current infrastructure. IMHO, you'd need to isolate self-driving lanes from human driver lanes completely before it can become a reality, and slowly phase out driver-only cars with self-driving cars/lanes. Even at that rate, I'm still not certain it would work better than what we have now...
Upvoted!
I've posted it before and I'll post it again: what advantages does driverless car-based transportation infrastructure offer over a rail system of the same scale? I am genuinely interested to hear counter arguments since, to my mind, well planned/maintained rail systems can better leverage centrally generated power, have better driver (conductor) : passenger ratios, are easier to maintain in aggregate (ie. tracks vs. roads, total number of train cars < total number of motor vehicles, etc.), and so forth.
What am I missing?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_mile_(transportation)
The problem is not last mile. It idea that last 30 miles are not viable to run extended routes through as it gets too slow to follow the winding paths as plain buses.
The solution is actually pedestrian traffic and biking optimization for last few miles access, not tossing more cars at the problem. Not building areas in cities with crummy access to public transport. Making it less necessary to carry heavy loads personally relying on improved delivery systems instead. (Which should also create some jobs.)
I really believe that UBI would be sustainable by tapping into the concentrated wealth that arises as an unfortunate and unfair side effect of the economic rules we put in place.
Cabs refusing to pick people up based on race, refusing to go to certain areas, flat out cheating people by manipulating routes, some times not showing up if called. I've seen it all. Uber seems to eliminate all of those issues as far as I can tell.
That said, I disagree with the headline blaming this on the gig economy. There's lots to blame the gig economy for, but this is pretty squarely showing the flaws in the old medallion system -- that you need a crippling amount of financial debt in your name to participate in the system.
I could be misremembering though.
> Over the years, many medallions once owned by individual drivers were sold to large taxi fleets. As of 2012, about 18% of all taxis were owner operated, while the rest were leased; this is a decline from the 29% ownership rate in 2006.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxicabs_of_New_York_City#Logi...
For some definition of superior. For instance, Uber is for sure superior in stripping the taxi drivers of their rights.
2. Ability to share rides
3. Ability to review/report bad behavior (on both driver and customer side)—this along was a notorious problem with cab drivers. And I bet terrible customers used to be rampant too, but they were paying the drivers so nobody cared.
4. No cash. No tip (arguably more controversial thing they got rid of).
I never had to report bad behaviors, but I could just look at the taxi number, displayed clearly near the dashboard, and report it to the taxi company.
I am it that Uber can have minor advantages, but I boycott it due to the huge disadvantages in terms of worker rights.
Also they have been working at a loss to kill competitors: refusing to use Uber means defending your right to choose a service in the future.
It would be nice to see some numbers in this article to see comparable rates from all the other app services like Uber/Lyft/Via etc. I mean if it's a $10k/year pay cut .. well then just do it and take night courses to do something else more worthwhile. If it's way more than that; non-sustainable, then you're just going to have to wait for Uber to tank and prices to go back up (you might need to wait a few years).
Also, impossible for me to ring them as I'm deaf so... I have to text my wife to ring one! :( I seriously do not understand why no NZ taxi companies have banded together, raised some investment and created a good app then strengthened the market in the places that Uber etc don't exist in yet.
It's almost like they don't want to be taxis anymore.
I'm kinda surprised Uber isn't in Dunedin yet though. I know they're in Welly/Auckland .. and I suspect Chch as well.
Often Uber drivers in NZ work for a smaller taxi company and have multiple ride sharing apps on their phone.
Building apps is actually simple. I work with one of those large powerhouses and they're actually really bad at it. Smaller teams can usually do a better job.
Has nothing to do with population size.
Also, I think Uber is in CHCH and the Tron. No doubt Dunedin is in their expansion plans.
Under the same type of thinking (and I wouldn't say that I am a union sympathizer in any way) there would be little use for unions since there will always be a large group of people that are willing and able to take the job at a vastly lower pay rate (for many union jobs).
There has to be a balance but the balance isn't simply removing all restrictions and letting people loose their living.
