The Uber leak exposes the global war on workers
tribunemag.co.uk
tribunemag.co.uk
Uber has essentially not just broken laws, but outright exploited workers/drivers... and people comment "Aah but the local taxi mafia was bad"...??!? I'm sorry but that does not justify exploiting workers. That does not justify using political influence to enter/gain markets. This isn't some messiah coming to save us all from the "horridness of local transport".
I'm not saying that having Uber as a player is necessarily bad, mind you. But it's possible to have some positive benefits for some people while hurting a lot of others. I sincerely doubt too many HN users have driven taxis, but my conversations with Uber/regular taxi drivers hardly painted a favorable picture of Uber. (Nuance - please note that my taxi drivers doesn't represent all drivers. There will be happy and sad drivers, my point being it's not always sunshine and rainbows... which the article speaks about too.)
I wonder if this being a YC owned communication platform affects/biases users (some of whom I'm sure are YC founders etc themselves), however the ratio of apathy/"taxis were already bad" to "Uber shouldn't exploit workers, nothing justifies it" is disappointingly low.
(I know this is a particularly ranty comment and I had kept quiet on the last thread but seeing the same type of comments here pushed me.)
- Walter Lippman, The Basic Problem of Democracy, 1919 (https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1919/11/the-bas...)
I'm not trying to have a holier than thou approach - lots of people simply need a job, and humans are only human in their actions - but I would be curious to see how opinions of folks working at small startups differ from those working at GAAFA/FAANG etc.
(To be clear, opinions are your personal subjective thought and I don't think they can just be "wrong", I'm just curious on if there's a difference in who thinks what how.)
If this was the case, why didn't workers continue what they were doing before they worked for Uber? Did they have no job before Uber, or did they view Uber as an improvement to their previous situation?
Private property doesn’t exist in nature.
To me force—including reckless regulation—is the real exploitation.
Also, Uber isn’t making a lot of money. They have been hemorrhaging VC for years and aren’t making any profits.
While Belgian road traffic victims lay on the road, the ambulances and dispatching services colluded to assign more distant ambulances for maximizing the per km driven profits. That's not a victimless crime: lives, limbs (think infections) and livelihoods (both of the victims and the typical scapegoats who shall carry all the blame, round down all liabilities and round the remaining liability up). Hurray for "socialism", money must roll.
"Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, bots, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
That's because, overwhelmingly, cases like this where people are convinced that something seems "totally astroturfed" turn out to simply be people disagreeing with each other. The community is divided on divisive issues like this one. To a first approximation, it really is as simple as that.
Of course there are also various kinds of manipulation, but because of what I said in the previous paragraph, the only legitimate way to address those is to look for evidence—that means something objective, which is not just based on people having opinions that seem obviously wrong or bad (i.e. sufficiently different from one's own).
This phenomenon is extremely well established and you can find many years of past explanation about it here: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme... .
Edit: incidentally, perceptions like "Every single time there's an article about $topic..." are also hopelessly subject to cognitive bias. HN has had many, many threads about Uber which have been dominated by negative sentiment.
You forgot to add "in some places".
Which companies do not do this?
Just because everyone (theoretically) does it doesn't excuse the behavior.
However, as I dreaded calling a taxi service - I never knew, which taxi service is good/had good prices, it was frequent, that taxi driver would take you long way just so you would pay more, and of course old mercedes which smelled awful was a norm here where I live. Some people talked about how taxis are awful but nothing could be changed.
Just then Uber was introduced here, few months later we have multiple Taxi application, where you see how much you will pay in advance, you can call taxi with ease for exact time. Thanks Uber, you can go now ;)
When someone pops your bully in the nose, you don't care if it was a cheap shot.
Of course that is short sighted and today's hero can easily become tomorrow's bully.
Taxi business here is quite different.
(Edit: I'm Croatian and fairly well aware of how taxis work in Europe)
Uber Pop got kicked out in a couple of months with Uber having to pay the social security costs of the employees. Now it's just an aggregator of Taxi companies, same with Bolt. The possible margin is minuscule since the drivers change apps depending on which pays the best. Often having both open.
For the companies themselves it's an extremely cutthroat business. From what I have heard the only chance to make any money is to own about 50 cars and have all maintenance in house. Otherwise it's just a fools attempt at being independent.
edit: And Uber charged me a fee to cancel the no-show ride and I had to call and argue with them to take the charge off.
I don't speak German and had been in Germany for only a few hours at that point, so I didn't know for certain that I was being scammed. In fact, I still don't. As far as I gather, taxis are supposed to use their meters to calculate the cost of the trip, but perhaps there are exceptions I am unaware of.
There's a lot of things I find questionable about Uber and its business practices, but the fact that they tell you the price up front is definitely a positive contribution.
Is Uber horrible? Probably. But at least they provide the service they claim to.
The taxi companies in my area before Uber (and frankly still, after Uber) are literally rage inducing. You can call them and confirm that a cab has been dispatched - and it will NEVER show up. Call them back and confirm again? Same thing.
Need to schedule a ride to the airport? Cab won't show.
Need someone to take you home after a house party? Cab won't show.
Literally flag down a cab on the side of the road? They will hassle you over card usage, intentionally drive out of the way (like - seriously, bitch I've lived in ATL for 33 years, I know this is the long route you fucker), and have terrible safety standards (oh, none of the seat belts in the back of your cab work? fun!).
So Uber might be horrible, and I would really, really love to see cities increase spending on public transit.
But I FUCKING HATE the cab companies. They can fucking rot for all I care. If Uber puts them all into chapter 11, I will cheer them on.
Would I still prefer to see investment in public transit instead of dealing with Uber? Of course. But we weren't seeing that with cabs, and at least Uber will god-damned show up when called.
I don’t understand this analogy in this context. In the case of Uber, uber is also a bully, arguably a worse one. In this case you want both of them to be arrested. Even when their fighting each other, it is still disturbing everyone and you just want them to stop.
Uber is not a hero of today, nor was it the hero of yesterday. It was always a bully,
No one has a god given right to have cheap taxis in their city at any cost.
The people complaining in this thread sound like the people complaining that they can't run a restaurant without paying their workers poverty wages.
People have rights, businesses don't.
Out of curiosity, what coercive power does Uber wield that allows them to exploit workers all while non-exploitative employers have struggled to find anyone to hire? We've been living through what has been possibly the best job market in history for most of Uber's existence. Locally, we've been at full employment for nearly a decade now (less a few months during the height of COVID). It's certainly not a matter of "They have no other choice".
“Full employment” doesn’t accurately describe the last decade. Worker power was maybe never lower than it was between 2008 and 2020.
Wages blew inflation out of the water through the later half of that period, so I'm not sure that tracks. Wages struggle to keep up with inflation, let alone beat it, when workers don't have much power. The reality is that the job market was very strong from the mid-2010s onward, save the COVID shutdown period. Although, obviously, not uniformly so.
It is true that the job market was difficult at the beginning of Uber's existence, which is why I said "most of" not "all of". I suppose what you're saying is that the exploitation was short-lived during their early days or limited to certain local markets?
Not at all what I’m saying.
I’m saying 2008-2020 was a bi-modal situation. Just like the COVID shutdown was: recall how for many workers, it meant working from home and a buildup of funds because there was nowhere to spend it. For another group it meant struggling, gig work, moving back in with parents, and draining your savings - because their entire industry was just GONE. Depending on what numbers you look at, and at what resolution, you see the first group, the second group, or both.
So wages went up during the 2010-2020 period, but for who? Minimum wage didn’t keep up with inflation in most places during that period. More lower paying jobs, less overall power. What are you going to do, quit this $10/hour job and go work at another $10/hour job? Why bother
Locally, minimum wage increased 50% over that period. Inflation was 17% over the same period. Like I asked before, maybe they only exploited workers in certain markets? There is no evidence of the bi-modal situation that you refer to locally. Obviously not all locales are equal, but the remark is presented without local information, hence wanting to know more about what it means. Does Uber treat workers like gold in some markets?
> What are you going to do, quit this $10/hour job and go work at another $10/hour job? Why bother
The reason you'd go to the other $10/hr job is to not face the same exploitation found at Uber. If all jobs on the market are seen as being equally fair, you're not being exploited... You might not be worth what you wish you were, but that's not what exploitation is.
On the main point - first in most US states minimum wage has not kept up with inflation.
Second - does minimum wage apply to gig workers in your location? Because in most places they have successfully classified their employees as “contractors”.
As to your point, uber is in many many places in the world - and the degree at which they have exploited their workers is variable. Where I am, uber costs about the same as a regular taxi did before uber arrived. But taxis drivers made and do make more than uber drivers. That sounds like a middle man got in and lowered wages. The same work, less money for workers, more for middle men? That is exploitation.
I appreciate your attempt to find some kind of reply, but, locally, minimum wage is up 1,567% since the first year it was in effect. Inflation is up only 810% over the same period. That's a substantial real gain.
> Second - does minimum wage apply to gig workers in your location?
As of a couple of months ago, yes. But, really, was anyone turning on their car for less than minimum wage before? You'd be losing money hand over fist doing that. There is no purpose in driving for Uber if you are losing money. Doing nothing at all is the clear winner in that scenario.
> Because in most places they have successfully classified their employees as “contractors”.
Which is fair. It's clearly a contractor position by every measure, and remains a contractor position here even with the recent laws surrounding those contracted services. As you can see, contractor doesn't have to mean a free-for-all. Contractors can be given worker rights too.
> But taxis drivers made and do make more than uber drivers. That sounds like a middle man got in and lowered wages.
Taxis, in many jurisdictions, have historically held a monopoly/oligopoly. That sounds more like new competition has increased competitiveness, which doesn't come as any surprise. A lowered price isn't the same as exploitation, though.
Yet people were. That’s literally what we’re talking about here. Because starvation was the other option. Burning your capital (i.e. your car) to the ground was a sensible choice given the other options.
> A lowered price isn't the same as exploitation
See my other comment. It isn’t exploitation, unless someone else is getting rich off it. Which they were.
But that brings us back to the top. If you're going to burn your car to the ground, why not burn it by driving it to an employer? The farmer at the edge of the city has been paying $25-30 per hour (even pre-pandemic), sometimes more, to anyone willing to show up – and still, nobody shows up.
It might not be the most desirable work, and maybe you're not quitting your developer job over it, but compared to losing money driving for Uber because you're in a crunch? You're not losing money making $25-30 per hour in an employment situation, even with some commute required to get there.
As we have discussed multiple times, not all locations are the same, but the question: "Does Uber treat its drivers like gold in some markets?" remains outstanding. There is an implication that Uber is exploitative everywhere (perhaps to varying degrees), and if that's the case, why so where the job market seeks workers elsewhere?
> It isn’t exploitation, unless someone else is getting rich off it.
That's not in line with the common definition of exploitation, and even if you want to use your pet definition, saying that all client-worker relationships are exploitative isn't particularly useful.
What’s that definition?
I’m using exploitation in the common sense of “treating someone unfairly” or “making use of someone for your own gain”.
Work relationships are not always exploitive. Ideally they are mutually beneficial. Sometimes they’re slightly skewed where one party profits a little more than they other. None of that is what we’re talking about.
I imagine they wish they could profit. Uber isn't profitable. They lose stupid amounts of money. It subsists on investments made by capitalists looking to metaphorically burn up their car. Given your definition, if the workers were making more than nothing they would be the ones exploiting Uber.
