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Comment by adewinter | Hacker News Reader

If your business cannot afford to pay a living wage, it does not have a viable business model. No amount of dressing it up or attempting to shift the blame will change that fact.

That the unions and local governments are attempting to ensure a business isn't extorting labor out of the population is a _good_ thing.

Yeah, it sucks that taxis aren't cheap and also pay drivers well. It also sucks that we don't have light rail going everywhere. In both cases the implementation is just not economical. Therefore we need a different solution that doesn't sacrifice people at the altar of convenience

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Uber drivers are adults who are not being exploited by any one. They are free to choose any manner of employment available to them. That is the beauty of the free market.

Taxis are absolutely terrible monopolistic businesses with absolutely no regard for proper service. Uber and Lyft thrived because taxis are so disastrous.

> Uber and Lyft thrived because taxis are so disastrous.

Yes! Exactly! These businesses create value with convenient apps and better logistics.

They should rely on that value, and not the value that they can extract from labor.

(The rest of your comment is so far removed from my understanding of "exploitation" and "free to choose any manner of employment available to them" that there is no way for me to respond to it meaningfully.)

The taxis in Seattle were vile before Uber. I know women who were literally extorted by taxi drivers. Nothing in my experience with Seattle taxis back then suggests that this is not plausible. Even when I literally had a taxi line outside my door, I avoided it at all costs as there were many bad experiences.

The “unions and local governments” tacitly backed a criminal enterprise in the taxis. No thanks.

So if my skills do not justify whatever the value of a living wage is, I should be condemned to permanent unemployment?

In this respect, minimum wages are literally systemic racism. They were started as a way to keep lower skilled blacks out of the workforce. In the 1930s, blacks had a lower unemployment rate than whites, but since the minimum wage priced them out of the labor market, they haven't been able to keep up.

> If your business cannot afford to pay what the government defines as a living wage, it does not have a viable business model.

Is that what you are really saying?

Because there is a difference between a government-defined living wage and the true economic value of any particular job.

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