However, Uber also provides an easy way to view consumer price increases due to wage increases. I know that Uber has moved to more of a fixed-price model now, but let's pretend that Uber still had a per-mile/minute model. Uber charges $X per mile and $Y per minute and Uber takes 20% giving 80% to the driver. At that point, the absolute most that a union could increase driver wages without increasing consumer prices is 25%. If Uber was charging $1 and drivers were getting $0.80, if the union wanted a 50% raise Uber couldn't still charge $1 because drivers would be taking $1.20.
I think the network effects of Uber and Lyft make it hard for labor to have power in those situations. However, given that Uber's gross margin is a percentage of receipts, it's easy to see how it would push prices higher. I'm not saying it's not a worthwhile trade-off, but it's hard to argue that Uber drivers getting paid 25% more wouldn't cause fares to increase.
(Not that uber would ever do anything awful, of course.)
(To be clear, I'm not saying you disagree with any of these points, these are just my $.02.)
Not that many drivers actually drive full-time for a living. A lot of them are just temps. They do some driving on the weekend to make some extra money, they're doing it temporarily while they're between jobs, and so on. If they get fed up with Uber and Lyft, they'd be more likely to just walk away than fight.
Case in point: I rode with one guy a few months ago who was on paternity leave... he took up Lyft driving because his wife had no paid maternity leave so he drove during his three months paid paternity leave to make up for the family missing out on his wife's income for a few months. Once his wife is working again, he's done driving.
And we're also, as a society, at a point where service jobs are almost fungible. If McDonald's fires you, you can get a job at Taco Bell. Even the same kind of service job doesn't matter. If you get tired of Uber jerking you around, you can find a restaurant and become a waiter. None of the skills involved in these jobs are particularly hard to train for. Every service job is going to require that you have basic customer service skills, and you can take those from job to job. Driving is a fundamental skill in most of America; if you can drive a car and understand Google Maps, you have the skills to drive for Uber or Lyft. For other service jobs, you don't need years of experience to take people's orders at a counter, scan groceries, or do tier 1 customer support.
When unions first came to prominence, we had an industrial economy, not a service-based one. Chances are, you lived in a small town where there was just one factory, and the town probably only exists because of the factory. If you got fired, you were screwed. If the factory closed, everyone in town was screwed. And if you've been working with the same specialized proprietary factory equipment for years, it's going to take a long time to re-train you on another factory's equipment, so that's another disincentive to switching jobs. Hence unions.
tl;dr Service workers, including Uber and Lyft drivers, don't unionize because losing your job doesn't mean that you and your family are hopelessly screwed.
At the end of the day, unions are a means to organize labor. Individual workers have very little power against large corporations, especially if they end up conspiring with each other. You could take them to court, but they have more lawyers and more money to spend on them. We see the benefits of non-union representation now, but what happens when tech turns from feast to famine?
Here's them going on strike the other year: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/aug/31/bma-announce...
(written before their contract was ratified)
>Medicare-supported training slots are frozen where they existed almost two decades ago, perpetuating inequities in the geographic distribution of training slots and ignoring changes in the geography and demography of the U.S. population
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK248024/
https://www.aamc.org/advocacy/gme/71178/gme_gme0012.html
http://www.nrmp.org/board-of-directors/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Resident_Matching_Pro...
Median household income in the US is $59K. So the average nurse salary approaches the median of what a two-person household makes in America.
Ignorance is bliss I guess?
The economic research of the effects of unions on consumer pricing is well established. That you choose to willfully disbelieve the economic research in that area unfortunately does not make it less valid.
And collusion of employees (unions) is permissible. Collusion of businesses is less so.
The reasons to allow a non-owner, non-governmental power like a union to force the business to change can make sense and pull at your heart strings. I would prefer, if we are to encourage unions, that it stays about safety and let the free market sort the rest out. People can always find new jobs.
If that was the case, we would not need unions.
People can find new jobs, they just would prefer not to, but an employee’s preference and the business’ preference do not always match.
If collectively nobody works within each given business to improve workers conditions at that business where will all the disaffected workers turn for a better option.
Within an industry major players have no reason not to fix conditions at just crappy enough that people don't leave faster than we can hire new cogs.
Anyone who things the free market just magically fixes things ought to look at the labor market in the 20s.
Unemployment is near historic lows. Any employee dissatisfied can find a new job. Competition between employers drives better benefits, wages, and working conditions.
That's a presidentially arrogant statement to make, particularly in the middle of a discussion regarding the gig economy.
> The public typically perceives a low unemployment rate as reassuring because it suggests that everyone who wants a job has one. But the broader set of jobs data suggests that’s not the case. ”As usual, the consequences of truly no growth in the labor market leaves particularly politicians to emphasize nothing other than the unemployment rate,” Snider says.
https://qz.com/1297561/the-dazzling-us-unemployment-rate-is-...
Left to their own devices, large companies will just collude to fix wages. There needs to be a large-scale counterweight to the large-scale business. https://nypost.com/2014/04/24/tech-giants-settle-wage-fixing...
Do you see the contradiction in your belief?
A union exists to make the exercise of the employees rights more meaningful by doing so collectively. If you acknowledge that an individual employee has a right to ask for more money or changes to how the business is run and decline to come to work its difficult to understand how all employees don't have the same rights collectively.
Incidentally this is an instance of the free market. Labor is a market. They are selling YOU their time and collaborating to get a better deal.
So even if the business wants to fire unionized labor and find new and better labor, they can’t. They must now work through a tangle of rules to make changes to their business.
Those terms exist precisely to target the abuse you are describing: firing experienced, knowledgeable workers for "better" employees that are inexperienced and know jack-shit about what they're supposed to be doing and whose only qualifications are being cheaper.
Let's face it: in most unionized gigs, the contribution of each individual worker isn't significant, so the marginal gains of hiring a "better" worker is generally immaterial to the bottom line. In the cases where that's not true, the union contracts generally have reduced job protections that make it easier for underperforming workers to be let go (on the basis of objective criteria).
Though I would like some intermediate restrictions on the ability of an employer to summarily fire an employee for no good reason, short of extreme difficulty. Like, maybe some advance notice or severance payment in the absence of misconduct - the unemployment insurance regime is often severely inadequate, and gaps in employment make it harder to obtain subsequent jobs.
Plus some chance to refute allegations of underperformance makes sense - it can be real underperformance or it can be a cover for discrimination, both happen.