While your definitions are correct, your interpretation is not. "Fair" in economics isn't some moral position. It simply refers to where people generally agree. If Uber isn't meeting its agreements with the workers then there may be a case for exploitation, but that doesn't seem to be the case. Your point, if I interpret correctly, seems to be that the workers are making agreements that you wouldn't agree to.
That’s one interpretation of the data. Another would be that a lack of worker power is preventing wage increases. How does your interpretation of the data handle the fact that people on the capital side of the economy - i.e. uber ceos and shareholders - are getting rich off all those $10 hour jobs? There is clearly lots of money in the system… it’s just not going to the workers
And you forgot immigrants, the other large group working minimum wage jobs.
That doesn't make sense though. A worker can choose not to work and do nothing, same as if the "exploitative" job wasn't offered at all. Are you saying the existence of the choice is immoral, and that someone else should decide whether or not a job is a good use of their time?
Second, the logic you just used could easily justify feudal serfdom. Does the existence of the choice to become a serf make the lord immoral? If your line of reasoning can be used to justify modes of living that we all agree are bad, perhaps it’s a flawed line of reasoning?
Yes, because a larger number individuals choose to work for them instead of not work. If everyone (or even just a simple majority) decided not to work for them, then the company would likely die.
But to your point, I don't agree that the existence of Uber warps the labor landscape in such a way that it removes previously available jobs in other sectors. It would make them more available (and employers more desperate), if other workers moved from those jobs to work for Uber.
>Second, the logic you just used could easily justify feudal serfdom.
I don't know enough about feudal serfdom to comment on that, but I would point out that you haven't shown where my logic is wrong/flawed. Only that you think it justifies something bad. I would ask that you point out the flaw in the logic instead.
That it can justify something bad is the flaw. For example, racism isn’t bad because it’s logically flawed. Depending on your core beliefs, something I’m not going to be able to change, it may be the logical conclusion of them. The reason it’s bad is because it is used to justify mistreatment of others.
You’re on your own dissecting if you believe in something that can justify feudalism because of bad core beliefs or because of bad logic.
You are putting the horse before the cart by saying that something is bad first, regardless of whether or not it is logical. If you are saying feudalism is bad (again, I don't know enough on the subject to speak about it), but it is consistent with my logic, then you have to explain how the logic is flawed, which you have already asserted in your previous post.
That's exactly what was describing as a "core belief". I share that belief, but plenty of people don't. If you hold the opposite core belief "individual behavior can be inferred from a person's group membership" bam you've got a logical chain that leads to however far down the racism spiral you want to go.
There is no logic that can prove or disprove which of those two is "correct". Empirical evidence, maybe? But that involves changing a core belief - you can show me mountains of evidence, but like anyone I'll discount the evidence that disagrees and overvalue the stuff that does. It's a long road, far too long for the HN comments section.
> You are putting the horse before the cart by saying that something is bad first, regardless of whether or not it is logical.
I'm not. As best as any human can do I am attempting to put my core beliefs first (examining them for faults and prejudices), and following logical chains to end up at my morality. Within this conversation I'm saying that I can dismiss an idea without tracing it's logic back to first principal because there is a logical chain between it and a different idea (feudalism) that I have dismissed already.
Hiring during a recession is not in and of it self any more exploitative then hiring during an economic up swing. However, during a recession you can easier get away exploitation which you wouldn’t have gotten away with if the labor conditions were better and the jobs were plenty. This is what Uber exploited.
I will add to that that Uber also played with the psychology of their workers, exploited addictive behavior by “gamifying” the work. This creates a cognitive dissonance among the worker which “tricks” workers into accepting conditions they otherwise wouldn’t have.
In the extreme case of this, we end up in a world where quick trip buys up all available fuel during a hurricane...
There's a lot of moving parts... the good of everyone vs the good of the individual vs the good of the present vs the good of the future. All of that is clouded by people with poor reasoning or malicious reasoning, and the fact that nobody can predict the future, and nobody wants to be held accountable if something fails.
That's a completely subjective term that just describes that one part of the transaction does not like the deal that they entered voluntarily. That's why many people, including myself, consider the usage of this term an attempt at manipulation.
In almost any country where it operated or operates, Uber was not and is not a monopoly, neither on taxi clients, nor on labour. There are multiple taxi apps a driver can work for, and many shift between them in a span of one shift. And traditional taxi parks, although lost a significant market share, have not disappeared. Therefore, a price of a driver's labour is still dictated by an open market and not by Uber.
What changed, though, almost everywhere, is taxi apps made the market more fluid and effective, and turned over a lot of mechanisms which taxi drivers used to "exploit" clients. You just have to travel to a city that still mandates government-backed monopoly, like Istanbul, and compare the level of prices, service and reliability to what the ordinary Uber experience is like.
> Uber has essentially not just broken laws
Laws can be, and often are, immoral. And any laws that limit the ability of parties on the free market to transact with each other however they wish, including taxi medallions or similar systems, undoubtedly are.
The choice between homelessness, starvation, and working an underpaid job is not a choice made voluntarily.
And equating the “exploitation” of slightly higher taxi rates compared with a coercive job… that’s way off the mark. An extra $20 to get from the airport or home from the bar once and a while (talk about transactions entered voluntarily), vs a grueling work environment that pays terrible that you have to do EVERY day to not starve.
Homelessness and starvation (even if we accept this argument at face value for drivers in first-world countries) are natural human condition, and Uber, or any other employer, does not become magically responsible for it just because they enter the picture with their job offer.
> An extra $20 to get from the airport or home from the bar once and a while (talk about transactions entered voluntarily), vs a grueling work environment that pays terrible that you have to do EVERY day to not starve.
I believe that everyone should feel sympathy for the poor and contribute to charity. However, this moral choice should be a free choice made by the person herself and not through coercion by government or similar entities.
WTF?
The natural human condition is subsistence hunting and gathering. The natural human condition is family unit based farming. The natural human condition is feudal serfdom. The natural human condition doesn’t exist because when and where in history do you point your finger and say this is natural.
The majority of human history we would not have considered ourselves homeless, and we would only starve if there was no food. The idea of one person in the group having more than they need and another dying for lack of food was unthinkable.
Don’t look to history to justify your social-darwinian beliefs. It doesn’t have your back.
Not to mention shifting a discussion about commerce to one of charity. Forcing companies to allocate more of their funds to labour vs profit to owners is not charity, that’s worker power operating as a market force.
and removing the underpaid job from the equation leaves someone with just homelessness or starvation - clearly a better position, right?
feel free to tip $20 for your uber rides if you feel that helps
If your particular business can’t exist and pay people well, it needs to die to make room for one that can.
And I don’t tip $20 - I ride transit or my bike. And yes it does make me feel better supporting non-exploitive systems and avoiding exploitive ones.
what reason you have to believe that is in fact the option? there are really quite few businesses with profit margins so high you could meaningfully raise pay purely by reducing profits.
> If your particular business can’t exist and pay people well, it needs to die to make room for one that can.
and how does that unspecified higher-margin business (if one even exists) achieve it? presumably the main way would be to be much smaller, charge higher fees & target more exclusive customers, so that only the rich get the benefits of the business, and vastly fewer people even get the opportunity for a job. sounds great.
trade-offs exist and your inability to acknowledge them is not constructive
What reason do you have to believe that profit margins are so slim?
My evidence for business being able to pay more is the existence of massive inequality. The superyacht seems to argue that there is more to go around than the financial statements indicate.
Voluntary has some shades of gray, especially when there is a power imbalance. Or, they might enter voluntarily, and things go quite ugly, and they feel they need to continue for their lively good.
A "voluntary" contract can still be bullying and coercive.
> Laws can be, and often are, immoral.
This is true but most instances of a company breaking the law are not this. Especially when breaking regulation is key to that company's existence. You can argue that regulation is unjust but it's typically been enacted by the people's duly elected representatives in good faith, and purposefully building a business around breaking it amounts to disrespect.
I don't think so. The word "coerced" is an adequate replacement for the word "voluntary" in that situation. It can't be both.
I think the issue that the GP poster has (and I have as well), is that "exploitative" is so nebulous that anyone can use it to describe almost anything. Any opportunity that an employer leverages is technically exploitation. Are all low paying jobs exploitative? They will always exist, by virtue of pay scales. But the word "exploitation" implies they should not exist.
The word "exploitative" would be much more useful in conversation if there was a set of clear qualifications (agreed upon by the majority of people) for a job to be exploitative. My understanding is that these qualifications already exist in labor law though.
Lack of imagination? Lack of life experience? People are coerced into contracts all the time. As I said before, "power imbalance" between parties is a key requirement for this.
I also don't buy that Uber is any worse to its workers than the cab cartel was. And "exploit" is a nebulous term. If you want to say that Uber "exploits" its workers, you have to say how. I don't see providing a platform where drivers can choose when they want to drive as exploitative. I don't see the pricing system as exploitative, as they can quit at any time. I don't see employment systems where you are paid for the amount of work you do, rather than time spent, as exploitative.
You're making the point well, that they're not necessarily worse than the system(s) they disrupted.
- - - -
> If you want to say that Uber "exploits" its workers, you have to say how.
Here is one answer from "The Market Fairy Will Not Solve the Problems of Uber and Lyft" (2016):
> They don’t pay the cost of their capital.
> The wages they pay to their drivers are less than the depreciation of the cars and the expense of keeping the drivers fed, housed, and healthy. They pay less than minimum wage in most markets, and, in most markets, that is not enough to pay the costs of a car plus a human.
> These [sharing economy] business models are ways of draining capital from the economy and putting them into the hands of a few investors and executives. They prey on desperate people who need money now, even if the money is insufficient to pay their total costs. Drivers are draining their own reserves to get cash now, but, hey, they gotta eat and pay the bills.
https://www.ianwelsh.net/the-market-fairy-will-not-solve-the...
If so Uber will eventually cease to exist, and this is not an ethical issue
> The wages they pay to their drivers are less than the depreciation of the cars and the expense of keeping the drivers fed, housed, and healthy. They pay less than minimum wage in most markets, and, in most markets, that is not enough to pay the costs of a car plus a human.
The depreciation and operating cost of a car and the living expenses of a driver are variable by the choices of the driver. I have taken Uber rides in new SUV's and in old Priuses that have little depreciation value left in them. Is Uber supposed to pay more for drivers with less efficient / more expensive / newer cars? Is Uber supposed to pay you more when you move into a more expensive apartment? Is Uber supposed to pay you more if you are married or have kids to feed (which would be illegal). Decisions on what car to drive and where to live are economic decisions made by the individual driver, and if they lose money by deciding wrong, that is not Uber's fault.
> Drivers are draining their own reserves to get cash now, but, hey, they gotta eat and pay the bills.
So basically this is like the economic profile of taking a loan. You get cash now in exchange for additional costs paid later. If Uber's deal was similar to a payday loan in its cost/benefit ration, I would say you have a point here. But if it's more similar to a regular loan, then no. But this gets back to my point that it is variable by driver, and it doesn't make sense for Uber to offer higher rates to some drivers based on their choices. So basically I assume what you want here is for Uber to refuse to take on a driver that they calculate will lose money based on their vehicle expenses. I don't think this is entirely unreasonable, but IMO it's on the driver to make that decision, and Uber is not ethically responsible.