And no when you are in your 60's you are not going to simply learn and pursue a new career either everything becomes harder and your obligations are such that many times it's simply not practical.
This is key from the article: "Implicit in his testament was the anger he felt over the de-professionalization of his life’s work"
Somebody here compared this to elevator operators. Come on, what a silly comparison. Driving optimally in a city and finding your way and not crashing is actually a job that takes skill and practice.
Maybe if they didn't provide shitty service and lobby for self-serving, anti-consumer laws to limit how many taxis can be on the road, I'd have some sympathy, but no.
They shit their own bed, now they get to sleep in it.
https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=1888367364808997...
Banks were bailed out, the US government buying debt $1 for $1 (instead of for cents on the dollar like they should have). They could have, instead of bailing out the banks, forced those banks to sell debt (their mortgages) back to consumers at fractions of a dollar. Most people struggled and fought to get basic loan adjustments. The smart ones walked away from their houses.
The reality is, yes the State needs to step in and adjust the medallion prices and cut the independent owners a break. But only a fraction are owned by individuals. Most are owned by the big companies, which many would argue shouldn't get a break.
Plus it's not like the city of NY has a lot of money to even suggest this. They can't even keep transit funded enough to maintain MTA and keep Penn Station from falling apart.
I'm sure Doug Schifter's fallacies are obvious to us. He was committing the CBT cognitive distortions of "Personalization" and "magnification". He failed to recognize that his taxi job was an ill-gotten gain, gotten through lobbying, government control, and harming consumers.
Our species is built around the principle of adaptation. When the world changes, you must change with it. Or you die.
Perhaps think on this before dismissing another's life so glibly.
I graduated at 2009, after the recession, with a degree that wasn't particularly useful. I was unemployed for a long time, but I figured out how to lower my standards, get something to survive on, and then use that foundation as an opportunity to retrain myself. It's hard, but it's not impossible, and millions of people take new jobs that are in different fields.
In NYC 88,000 is a livable wage. NYC metro is a very expensive place to live. Calling a livable wage for a weeks work “ill gotten gains” is a bit far fetched. Unions and state controlled monopolies exist for a reason, not the least of which is protecting the broader workforce who don’t have leverage against their wealthy employers otherwise.
This is capitalism and if it's too emotionally painful to watch disruption unfold then as a society we need to find a different mode of operation. Why get distracted by the players when the game is the problem?
I've been largely okay with capitalism I guess because I've benefitted from it. But human lives have decreased in value. In a society where making $500, literally, is more valuable than a human life, we'll choose the money every time. That's the game.
Of course I have no idea what to do, in the face of this almost existential crisis, but getting mad a Uber for disrupting an industry is wasted effort.
"Medallions, which grant the right to operate a taxi in New York City, were now depreciating assets and drivers who had borrowed money to pay for them, once a sound investment strategy, were deeply in debt."
Just like any investment, you are not guaranteed a right to a return, or even to keep the money you put into an investment, and there is no reason why taxi medallions should be any different. The only reason these medallions were so valuable and such a "sound investment" for so long is because of government-induced artificial scarcity. There are good arguments behind that model, but if you depend on a model like that, eventually, you will have problems.
"He was now sometimes forced to work more than 100 hours a week to survive he said; when he had started out in the 1980s a 40-hour week was fairly typical."
In 5+ years, he never had the opportunity to change careers or do something about his situation? I know it's not easy, especially as you get older, but it's a lot easier than leaving your family behind. I apologize if I sound harsh, but he had years to come to terms with the changes in his profession and adapt, and he chose not to.
"For taxi drivers staring down an even bleaker future of driverless cars" - in other words, the changes brought about by Uber and Lyft and every other service of that sort is inevitable anyway. What do these drivers think will happen the moment they can reasonably be replaced by the very cars they drive?
A lot of this feels like the death throes of an industry that had its time and served its purpose, but an arguably better alternative came along, and the industry now feels as though it is owed something by virtue of existing, rather than by virtue of providing something of value. Pardon me, my buggy whip was left in the beginning of last century.