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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

"while on a trip" - Uber PR.

Not per hour worked. Not when going to a pickup. Not when waiting for a ride. Only "while on a trip". That alone probably means about 1/3 off. Which puts them below SF's $15/hour minimum wage.

Then, Uber counts the entire amount paid to the driver as "wage", not including their renting the driver's car. That takes off a substantial amount.[1]

And if drivers were employees, Uber would have to buy the bottled water.

[1] https://www.ridester.com/uber-lyft-driver-costs-and-expenses...

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You’ve identified what everyone else can’t understand. Kudos.

This is especially damaging to drivers that desire to drive their own vehicles and choose how much they want to drive. The proposed wages are way below what you should be taking home in an area like SF, and you are depreciating your own expensive asset and paying your own fuel and maintenance, auto insurance, health insurance and so on.

The real gem however is this would force drivers to use the rental car program which doesn’t make much sense unless you are driving all week long. It is a way for Uber to control drivers making them unable to reject poor work and working conditions without actually making those drivers employees. As an independent contractor you should be able to turn off your Uber driver app when the pay starts sucking, and go work for someone else at your own discretion. There’s no freedom to do that rolling around in an Uber rental.

How else could they do it though? They'd have to telling drivers they can't work or scheduling them, otherwise there'd be a flood of people chilling in their cars waiting on rides and being paid by uber.

The "gig" economy seems to work by offering people a fairly open choice of pay and work. Though Uber could be more transparent about expected earnings.

They could be paid while they have 'accept rides' turned on and then Uber could stop accepting an infinite number of drivers.

Similar to cloud based server prices.

Paid for time that you're actually online.

If you're only logged on for 20 mins (a third) of the hour - you get $7 min wage ($21 / 3).

Are you seriously comparing a saas service to a service based on real humans? You do realize how different turning a server on from being off vs. getting a driver to pick you up from whatever that person was doing before?

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