Say you lose your job and your pension and all the things that make your life comfortable tomorrow. You have a choice to wait it out, maybe take some time to learn an advanced skill and find a new line of work. However, you need money now to take care of a sick family member. So you start driving Uber...
Yes the mechanics of the rideshare platforms are such that you can start earning money now, but the cost is as you pointed out, to you in the future. So then the question is this like a regular loan, or is it more exploitative like payday loan. I think the lack of transparency and the circumstances one has to be in to even consider these choices are such that make it appear, at least to me, more like the latter than the former.
I think what the person responding to you wants, I know what I would want, is for Uber/Lyft to pay a bit more to take these costs into account. However this would raise the cost to riders, which have already been artificially subsidized for some time [0]. Uber won't do this because it would, to your first point, cause the company to become insolvent.
The assumption that poor people are not making rational choices is just plain wrong. I think the reality is closer to - people are trying to make the best choice they can, but often have a limited number of really bad choices to chose from. Sure some drivers drive an SUV instead of a Prius, but that may have been a function of the incentives presented by the app itself (i.e. qualifying for more exclusive rides, the appearance of making more money from this vehicle, its the only car you have now, etc. etc.).
A company that takes advantage of limited choices, and then offers you an option that appears to temporarily solve your problem now, at great personal expense to you later is in my view acting in bad faith because they are to some effect misrepresenting the service they are providing to their drivers. it is this point, in my view, that makes it look more like the payday loan than a "regular" loan.
[0] https://slate.com/business/2022/05/uber-subsidy-lyft-cheap-r...
So asking if Uber behaved ethically is indeed a useful question (even more so if the answer is obvious) because if they did, and if their behavior is indeed common in the industry, it provides a pretty solid justification for the government to jump in and improve things, where the free market isn’t.
People are asking for general labor laws which prohibits companies from misusing contractor status as a way of bypassing benefits and reasonable work hours.
People are asking the for a public alternative to taxi service, including more frequent buses that service wider areas, longer into the night so they won’t have to use the taxis so much.
Note that better labor laws will also fix the situation for the traditional taxi companies, as they won’t be able to exploit their workers either by e.g. a weird medallion system. You’ll probably have to pay more then previously for your cab ride (as the driver needs fair wages for their work), but that’s where the public alternative to cab rides comes in.
Re: (A) If you really zoom out to the history of labor, it is a huge stretch to say Uber drivers are "exploited". They have almost perfect clarity on what they are being paid to do, they do it and it matches VERY closely the expectations, and they get paid in a timely fashion on the agreed-upon timeline. They have no lock-in, and can quit on a moment's notice. There are so many drivers globally who use Uber and vote with their labor. Frankly, it's generally very easy work too, compared to almost every other job (I'm sure it has its moments).
If I were to try and make the Steelman argument for why workers are "exploited", I can come up with basically 2 things: 1) Workers are incapable of deciding what is the right work for their situation. 2) No worker should earn below $x for any reason, and it is better that they be unemployed. In my experience, I have found that people are very savvy about money when it comes to earnings. Where people have issues is long term planning, but short-term, I have found people are very good at "this hack makes my job easier/make me earn more". So I don't buy either of these arguments, I believe it is generally a pessimistic and paternalistic view of workers.
I don't believe using the term "exploited" is generally helpful here, as it is an emotional term and not specific enough to address. If you were to break it down, we could have a real discussion.
Re: (B) You can't really look at the laws for moral guidance, There are many bad laws out there, that many many people disregard (e.g. the average US commits 3 felonies a day https://www.amazon.com/Three-Felonies-Day-Target-Innocent/dp...). It is totally possible in many cases to break laws justly and comply with laws unjustly. You can look at the "illegal" actions of Rosa Parks and Gandhi for extreme examples of just lawbreaking. There are laws that are absurd, for example in New York during COVID, it was both illegal to wear a mask and illegal to not wear a mask. But there are many other smaller examples in people's lives where they think breaking the law is the right moral thing. And the reason most people support Uber's "law breaking" is that it was NET better for everyone than the old system, both drivers AND passengers. This passes a moral "smell test" for me. If one action is illegal, and the other legal, but everyone is better off doing the illegal thing, then the law is the problem. The legalization of Marijuana is another example of trying to reconcile this type of thing. Everyone is better off if it is just legal.
You also forgot that Uber doesn't make clear the costs of insurance, maintenance, depreciation and liability (other to say that it's not on them) which is coincidentally are the most confusing and difficult accounting considerations. Uber is clearly exploiting the lack of business acumen in their drivers.
Uber would hire children if it were legal for the exact same reasons people hired children in the past and the same reasons Uber currently hires people. Their drivers lack awareness and oversight from social and government organizations.
Now the situation has flipped. When most people think back to taxis before Uber existed, they'll unfortunately rather accept poor working conditions for the drivers than going back to the taxi hellhole they still remember.
My main point was that customers aren't being treated badly like with taxis anymore, and they'll accept a lot of exploitation due to that.
Unless you can show me someone forced to drive for uber, any claims of worker exploitation are incredibly suspect.
Of course, it does not justify exploiting workers. Protecting people from those practices is one of the reasons we have governments composed of independent powers, and entire structures with the only purpose of keeping those honest. People aren't complaining about Uber because it looks like that on their case, those safeguards are working. (As an example, this article could only be written because the safeguards are working.)
And yeah, they were some courageous people that insisted on breaking some really immoral laws and destroying a really bad local actor. If it wasn't for them, city transportation would probably be the same it was at the 2000's. Of course, they did it for their own immoral motives, using bad practices that should be punished. It just looks like they will be punished, so why bother hating them? Just use a lower priced competitors that probably treats their drivers better, and forget them.
Yes I'm certain the folks at Uber were feeling the pressure every day at their Bay Area office with its foosball tables.
Good grief.
Perhaps because "the ends justify the means" is not a sound code of morality. Lying, cheating, stealing, exploiting, lawbreaking, hiding rapes & assaults, and more are rarely justified for any ends, perhaps only fighting literal authoritarianism.
These immoral behaviors are certainly not justified to merely open a stagnant market because you want to exploit the workers even more than the entrenched entities (e.g., at least in the old system there was a path to earn a medallion worth 6-7 $figures and get a retirement, w/uber, it's only 'what are your stats last week') and steal some of the gains for yourself.
And now, after over a decade of lying, cheating, stealing, exploiting, lawbreaking, hiding rapes & assaults, and squandering $billions of investor funds, they still aren't profitable, and are shedding drivers & customers as they attempt to raise prices to anything sustainable.
We were promised flying cars and all we get is a new form of exploitation, except now driven by a smartphone app? If they put all that funds and effort into an actual honest non-exploitative effort for a flying car...
But the investors don't seem to care, they are losing the drivers, and the government seems to be acting quite well against them (at least here it is). So, again, why should I bother?
Anyway, AFAIK:
> If they put all that funds and effort into an actual honest non-exploitative effort for a flying car...
They would be squashed (literally) by the taxi mafia. That's why nobody did it before them.
(About the "hiding rapes & assaults" thing, do they still do that? They tried it here and it backfired quite strongly (as it should), so now they have a policy to help the police on those cases. If they are indeed doing that somewhere, well, maybe people should look at the other end of the problem, it's way more effective to fix it there.)
So, are you saying that just because someone has recourse that acting immorally is OK, and because that recourse exists, we shouldn't hate on them?
I have an attny friend who took a case against Uber. In a liberal US state with strong worker and consumer protections, it still had to go through multiple layers of appeal to the state's supreme court until they finally got a settlement from Uber. It would have been literally impossible unless the plaintiff was very rich, or the attny hadn't taken the case on contingency/pro bono basis (IDK which he did).
Hordes of unethical people like the Uber executives will fight everything tooth & nail, legally or not.
They do not deserve respect in a civilized society merely because they manage to make money. Any clan of asshats can make money by exploitative and illegal means.
>>They would be squashed (literally) by the taxi mafia. Just because the "taxi mafia" is bad also does not mean that it is OK to impose bad consequences on everyone else to fight them. If the taxi mafia were the only ones harmed, maybe OK, but that group has harmed a lot of people.
It's certainly not ok. But I'm certainly not losing sleep over it, because the worst case is really not that bad.
Anyway, I do encourage people to look at alternatives to work for, and I will start to lose my sleep if I see my government's attitude changing.
> Hordes of unethical people like the Uber executives will fight everything tooth & nail, legally or not.
Yeah, and if you look carefully, the root of the problem here is not inside Uber. I keep hopping some high-profile criminal acts on exactly the correct way to disrupt the Justice system and for it to change into something more democratic, but well, that's pretty unlikely. Odds are getting higher that my country will get a plain old revolution to change that, what is a much worse option.
I'd agree that this is extremely unlikely in any country, and even conceiving & detailing such a plan, nevermind executing it perfectly to obtain a desired effect seems impossible in that the possible actions do not overlap with any solutions.
>> Odds are getting higher that my country will get a plain old revolution to change that
What country is that? It may be necessary. That said, just because most of an elite is unethical doesn't give some sub-group license to be so, at least in my book.
To me, those statements don't eschew accountability, it just acknowledges sometimes we send companies/people to the gallows that did both good and bad things. Gallows here being a metaphor, I doubt the political elite that were recruited to Uber (and other companies) will be held accountable or mentioned any more than in passing in the press. That said, I do expect to see policy changes and regulations in the future regarding mixing lobbying, recruiting highly connected staffers, etc
To be clear, I don't think there's some conspiratorial undercurrent of former Uber engineers here acting in coordinated fashion to cover up the story of what they're affiliated with on a place as relatively small as HN. For as popular as this forum is with nerds, the only thing we're really reknown for is the contrarian nature of the forum and how that contrarian nature sometimes (most of the time?) picks big winners. HN doesn't decide the future of hacker culture, it's just a voice in observing and dissecting it.
a) Uber was a crappy business model that required the exploitation of the labor force to raise money. If this fact can't be fixed for the company to be profitable, the company can shutdown or become a co-op for all I care.
b) Toronto and SF have banned sidewalk robots (until they "study" the situation i.e. until only monopoly transport companies can afford to wait around). NYC had banned scooters and e-bikes till last year, and in fact spent precious police time chasing down delivery workers who motorized their bikes to reduce the physical drudgery of their work. So when the Guardian says "Uber broke municipal law", my question is always "How stupid were these laws?". Most of these city laws consistently over-index for the opinions of the wealthy retirees who can show up at 10am on a Tuesday to yell at their council meetings. So, if VC's want to fund lobby arms to move the needle in breaking through to these councillors, I'm here for it.
But in this context, the Uber methodology would be useful for busting through the archaic city approval processes + frivolous environment lawsuits aka the prime driver of the housing shortage [1]
[1]: https://www.npr.org/2022/03/29/1089174630/housing-shortage-n...
A lot of the conversation here is based on anecdata (interactions with uber drivers or cabs) or people projecting what its like to be a driver on uber and they are unwittingly being exploited.
I worked at a company that provided products to uber, lyft and doordash drivers, and personally interviewed well over 200 drivers, (along with having access to detailed data on a much larger dataset). The vast majority of drivers we talked to did not feel like they were being 'exploited' and generally liked the flexibility of the gig economy. Most workers were part time, working to supplement income from other jobs or in between other gigs, in fact when i was there, most drivers worked less than 6 months before stopping. I would say these people have a much better sense of whether they are being exploited than people who are not in their shoes.
There was a small but important minority (we called them 'professionals') for whom driving had become their full time profession (most were not cab drivers before) who were perpetually annoyed by uber and their main gripes tended to be the changing promotions systems, and algorithmic changes that reduced/limited profitable rides (like airport pickups) and just general loss of control.
Some people claim that every employer is exploiting their workers
It is a separate but related issue then the law-breaking. They need to be discussed separately.
Most people recognize that there are bad laws that should be broken, and bad laws that should be changed.
If Uber broke a bad law, the most important solution is to fix the law. If Uber broke a good law, the most important solution is to stop them.
I think the most charitable interpretation of them is legal duct tape over other bad laws. The most obvious examples are tax laws and incentives that tie Healthcare to employers.
>Uber has essentially not just broken laws, but outright exploited workers/drivers... and people comment "Aah but the local taxi mafia was bad"...??!? I'm sorry but that does not justify exploiting workers. That does not justify using political influence to enter/gain markets. This isn't some messiah coming to save us all from the "horridness of local transport".
Except this isn't a david against goliath story like you're implying.
The fact is that those laws are not just practically wrong, but they are also morally wrong, and serve primarily to protect entrenched interests, both from the taxi companies, and of the workers who you claim incorrectly are being "exploited".
The fact is, if anyone is "using political influence to enter/gain markets" it's the established interests. The taxi companies, the workers, etc... Those very regulations that you are complaining are being broken by Uber, are the the problem!
I don't like Uber. I think it's a bad business. But its effects on muscling in on the taxi industry, and its blatant breaking of these immoral and economically ruinous laws are quite frankly commendable.
Would that we had more companies like this in other areas of the economy with entrenched interests.
The latter two are also a concern given the total disregard and emphasis on private profit over public good. Where I come from there are pretty restrictive drug laws which public health officials have frequently pointed out are harmful for people with a substance abuse disorder. In response a non profit organization took a direct action and illegally provided safe use shelters for harm reduction with on-site medical professionals to observe safety. This is an example of somebody braking the laws for a public good.
What Uber did was for their own profit, and profit alone, irregardless of any public benefits. In fact there are examples of cities divesting in their public transit systems using ride hailing as an excuse. This is an example of Uber resulting in net harm, regardless of the effect they had on the traditional taxi companies.
Taking some information it's way too much, but would I have argue with how the meter was operating anyway?
Now, I need to comeback to the airport at 4am.
So instead, I reserve a airport transfer from the airline itself, pay in advance something like 30 USD this time.
And... no one show up at 4am. Mobile phone of the transfer is not answering... I never heard of them *
So I install Uber, hopefully it's working, enter my visa (from my country, no need for local currency at all), after 10 minutes, someone very nice take me and I just paid like 15 USD to get to the airport, at 5 in the morning, with the invoice by mail.
How do you compete with that? Taxi business need to reflect. And every country is the same strangely, it's as universal than taxes: you can't escape!
* Edit: In fact I know what happened, and there is nothing to do, because I looked at the invoice and on the third page of the voucher PDF there, it's said that I needed to call 24h before to confirm the transfer... They don't call, you have to call. Even after the first confirmation I already did for confirming the pickup address some days before, I wasn't feeling paranoid enough. So you can't say nothing because I didn't read the last page, but it's a dumb heavy process, do people changes their mind and decide to live forever in the country frequently?
If one business offers better service than another, but, the first business exploits their employees, which service should be investigated? I'd agree the second business should be aiming at improving their service, of course, but we also need to clamp down on businesses who are exploiting people.
They aren't quite "employees" given that they can reject my trip request without needing to provide any excuse, which by the way happens frustratingly often esp. during rush hours.
I'd like to see an actual employee do that - like a waiter in a restaurant ("nah, I won't serve you, I'm busy and don't feel like it"); you'd have a word with their boss. And when things don't work that way, we're probably talking about some form of freelancing. Like a barber renting a chair at a barbershop. He (or she) is not an employee of the barbershop owner, as implied by the fact you can't really complain to the owner if they refuse to serve you.
Doing so enough times will lead to Uber penalizing the driver. Does that sound like a freelancer to you?
Obviously, the definition will change depending on the country. Referring to a previous court case UK (Employment Tribunal: Uber BV v. Aslam), this is why they think Uber drivers are employees, not freelancers:
> Uber set the fare which meant that they dictated how much drivers could earn
> Uber set the contract terms and drivers had no say in them
> Request for rides is constrained by Uber who can penalise drivers if they reject too many rides
> Uber monitors a driver's service through the star rating and has the capacity to terminate the relationship if after repeated warnings this does not improve
With those things in mind, it's hard to not feel like Uber drivers are in fact employees of Uber, not freelancers that can freely engage in business while only being "supported" by Uber or using Ubers app.
As a freelancer in IT: yes, 100%. If I keep rebuffing my clients, they eventually stop calling.
They might, unless you're the best freelancer in a niche, and they have no other choice.
The difference between you in that situation, and a driver "working" for Uber, is that you or your clients decide if you get any work in that situation, while for the Uber driver, Uber decides if you get any work or not.
Apparently it doesn't hurt their profitability worse than not being free to choose their clients would. And I see pretty solid evidence of that: they're using this option extensively, I'd be surprised if they did that despite being worse off as a result.
For the waiter from my example "enough times" changes into "even once".
> Does that sound like a freelancer to you?
Well, I mean, if you were a shop trading on Amazon, and you'd keep on cancelling orders, I can imagine you could even get kicked off the platform.
I'm sure you also don't have much say when it comes to contract terms, the provision etc., and then there's the good ol' star rating just the same.
It doesn't mean Amazon is your employer though.
(By the way, a lot of Uber drivers don't drive for Uber directly. They get contracted by some smaller local company which rents them cars etc. Then even if you argue they should have employee status, it's not on Uber, one should hold that local firm accountable. But this fact is conveniently glossed over, because corporations).
> Obviously, the definition will change depending on the country.
Sure, and that's not just because along with the country comes such and such legislation - there's also the political / lobbying aspect.
When thousands of taxi drivers protest by blocking the capital (which happened in several countries), the powers that be do pay attention. Maybe it shouldn't affect how things turn out at courts, and in a perfect world it doesn't, but I think we all know that in our world it does.
So anyhow I'm not speaking for courts, only sharing how I see these things, trying to apply common sense here. Obviously at the end of the day these matters are settled in courts, but this goes without saying.
Plenty of businesses give their employees discretion on which customers to serve.
They don't have to reflect, politicians work hard day and night to ensure there is never any competition.
You probably don't take taxis enough
However my personal experiences have no value in a discussion of this leak. It's irrelevant whether consumers likes a companies product when discussing rules and regulations.
Creating the kind of world we want to live in should be the sole purpose of rules and regulations. How people want to live shouldn't play second fiddle to what rules and regulations say. Rules and regulations can be changed.
There’s real truth in the terrible service flaws of the previous taxi system, but the employment flaws of Uber are being smothered with the service improvements they’ve introduced. That’s not the only issue worth caring about.
Having workers tie themselves to a company for 40 hours a week being the only valid way to make money is conservative thinking, be a bit progressive and see how much freedom this potentially opens up for workers.
The issue ttjjtt and others are pointing out about Uber are not around binding employees to one employer for a fixed 40 hour workweek. In fact, I'd bet ttjjtt would support labor laws which limit a businesses ability to punish employees for moonlighting.
The issue is, like amazon's mechanical turk, that Uber is cutting corners, costs, and wages for their "employees" in ways that are both legal and illegal while secretly lobbying to make it easier for them to reduce benefits.
This is a market leader using their position to harm their workers. "Conservative thinking" is that "why do we need all these labor rules and protections for employees? They signed up for it!" Progressive thinking is "Maybe we shouldn't let businesses set the rules for how they treat employees?"
Right, so make regulators get off their asses and start draft up some reasonable regulations where workers can work freely like they can with uber and mechanical turk? Just banning that sort of freedom entirely is conservative thinking, since it aims to preserve the shitty situation we have where everyone needs to have a "job". Today people can't even imagine a society where you don't have a job, you just go and do things that are useful and get rewarded the full fruit of your labour, that sort of thing is possible with Ubers offerings and a bit of regulations, why go all in on preventing that future from happening?
Uber works great for users, we know that. Uber would also work great for drivers if the drivers got a larger cut. So what is the problem, just regulate it and everything gets better than under the old Taxi systems. Why is this so hard to imagine? And no, this is not over regulating at all, at least not more than for example limiting how many Taxi's are allowed to operate in the city etc which is already happening.
Did you read the article?
The issue is 2 fold.
1. Uber is lobbying heavily for regulators to NOT do that.
2. We have an entire political party in the US (Republicans) that are "anti-regulation" and fight tooth and nail against new regulations.
If we want "regulators" to make things better, we need to put in regulators that want to regulate.
This doesn't matter on a state level, for example democrats could easily create such regulations in New York or California if they wanted to.
> Uber is lobbying heavily for regulators to NOT do that.
Yes, every corporation lobbies for laws that favors them, this is nothing new. Lobbying isn't corrupt, politicians making under the table deals with corporations is the bad part, lobbying is just corporations telling politicians what kind of laws the corporation would want.
And then paying money to politicians who offer to do what the corporations want. Lobbying (at least as practiced in the US, where it is considered "free speech" for corporations to "donate" money to politicians they like) is very clearly legalized corruption - there really is no other valid way to look at it.
Yes, it is slightly more expensive than Uber, but the drivers have been vetted by the municipal government, proved their ability to speak the local language and know their way around the city and are insured to be able to pay you off if they crash.
Unlike Uber, they are - in fact - independent contractors. They are actually proud about their freedom.
Uber, OTOH, works here mostly by way of these shady folk who rent cars to disadvantaged immigrants who barely speak the language, collecting most of their earnings, forcing them to drive north of 12 hours per day before they return to Poland or Ukraine in 6 months.
> Right, so make regulators get off their asses and start draft up some reasonable regulations where workers can work freely like they can with uber and mechanical turk? Just banning that sort of freedom entirely is conservative thinking, since it aims to preserve the shitty situation we have where everyone needs to have a "job".
Trying to pass such regulations runs against massive lobbying efforts by companies. Amazon, Uber don't care about giving employees flexibility. They are free to give workers the flexibility, nothing is preventing them from doing it. They use this model to reduce benefits to give their workers. It is incredibly hard to pass regulations against these lobbying efforts. However regulations that companies need to give their workers benefits do already exist, that's why Ubers operations were deemed illegal in places.
> Today people can't even imagine a society where you don't have a job, you just go and do things that are useful and get rewarded the full fruit of your labour, that sort of thing is possible with Ubers offerings and a bit of regulations, why go all in on preventing that future from happening?
The argument is that the future is that people don't have the choice of " just go and do things that are useful and get rewarded the full fruit of your labour," but instead are locked into highly unfavourable situations, with no choice (because of their economic situation) and at the same time skirting around tax obligations, just to enrich the investor class behind Uber.
That did already happen, just look at what Über did with the Uber Black loans where drivers got enticed into car loans with promises of guaranteed income, just for Uber to reduce the fares. This is essentially the same as how servdom in Russia worked.
> So what is the problem, just regulate it and everything gets better than under the old Taxi systems. Why is this so hard to imagine?
That's the whole point about the Uber leaks. Uber was not willing to work under the existing worker protection frameworks, they even exited markets where they were forced to (e.g. Switzerland).
HN is obviously not a hive mind, but in in general, for facets of the HN crowd, the investor class, those with conservative/libertarian views on labor, business owners, etc. the default view is simply to not empathize with the service worker.
For whatever it's worth, I tend to err a bit toward the "more regulation" end of the spectrum, but I don't feel the need to believe that the world is simple and everyone who doesn't subscribe to my simplistic view is morally deficient.
Except this counterpoint is not based on real evidence but largely based on purely theoretical arguments which have been shown numerous times to be way too simplistic.
I’d like to hear more evidence. until then it seems like a comforting thought for a libertarian rather than a sober description of reality.
You’re on the internet arguing with imaginary strawmen for your amusement. It’s not time well spent.
I agree. But we also need to consider when well-intentioned measures are corrupted or fail entirely. That was the case with taxis before Uber. It remains the case with many of Uber's competitors. Uber is no paragon. But the neither is the status quo. This is far from a bimodal argument.
The fact is that Uber/Lyft created a new market even when the product existed a long time. In NYC, you could always get a car service to come and pick you up, but you had to know them, have a pre-existing relationship, etc. If you do, even today, it's cheaper than Uber, but it's a hassle.
Also in NYC, taxis are terrible in comparison to Uber. They're usually dirty/unkept, the drivers are sometimes "off". Taxi owners weren't focused on the service- they were focused on the medallion, the right to have a taxi. That's where the real value was.
The taxis were/are essentially anonymous, so there's no incentive to do anything more than the bare minimum in terms of cleanliness, repair or customer service.
Uber, for all its extreme faults, flipped that on its head, with driver and rider visibility, and that changed everything.
Uber has many problems- handicap inaccessibility, driver treatment, a ton of evidence against them regarding deliberate manipulation and probable lying to regulators, but "bring back the old ways" clearly weren't working either.
The market needs to break up and become more free.
Similarly, until a few years ago it was forbidden to operate busses between cities.
Uber has some negative aspects but opening up the market and allowing healthy competition is certainly a huge positive.
And was there any other requirements? Like required training or mandating mandatory supply at all times?
There’s a lot of competition on the German market for taxi-alternatives, many of which started long before Uber (and are often cheaper as well).
In the process, Uber clearly behaved illegally and unethically towards its workers and government regulators. That's been known for a while. Could it have been different? Maybe, maybe not. Sometimes governments don't listen until they're forced to.
Now about the working conditions of cab drivers, honestly in many places they were already being screwed over by local oligopolies (for a prime example of this, see for example the NYC medallion auction scams which defrauded individual drivers of hundreds of thousands of dollars). In the Uber story, drivers got shuttled from one shitty situation to another probably just about as shitty.
Hopefully the new set of players in that space now abide by the local rules, and also the regulators learn from their failures and get on top of the industry without forgetting about their users too much.
Many rich people wouldn't suffer if Uber could just forcefully employ people at will, keeping them hostage, if Uber could arrange something like that. But that hurts the people who are being kept hostage. When we create/remove/modify regulations, both sides of the coin needs to be considered.
In this case, it's less about how good/bad Uber is for passengers and more about how Uber is exploiting their employees. Even if everyone loved Uber as a passenger, we can't allow them to exploit other human beings.
Anything else?
But since you apparently sit on a trove of data (as you're so sure of this) that I don't have access to, could you share a bit the results and your methodology?
And I presume you obviously don't use those pesky child-labor-by-Foxconn phones/other devices like Apple; heck it would be hard to find any electronic device using ie rare metals that were sourced by standards you seemingly want others to adhere to. So I presume you typed this on some wooden computer sending pigeon packets.
We can go much deeper. You will inevitably fail eventually the same standards you are expecting from others here, probably pretty quickly. Its just about which battle one decides to pick up and push hard enough. You picked Uber for some reason, others for around gazillion reasons stated in this thread do not consider them the most important topic given the overall benefits to whole society.
"Yet you participate in society. Curious! I am very intelligent."
I don't think anyone would disagree with that. I think the point is that Uber can do shitty things that should be punished and provide a good service that should be encouraged.
To put it another way, the world I want to live in gives you a fair chance of running a competitive business without having to be mega rich and chummy with the leaders of the countries you operate in.
The idea that Uber is creating slaves that have no agency is the typical elitist arrogance, sitting in their ivory towers, picturing all these poor Uber drivers suffering when it’s simply not the case.
> Uber identified police officers through data mined from the app and then, using an internal tool called “greyball”, served them a fake view of the UberPop app, populated with ghost cars that wouldn’t stop for them. They could also block anyone from booking in certain zones, like around police stations, using a tool called “geofencing”. [1]
Fair enough if you disagree with the court ruling, but they should abide by the law like everyone else.
[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-f2971465-73d2-4932-...
if you disagree with a court ruling, and then set up intentionally a system to avoid the police detecting you continue your behaviour, you should be punished to the maximum extent of the law. The people who orchestrated that behaviour should have money confiscated from their illegal enrichment, and jail time for purposely working to circumvent a legal order for a court. And if not back then, today.
They broke through all of those unfair laws and now we live in a system that benefits from them breaking the rules for the better. Seriously, you think the taxi monopoly was so much better than now? That’s laughable!
Should the Dutch farmers who are being regulated out of business sit idly by while all their hard work goes to nothing?
Uber chose to break the rules against an illegal taxi monopoly and I’m thrilled they did because otherwise no one would have been able to break it. Because they put their necks out on the line we have a driving service around the world that would never have existed if we didn’t have them pushing the boundaries.
I would, for a large number of reasons, at the basic level no one really agrees what the "world should be" thus your regulations for a utopia would not match mine.
Further government has proven through out history to be very poor at creating the kind of word "we want the live in"
Instead government, the law, "rules and regulations" should be about impartial conflict resolution and protection of natural rights not attempting to create some kind of Utopia that it can never achieve and will make everyone life worse in the attempt
And the first requirement for this is that rules and regulations are followed.
Establish a culture in which there is no consequence for disobeying the rules and regulations and I guarantee that the most regular offenders are not those who's practices you agree with.
The best case scenario here is that there are heavy consequences for those who broke the rules, but the rules are revisited and altered to make things more in line with consumer needs.
As an autistic person I found this very hard to grasp when I was young. Now I understand that rules must be discovered as an emergent property, they cannot be read from a manual or law book. What matters is the culture that enforces whatever rules you want. Otherwise you get tons of laws on the books people don't enforce.
Seems like you're addressing the difference between the concept of Social Contract and the concept of Law.
The Social Contract is exactly what you described: the implicit permissions and offenses that a body of people will tolerate. It is, by definition, equal to the current will of the people, and as you said requires discovery. But it requires constant discovery, as the list of permissions and offenses may change over time, and is not necessarily consistent.
Law is an explicit agreement on what permissions and offenses that body of people will tolerate. Ideally it would match the social contract's list of permissions and offenses, but in reality it will always be lagging behind, and it's a social responsibility to try and keep it up to date. Unlike the Social Contract, the law is codified and constant, requiring no discovery.
In small groups of people, coexisting with just the social contract can be all you need. But as the group grows, it becomes less and less possible to predict what the current body of permissions is, leading to people committing offenses without malicious intent; there was no way for them to know beforehand that an action was an offense. And because the body of permissions changes constantly, it's also not something that can be relied on practically after the discovery. We must always suffer the anxiety of taking an action that will condemn us.
Law provides an easier means to get along by providing a constant and predictable list of permissions and offenses. It changes too, but only by announcement, allowing the populace to stay abreast of the updates. This offers a relief to the anxiety presented in a strictly Social Contract setting, and encourages people to act and be involved in daily life rather than avoidant of it.
The offenses you're describing seem to fall under the concept of De minimis[1], which establishes that there are offenses to a rule that just aren't worth acting on. We all know they're against the law, but not necessarily against the spirit of the law, and the cost of acting on those offenses are greater than the benefits. So we allow them to happen, by virtue of the Social Contract overriding the Law in minor circumstances.
But that doesn't mean that the rules and regulations aren't important and larger offenses should never be acted on. The Law is still the Law and for good reason. Ignore it, and that anxiety returns to plague anyone without the power to force their will.
Unfortunately when you have regulatory capture by special interests groups, this ensures that no progress ever happens because the organization with the most lobbying money is always guaranteed to win.
The Uber driver circling at 5 am may not be turning a profit with $15 airport rides. This business may only be sustainable for as long as VC money flows, and drivers are willing to go bust.
Uber makes something like a 36% variable margin [1]. Even adding back sales & marketing we find a positive, if small, margin. They lose about 11% per ride. But that varies wildly region to region. (New York, for example, is profitable.)
Drivers' economics are more precarious. But the "as long as VC money flows" argument hasn't made sense since Uber's 2019 IPO.
So on net, they may be out something like 11-30% per ride dependent on location. Those are awful economics. More concerning would be busy season/dry season dynamics for Uber drivers. If there are months where rides decline in frequency or become more concentrated - then driver economics may be substantially worse than the average would have you believe.
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/uber-posts-nearly-6-billio....
Rules and Regulations are extremely hard to change, thats why we have companies like Uber popping up in the first place.
Surge pricing can incentivize more drivers to come online. I don’t see how you can reduce the customers in a short timeframe.
You end up with a surly asshole driver and a surly asshole rider who both think the other is screwing them, when in fact it was the silicon valley douchebags
https://reittiopas.hsl.fi/reitti/Central%20Railway%20Station...
I never need to take an uber any more. The cars and drivers are all professional, and they’re often closer than any Uber.
They (Uber) solved it by completely dominating the food delivery landscape with Uber Eats.
Are most of the silicon valley programmers on this forum native Thai citizens?
In Bangkok taxis are super cheap for everyone and it never happened to me that someone tried to cheat me (and I am quintessential white man)
Yes, it's called a worker's cooperative, a it's exactly how huge chunks of the economy should be organised. Unfortunately (as pointed out elsewhere in the thread) it is often impossible for workers to raise capital to build an enterprise in this model, even if it would mean a more efficient organisation.
They are (in)famous for using lots and lots of venture capital money to subsidize their fares for customers when entering new markets, using those low prices as loss-making user acquisition, and then eventually (and likely gradually) raising their prices once they have enough regular users - often having killed off some of the local competition who couldn't compete with the VC-subsidized prices Uber arrived with.
> How do you compete with that? Taxi business need to reflect. And every country is the same strangely, it's as universal than taxes: you can't escape!
Reflecting doesn't do much when your competitor can afford to sell every journey at a loss until you go out of business before then putting their prices up to what you're currently charging.
Yes, in some places Uber's arrival did either bring a better service or scare local taxis into doing better (e.g. lots of local firms now offer app-based booking and are just as reliable as Uber), and in some places taxis were so overpriced that Uber could genuinely offer a better service for a lower price and be profitable. But the vast majority of the times they offer cheaper prices, especially when it's such a big difference as in your story, it's a temporary (perhaps for months or years) strategy not something to expect to stay cheap. Enjoy using their services half paid for by investors while you can!
Edit: There don't seem to be many recent news articles that go into details, as it was known about so many years ago that most articles talking about these leaks just acknowledge this to be fact (e.g. in this very article we're in comments thread of, "At the same moment as Uber’s service deteriorates and the subsidy that helped it decimate taxis evaporates [... continues on about other stuff]")
But here's an interesting snippet from a court case that alleged this against them in the US where the judge basically agreed but said it wasn't to be point of being illegal. From https://casetext.com/case/sc-innovations-inc-v-uber-techs-2
> The Court held that Sidecar's allegation of a relevant market—app-based ride-hailing services, excluding taxis—was sufficiently plausible to survive a motion to dismiss. Id. at 10-11. The Court also rejected suggestions by Uber that Sidecar had not alleged below-cost pricing, id. at 12, as well as arguments that Uber's delayed entry to the non-limousine ride-hailing market and asserted pro-competitive purposes were sufficient for dismissal at the pleading stage, id. at 16-18. The Court nevertheless dismissed Sidecar's Sherman Act claims for failure to provide sufficient allegations of market power, particularly its failure to allege "that Uber has the power to raise market prices above competitive levels simply by reducing its own output, or that Lyft"—allegedly Uber's only remaining competitor—"could not respond to such a reduction by increasing its own output." Id. at 12-14. Absent such allegations, the Court held that Sidecar alleged no more than a "disciplined oligopoly," which the Ninth Circuit has held insufficient to state a claim for either monopolization or attempted monopolization, due to "a gap in the Sherman Act that allows oligopolies to slip past its prohibitions,"
In south of France, Uber is half the price of taxis (for ride to airport I pay 30e from my place, while taxi is 70+), and cars are always very nice.
In Poland, regular taxis are often cheaper. Although usually regular taxis are so-so cars. But, UberX is even worse: often very bad cars, scratched, even crushed, driven by foreigners who can't speak the language. Uber Premium are good cars with good drivers, but are more expensive than taxis (although, they are nicer).
Maybe Big Taxi needed a shakeup worldwide.
Although the other day I sat in sick in a Lyft before work, and I ended up getting only 5 dollars credit for the privilege of smelling all day around people.
I'm… speechless… Can I ask how often and during which time period you took the Taxi in Paris? I've never had or even heard of such experience, I always had the same quality of service of Taxi in Paris as in Germany. (= very good quality) I'll admit that I just take it twice a year when I go visit my aunt. But my brother lived for 7 years in Paris in the 2000s, and I've never heard him complain outside of the price. I'm genuinely surprised by what you're saying (Yes I am a native french speaker), if you didn't have such a good comment history I would have assumed you were an Uber comment farm account.
My family also despises the taxis and they've dealt with them their whole lives.
My partner and I need to get home from where she works, we use the uber app, and it quotes us $35. It's a little pricey for a 12 minute journey, but whatever. A driver accepts.
We watch as that driver drives in circles, then appears to come towards us, then turns away again. There is no extra stop listed. He keeps doing it, just going round and round, stopping for a while, driving away again. After 15 minutes of this, we cancel to see if we can re-book with a different driver. Suddenly - "Surge pricing!" it's now $45.
So we install the local cab app (Thanks Swan Taxis), their app is definitely worse, but we get a quote for $25 and the cab arrives in under 5 minutes.
How do you compete with that? Uber business need to reflect. It's the same every time.
There are similar applications for different markets of course. But Uber has the international brand recognition. Worth investigating what app works best before you go somewhere.
Since the story here is not about if Uber is better/worse for passengers but if Uber is a good/bad employer, it sounds like that's what you're saying.
If the choice to have good service + no exploitation arise, I'll take that one, and it's coming thanks to Uber bursting the taxi monopoly, but in the meanwhile no regrets, taxis had it coming.
Wake up, decide it's a good day to be exploited.
Kiss your wife goodbye as you enter your car "bye honey! On my way to being exploited by Uber!"
Drive away and open your exploitation app. Accept a ride, go to the person: "who's the person that's going to participate in my exploitation together with Uber today? Oh, there he is!". Drive him to the place he needs to be, drive away.
"Ok, do I want to be exploited some more today?"
Decide to be exploited on a few more rides and return home.
Now being serious, if you're an Uber driver and let's say that in the short term that's your best option, why would it be better for him to have this option striped from him? Why do you think anyone else should make that call except him?
There are multiple avenues available, the least of which is to pass sweeping legislation to force corporations into compliance with basic human decency standards.
Apparently, lots of drivers seem to think it's not such a bad deal. I sure am not going to shed any crocodile tears for the lost business for the taxi drivers that have had the privilege to rip me off in the past. Happened a little too often for me to do that.
There's a lot of sentiment around jobs, job security (which is an illusion), and people paying into social insurances. I'd say that's all fine and something to sort out by different countries. Meanwhile, it seems plenty of people make decent money driving around as Uber drivers and this is not really Uber's problem to sort out. The gig economy certainly challenges some established values. But fundamentally, there seem to be plenty of people willing to take those gigs. That's why that works.
Either way, that doesn't invalidate the value proposition of offering passengers a fair price for a ride before they enter the car. Whether it's Uber or somebody else offering that deal, it sure beats haggling with some shady characters in the middle of the night about a ride from A to B. Been there done that & no thanks. Not going back to that. Uber sure looks like magic when you use it in situations like that. Wnip out phone, ride shows up, and teleports you home. Great value. Anything less is a rip off deal, frankly. I've probably paid too much for that service on some occasions but I like it none the less.
Instead of going all socialist on Uber, maybe hold your local politicians accountable to be more competent. This is happening on their watch after all. There seem to be lots of people that have issues with Uber but not a lot of them seem to be able to do anything about that legally. Why is that? What's blocking that after all these years of scrutiny, court cases, lobbying, rule changes, etc.? If Uber is doing something illegal here, by all means drag them into court and fix it. But if not, maybe change the legal situation to normalize what they and other business do? Apparently, the problem is that Uber is still around after years of legal proceedings in many countries. Maybe, that's because they aren't actually doing that much wrong at all and are providing a decent service to customers via an army of drivers willing to earn some money that way?
And Uber drivers aren't even considered working for Uber, so no social benefit and health care from Uber.
I don't doubt that taxis can be problematic in many places. Typically they reflect the social conditions of where they operate. Inequality, poor education, corruption in general mean that taxis in such location are not a good experience.
And then highly paid people like many HN readers are just not willing to do the math: A taxi driver (or Uber driver) will not be able to drive all working day long. They have to wait for new passengers a significant part of their working time. So expect that when you use them you need to pay at least twice the rate for a normal employee. Deprecation and maintenace for a car is not cheap. And again the customer also needs to pay it for the time the vehicle is not moving, not just for the time they are travelling. The latter is even worse for Uber. Private cars don't have several drivers. Traditional taxis have (at least in this country), just to compensate for big part of fixed costs. Of course Uber externalizes those costs to their drivers.
These are the same Dick Cheney acolytes saying “we need illegal immigration or else strawberries will cost too much.”
That's a bit of a stretch. Finnish agriculture (which is rather small) has not been able to live without Ukrainian and Vietnamese workers for several years. But there are legal frameworks to get them the required permits. It's not free of problems, all kind of exploitation happens. But then the rules will be tightened again.
I think it's the same over most of Western Europe, with domestic workers alone farming could stop.
This dynamic changes significantly though when your have app-mediated taxi interactions, instead of waving down a taxi in the street. Taxi drivers end up drastically more efficiently allocating their time, since they don't have to drive around hoping for customers to miraculously appear - instead they just drive directly to the closest customer every time.
They can also manage their time to work only when & where there is demand for their services in the moment, instead of driving around the wrong area looking for non-existent customers. You'd also expect that by providing a more convenient/cheaper/better service, this would create more demand for taxis in turn, which makes it easier to find passengers, and so driver time can be even better utilized.
None of that requires either Uber specifically or a ruthless gig-worker model - any other app-based taxi service would provide the same benefits - but I think it does make a clear argument for why app-powered taxis in general should be able to bring taxi prices down and provide a better customer experience, without necessarily destroying taxi driver's livelihoods.
That has never existed in any of the 3 countries I have lived in. Taxis were always ordered by phone. At least since the 1960s drivers were offered trips via radio by the taxi switchboard, in 2000s the available trips appeared on a screen on the dashboard.
Well, it might depend also on the density, but at least outside of massive city centers some kind of booking has always been required.
> None of that requires either Uber specifically or a ruthless gig-worker model
Exactly.
> a clear argument for why app-powered taxis in general should be able to bring taxi prices down
We are on HN, so I assume few would resist to use IT to optimize a problem. However, my expectations of how much such systems really save costs in the end would be rather moderate. Don't underestimate human optimization if experienced drivers pick their rides from a list. As mentioned, technology for that has existed since the 1960s. Does Uber really offer anything better for the driver?
Did you read the article? The reason this worked for you is that you benefited from exploiting some underpaid soul that was up at 5 in the morning to barely scrape by.
My personal experience. I come back from a trip in Romania. Arrive at Seatac, open the Uber app, it costs $100 for a trip to my house. Wait for my luggage to arrive, I open the app again, it's $120. I go outside the terminal and I find a town car service which was $60 for the same trip.
Rewind 1 day, In Bucharest, I arrive at the hotel via taxi and tell the driver that I need to go to the airport at 4 in the morning. He's like 'great, I just started my shift. Here's my phone number, call me when you wake up, I'll be at the hotel within 15 minutes'. And he was.
Glad Uber got you where you wanted to go though, put your email in your bio and maybe they’ll ask you to write a tweet for them.
Denmark, using taxi 230 USD, need to call hours in advance.
San Francisco, using Uber 40-50 USD.
India, using Uber 10-20 USD.
In Denmark taxis are so expensive there is few of them, so not only is the crazy expensive, it's very hard to find one when you need it.
Uber did grow the market.
> MacGann insists that Uber drivers were seen by some at the company as pawns who could be used to put pressure on governments. “And if that meant Uber drivers going on strike, Uber drivers doing a demo in the streets, Uber drivers blocking Barcelona, blocking Berlin, blocking Paris, then that was the way to go,” he said. “In a sense, it was considered beneficial to weaponise Uber drivers in this way.”
> The files show MacGann’s fingerprints on this strategy, too. In one email, he praised staffers in Amsterdam who leaked stories to the press about attacks on drivers to “keep the violence narrative” and pressure the Dutch government.
Uber was weaponising their workers (while fighting as hard as possible to not call them workers and pay for workers' benefits) against local governments, they were behaving like a tech-mafia, a mob with sprawling power across the globe.
What the actual fuck?
This a scandal of huge proportions.
This dismisses drivers' expressed preferences and actions in favor of a chosen narrative. Drivers protested the measures purporting to help them. They polled against them in California. They voted against them.
Claiming they were all brainwashed by corporate requires extraordinary evidence. (It is akin to dismissing a unionization vote by claiming the union brainwashed the workers.)
I don't have a link to any source, it was some years ago and it might have changed since
The ideas were good - use your leftover time/space/goods, and earn some money. We'll cover the tech, just pay us x% of the cut.
But then it became obvious that these types of ventures were in direct conflict with various labor laws across the globe. So they begin to skirt the laws, pitting their laborers against governments, all while exacerbating the sectors. And turns out it's hard to subsidies certain businesses with VC money forever.
Where did things go wrong? Maybe when people starting treating gigging economy as a full-time thing. Maybe they thought they could offer cheap and awesome service forever. Maybe they thought they could remain in the grey area of the law forever, or at least until they gained enough power to change the laws.
I used to use airbnb, now it sucks. I'm back to hotels.
I used to use uber, now it sucks. I'm back to using taxis.
I used to use delivery services, now they suck. I just pick up my own food at a fraction of the cost.
I - the consumer - obviously enabled all these things. Ok, enough rambling...
This strange arc of the last decade has shown me that a sizable chunk of information technology has matured to the point of being a commodity. For those that have worked in the field reaching back further than a decade, this begets an ennui, as our labors redirect less towards the question of what is possible and increasingly more towards the petty struggles of bureaucracy and maximization of profit and labor exploitation.
We had (have?) a moment that was more fleeting than we realized.
Demonstrations, blocking streets, keeping stories in the press - all time -honoured tactics. I guess the outrage here is a private for-profit organsation adopting such behaviour more usually associated with political parties and pressure groups?
Seriously though, this kind of BS is not normal corporate behavior. When they do it to individuals it's a huge scandal. E.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsafe_at_Any_Speed#Industry_r... or Or more recently https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBay_stalking_scandal
This is effectively Uber at war with multiple sovereign and local governments. It's fucking insane.
Uber is a more efficient mafia that won over the old mafia.
How is that wrong? Uber gives people jobs. People have a right to compete with taxi drivers. The city should not be taking those jobs away.
Currently in my country there aren't a lot of places to work if you're young and untrained. But services like uber, bolt and various food delivery end up creating an unofficial floor for the wage of somebody willing to work. You don't need credentials or exams - you just need basic skills, time and will - and at least with food delivery services, you're a bicycle and 24 hours away from making money.
Now, maybe where some of you live things are different. Maybe you can afford the extra friction of employment, maybe you don't need that safety "wage floor" because anybody can get employed at any time. Maybe you live in heaven, I don't know. I was born beyond the Iron Curtain and I'm actually ready to believe that some countries somewhere are heaven. But everywhere I could see with my own eyes: there are people that can make money with this kind of freelance services, that would most definitely suffer if formal employment was the only game in town.
How are they not drowning in gigantic obstruction of justice lawsuits and regulatory demands?
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/security/informatio...
I agree there guilty and are behaving in a borderline devil way but given they're playing with the big boys in the valley who actually has any control over them?
If violence is not a solution, you're not using enough.
Think about it... Would you prefer your Gmail to be down for a few hours, or for Moscow/Beijing to get a copy of all your sent/received emails cos they dumped them from Google's servers in the country?
Wouldn't a raid by police (at least if they have a warrant) be "authorized access" because they are law enforcement?
At the very least, they could trigger the kill switch when the raid first happens, but once it has been verified it is the police, the kill switch should be disengaged so they have full access.
Only when you’re legally obligated to do so, which is probably often not the case.
Generally, but not always, a separate court order would be required to force you to decrypt your servers.
That's like saying a warrant wouldn't include data found in a safe, and that would require a second warrant.
Now, if the data is remote, I'd understand it I guess. But if the kill switch simply burns the local data so only remote copies are still there, that kind of defeats the purpose of the raid in the first place.
Afaik, courts are undecided on whether you can be compelled to decrypt your own data.
Corporations are held to different standards though. They are often required to share information about themselves with the government, are constantly involved with discovery processes, and generally have different expectations of privacy.
You can lock it remotely at a moments notice as well and it'll remain encrypted against law enforcement attempts to unlock it.
Should you be held accountable for owning such a device?
MDM managed Windows, macOS laptops are such devices as well.
See how easy is it to reframe a feature in a nefarious way?
If the data specified by the warrant is suddenly and intentionally encrypted then they still have to provide that data or argue the obstruction angle in front of a judge. Just because a company is incorporated doesn't mean they lose all rights.
If it's not stated that they are raiding the office to grab data, what could the raid even be for?
They don't have to hand over their entire database, and as a customer, I wouldn't want them to.
They don't have to let them grab whatever the want and root around in data not covered in the warrant.
I understand having a process in place to be able to hide data from criminals stealing your data, that's not a problem. The problem becomes when companies start to hide data from legal requests, which is what Uber is in the hot for here.
Surely you're not advocating that every company should have to turn over all of its information without a warrant
Turns out, there are laws and the above would be 100% illegal.
It's like if I told you "I use Veracrypt" what for? Am I bring investigated?
What hope there is about this sort of thing comes from the fact that they can't quite yet do to us as a profession what they do to taxi drivers.
It is clear that non-tech people wrote this. Any company device I used in the last 10 years was always encrypted and could be remotely locked to not boot.
Additionally most bigger companies will have "security" software like Crowdstrike on all devices which is basically a backdoor.
Now there's a rank for exactly FIVE (count em FIVE) taxis, a 15 minute walk from the terminal exit and a line a couple hundred meters long for the bus. This isn't a small regional airport. This is the international/domestic airport for a city of 5 million people.
Absolute madness and just another point of frustration I have to endure now when travelling.
Bus 3% Taxi 14% Metro 27% Train 33% Car 23%
The part of this that jumps out at me is how much difficulty the workers have in getting someone in to politics who is one of their own. The incentives just don't line up, and they keep wasting all their efforts on wage disputes rather than more effective bargaining strategies to get part-ownership of businesses. We can see it again here - Uber drivers are literally bringing their own car, but seem incapable of producing their own app and marketing structure.
You seem to be under the impression that Uber drivers are people with the time and money to engage in risk pursuits that cost upfront cash, with a hope of a long term payoff.
Most Uber drivers are looking for cash now, to fill their already empty pockets. In many cases Uber is little more than terribly priced equity release tool, turning the capital cost of your car and fuel back into liquid cash. If these people had the capital and time to build a business, they wouldn’t be exploited by Uber.
The poor aren't complaining that the powerful are keeping their wages low; the poor are complaining that the rich pay too much in taxes and the "undeserving" (some ethnic outgroup or other) get handouts from the government.
> “For decades, Americans have experienced a populist uprising that only benefits the people it is supposed to be targeting.... The angry workers, mighty in their numbers, are marching irresistibly against the arrogant. They are shaking their fists at the sons of privilege. They are laughing at the dainty affectations of the Leawoof toffs. They are massing at the gates of Mission Hills, hoisting the black flag, and while the millionaires tremble in their mansions, they are bellowing out their terrifying demands. 'We are here,' they scream, 'to cut your taxes.”
― Thomas Frank, What's the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America
> “If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.”
― Lyndon B. Johnson
> What this doctrine means for the politics of income inequality should be clear: a profound complacency. For successful professionals, meritocracy is a beautifully self-serving doctrine, entitling them to all manner of rewards and status, because they are smarter than other people. For people on the receiving end of inequality—for those who have just lost their home, for example, or who are having trouble surviving on the minimum wage, the implications of meritocracy are equally unambiguous. To them this ideology says: forget it. You have no one to blame for your problems but yourself.
> Because most of the fuses lit by Clinton and Co. didn’t actually detonate until after he had left office—and by then some science-denying Republican was in the Oval Office—they found it easy to absolve the Democrat from blame. When a Rhodes scholar was the one deregulating and cutting taxes, why, those were good times; when some idiot from Texas tried his hand at it, the world crashed and burned. Just another demonstration of the importance of a good education, I guess.
That's largely by design. Look at all the effort put into the blatant attempts at union busting by most of the major tech companies. Tired workers are always at a disadvantage in a war of attrition against wealthy companies. Doubly so when those companies are paying the people who represent us in government.
Depends on the country. In the US, the powerful have become influential enough to make the poor fight against each other (under the guise of "The Right VS The Left") instead of realizing that both groups have a common enemy that is manipulating them very successfully.
This is a widespread issue across many essential areas of human life - like housing (Airbnb), or the environment (pollution).
Tax everything the amount it costs to clean up the pollution it causes
During that time, Lyft AND Uber spammed the people living in Austin with a shit ton of mailers, local billboards were bought up encouraging people to vote yes on Prop 1, and even the apps were pushing their propaganda.
At some point, I remember Lyft and Uber pushing a false narrative that the number of DUIs and alcohol related deaths would go up if they pulled out of the market. Highly aggressive with this approach. IIRC, the amount of advertising spent to get Prop 1 passed surpassed any previous citizen initiated proposition in the city.
Would have loved to see that two faced fuck Kalanick cry after it was defeated.
edited: passed -> defeated
Even if it went ultimately bankrupt, it would be the most breathtaking political success - "reforms" like they like to euphemize - ever achieved by Global Capital.
The taxi experience has been so consistently horrible I'd rather walk if I could. My favorite is the routine of pretending the credit card machine is broken and trying to get me to stop at an ATM so they can get cash. Had one actually threaten to call the cops on me for not paying if I didn't do that after pretending the credit card machine was broken. Refused to drop the ruse.
Of course I must admit that most of these bad experiences were in San Francisco, a city of passive aggressiveness all the way down from the top. I have to admit that taxi experiences in New York and Boston were better, though the latter was kind of stupid expensive. Experiences in medium sized cities like Cincinnati have been hit or miss.
Everything related to transportation sucks. Most airlines suck, airports suck, train systems are incompetently run, buses are slow, cars are expensive, taxis are corrupt, Uber is abusive, and... well... I guess bikes are dangerous and horses smell.
That is not the case everywhere. There are plenty of walkable places with good public transport systems.
As the saying goes:
"A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars. It's where the rich use public transportation."
Is there anything wrong with having a kill switch? Is there anything wrong with breaking laws that entrench local monopolies.
Laws are not always good. I won't say this is the next civil rights movement, but sometimes extrajudicial measures are needed for reform.
Yeah, there is. Even if there's a point somewhere in there (there's not), Uber is not qualified to make those judgement calls.
Save the greater good bullshit for the company picnic.
People tend to bring up unresolved issues like that when the opportunity calls for it. I'd say for good reasons.
> Ripley operated like a “kill switch” that would lock down all the computers in an office, preventing staff from immediately providing any data to police even if they had a warrant.
I guess what's new is everything around it as well as the scope of the usage of Ripley (or the newer tool "uLocker").
Actually, Uber has been great for consumers. Being able to travel internationally and still have a single app that can do your transport is amazing.
In addition, there is data that Uber cuts down on drunk driving and the associated trauma and deaths.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamasurgery/fullarticle/278...
If I’m possibly going to have more than one drink with dinner, I’ll use ride sharing. Round trip ride shares aren’t that much more than weekend evening parking anyway.
It may have downsides for some, but it definitely doesn’t have downsides for all.
I worked at a company that provided products to uber, lyft and doordash drivers, and personally interviewed well over 200 drivers, (along with having access to detailed data on a much larger dataset). The vast majority of drivers we talked to did not feel like they were being 'exploited' and generally liked the flexibility of the gig economy. Most workers were part time, working to supplement income from other jobs or in between other gigs, in fact when i was there, most drivers worked less than 6 months before stopping. I would say these people have a much better sense of whether they are being exploited than people who are not in their shoes.
There was a small but important minority (we called them 'professionals') for whom driving had become their full time profession (most were not cab drivers before) who were perpetually annoyed by uber and their main gripes tended to be the changing promotions systems, and algorithmic changes that reduced/limited profitable rides (like airport pickups) and just general loss of control.
I think this is where government regulation and laws could play a role in making these types of companies better, but its difficult because it involves scrutinizing individual product decisions that are often different in different geographies and markets.
Here are some examples:
Many uber drivers felt they qualified for a promotion, but were denied and had no recourse, thats a problem.
Sometimes a bad faith customer would report a driver for unsafe driver because the driver refused some unreasonable request. The driver would be suspended and not be able to get back on the platform for a long time.
Things like limiting certain profitable rides, or not allowing drivers to refuse uber pool (back when it was thing) should be scrutinized as well
Before Uber, I had personal experiences with taxis in Chicago and London trying to scam and bully me when visiting. Taxis in my hometown would never show up when called. Not to even mention the racial discrimination that was ubiquitous with legacy taxis.
No matter if Uber is better/worse for the passengers, they cannot (shouldn't?) exploit their own employees. It's not worth allowing any human to be exploited, even if you get a better service for something.
Comments like this are frustrating. The taxi “industry” is made up of lots of small players in every city and small town around the world, each with different regulations and offerings. It’s not some massive conglomerate. Your experience with taxis in the place you use them can be completely different to the experience one town over not to mention in another country.
When self driving cars finally arrive everywhere, they'll be done for. I can't wait for the political battle of "keep the jobs so people can continue being occasionally exploited by transportation".
Yes. In London there were tons of minicab companies. They were cheap and shitty, but they were there, and you could pay for better ones. There were also heavily regulated black cabs. Uber have probably increased the quality of the market, but at the cost of many more cars on the crowded streets, and the VC funding driving competitors out of business. Further, they fucked around evading rules and reduced safety for passengers by (for instance) failing to background check their drivers, failing to ensure adequate insurance etc. They were cheaper than most competitors when they started out, now I'm not so sure.
In Southampton, UK there were and still are multiple cab firms. They didn't really have apps. Now they do. The uber cars are usually cleaner and newer, but if you want service at a particular time, you still book the cab, because they'll send someone to you specially rather than just searching on a cron job. There is no real price difference.
In Perth, there were multiple cab firms, their cars were crappy and their apps still are. For a while uber was cheaper and more convenient, they drove some of the cab firms out of business. Now uber must not pay as much, because there are barely any drivers and half the time they don't even bother to take the job. If they do take the job, they often cancel it or just fuck around to try and make you cancel and trigger surge prices. Uber is now usually the expensive option. Cabs are resurgent and similar to how they ever were, which was actually fine.
Basically, as far as I can tell, Uber were 'good' because they threw VC money at everything. Now that's starting to dry up, they're getting unreliable because they can't keep attracting drivers. And frankly we should never have allowed them to use billions of investor dollars to distort world markets, nor allowed them to avoid tax by using an already well-worn excuse (oh they aren't employees!) in the first place.
Too much regulation and a generally awful experience for users.
I used Taxis less than 10 times in my life ant it was almost always too expensive and frankly unpleasant.
I honestly despised Taxis and wanted this old system to die, I don't think my case is an outlier.
Regulation is always a two edged sword, in this case I think it created an opportunity for disruption.
But it is much easier to say so now.
And we can't all live in megacities, but there are certainly better solutions than relying exclusively on cars.
When Uber and the likes came, this disrupted the industry. But the big difference here is that the Uber drivers obviously only
A) worked during peak hours and peak days.
B) only used it as a side hustle, which meant not staying up at 3AM waiting for customers. Sure, in large cities, there probably are some of those drivers, too - but they're not obligated to that.
Traditional cabs couldn't compete on price, and had to either start laying off drivers, or close shops all-together.
Then the gov. budget, and started opening up to more uber-friendly laws around the taxi industry. They are no-longer obligated to offer 24/7 service, nor do you need to work for a cab company.
In the end, I (living out in a rural place) end up paying the same rates as before, but with zero options should I need a cab 04-05 in the morning. Not really a problem until you need one, like catching a very early flight, getting stuck somewhere after a party, or whatnot.
but sometimes I had to, or I was curious to explore this option, and I've been disapointed.
The worst experience was a drunk cab driver, smelling like he vomited just before taking the course. I had to stop him midway as it felt really unsafe.
Treatment of drivers would be the honest of the LLC owner.
Drivers would receive the tax benefits of operating a business.
It seemed like such a no-brainer that I struggle to understand why it hasn't been done.
Maybe it would even bring to light some of the State challenges to setting up an LLC
Drivers rented taxis, and the taxi company only made money based on renting out the fleet of cars. It was something like $80 for 12 hours.
Drivers were independent and made money from the customers directly. The drivers I talked to most were a husband/wife pair who rented the same taxi and they told me about having a CPA that wrote off basically everything. Haircuts, clothes, the majority of what they bought was written off their taxes because it was for business.
The dispatcher (what I did) answered the phone and got an origin/destination/name, and radioed drivers until one of them accepted it.
I think the whole operation was a couple dozen cars, a tiny rented building, 3-person rotation of dispatchers, a general manager, mechanic, and an owner.
You're right -- the city required that taxi cars had medallions to be allowed to pick up passengers, and the one who owned the medallions on cars there was the owner. With a medallioned car you could pick people up in front of bars, night clubs, off a random street corner, etc.
I don't, however see it as any different from an LLC. At the end of the day the taxi drivers worked directly for themselves, had their own clients, optimized for themselves on finding places to get hailed customers. At least the one I talked to about money stuff had their own CPA, if they filed as self-employed or formed an LLC/C-Corp/S-Corp, I don't know. They were paid by people they picked up, directly, rather than the taxi company.
They had a B2B relationship with the taxi stand, they rented a car with a medallion rather than go through the process and cost of buying one, they earned money directly from the people they picked up, making themselves a B2C.
And if you bought a medallion, you didn't need to rent the car from the taxi stand, so you could do it totally yourself and cut them out. You gain maintaining the car, the capital expense of the medallion.
I think this is the better model minus the medallions.
Uber should simply act as a dispatching service, and get a commission for connecting customers to drivers.
Im sure some people will still claim the are expliting the driver LLCs, but at least they wont have to deal with the headache of the contractor/employee debate.
I think in most states a B2B relationship is solid defense against claims that someone is a misclassified employee.
No one and I mean no one was concerned about taxi drivers as workers before Uber.
What’s different now? Drivers have flexibility and simple terms. Passengers love it.
Who did Uber hurt? Medallion owners. I would argue at the root of every anti Uber push is the taxi industry lobbying against it.
These “workers rights” people never once showed up to punish the pre-Uber taxi industry.
I’m skeptical even if Uber has cut corners as a global business. I imagine many global corporations have as much, if not more dirty laundry.
Medallion systems aren't that common, and you have no idea when and where "workers rights people" have showed up to punish the local taxi industry.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxi_medallion:
> Several major cities in the US use these in their taxi licensing systems, including New York City, Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, and San Francisco.
They seem pretty common to me.
The reason most people aren't as bothered by this situation as they "should be" is... things were worse under the old Taxi system for everyone we should have sympathy for.
Uber didn't make everything perfect, but they improved things dramatically.
So sure, let's keep improving things. But if the "anti-Uber" fanatics take down Uber, they won't get an improvement. They'll get the old system back, which was worse for drivers and passengers alike.
The only people that would benefit are lawyers, lobbyists, and the taxi industry.
Pretty sure there are _independent_ polls of ride share drivers in the 60% to 70% that like the system as it is. You can drive whenever you want for as long as you want. No boss. Just you and your car and some cool people getting from point A to point B.
But somehow this is equated to full time jobs and the lack of benefits. If someone wants benefits, they can always get a regular FT job. The market has plenty of them at the moment. I have never once met an Uber driver that hated Uber.
Is there a process that these files are eventually released to the public?
But Uber is one of the only games around that lets workers 100% set their own hours with no commitment to the job/client outside work hours. Think about that - out of all the countless millions of businesses around the world, almost nobody offers that kind of freedom. I don't think it's possible to list even 10 businesses that do.
So I suspect that there is an underlying attack here against the basic freedom to work as much or as little as one chooses, protected by anonymity. That's the real story.
Yes the law was broken, yes workers were exploited, but if the nanny state gets its way and regulates Uber into being just another 40 hour job with bennies, then a lifeline for non-mainstream makers and creatives like us will be lost. I think that motive to suppress alternative work models is so strong that I can't trust the headlines.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26588607
It's getting too hard to keep up with everything, especially living in the northwest where I might be a year or two behind big cities. I'm starting to feel like I'm running against the wind so hard, even with my own constituents in the tech community, that I question if there's even a point anymore. Nobody seems to get anything that I'm saying, so why bother saying it. The status quo just keeps crushing down harder and harder and I fear that we're running out of time to get free of it before the singularity starts arriving around 2030.
Uber should just respect the UK supreme court ruling. Minimum wage laws are there for a reason and if you don't comply well I think limited liability shouldn't even apply.
The unfortunate thing is Libertarianism is a pretty shallow, selfish, and immoral political ideology. It's a shortcut that's easy to take especially as someone that's likely upper middle class and doesn't want to pay dern taxes.
It's shallow, because it almost always doesn't consider full impacts of deregulating. For example, eliminating the minimum wage or enabling child labor. It assumes that the market will just magically correct, yet what we've seen historically is the market has a tendency to consolidate into powerful monopolies which can and do sacrifice everything for more money. There are not market forces, for example, to stop slavery. The market WANTS slavery.
It's selfish because a Libertarian always assumes they aren't at the bottom rung. Who cares if people below me get hurt? They should have pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.
It's immoral because a pure Libertarian can't really argue against things like child sex workers. Who is to stop them? The assumption is the parents will, but we already know desperate parents will sell their kids (where do you think old timey chimney sweeps came from?). It's deciding that "nothing can be done" without acknowledging that the current system or regulations have been done and have curbed these moral problems (but, notably, haven't eliminated them. Libertarians like to let perfect be the enemy of good).
But hey "I got mine" right?
This isn't to say that there aren't some libertarian ideals that are good. In fact, in many social settings I'd argue that "the government needs to mind it's own business" is a good rule of thumb. However, Libertarianism fails pretty spectacularly when those regulations are around labor or business practices. It's incredibly naive in thinking that "natural consequences" work better than a government inspector.
> The real reason that the minimum wage is wrong is because the government should possess no authority to interfere with the employer/employee wage agreement or contract.
As for child sex workers, there are 2 simple questions to ask a libertarian that will reveal where they stand there.
1. Do you think prostitution should be legal?
2. Do you think a 17 year old should be able to prostitute themselves? How about 16? How about 15? How about... You'll pretty quickly find a line that isn't a clear 18 or 21.
It's seems like a strawman, but it isn't. You don't get to advocate for deregulation and allowing for anyone to contract for anything (a core tenant of libritarianism) without running into these issues.
[1] https://www.libertariancountry.com/blogs/news/there-should-b...
No it isn't, plenty of countries with much better worker conditions than USA doesn't have a minimum wage.
A libertarian does not support a nation with strong regulations protecting unions. They wouldn't stop a union, but they'd also be in favor of allowing a business to fire employees everytime they unionize.
The better worker conditions are coming from strong unions, not lack of minimum wage. Unions are so weak in the US that killing the minimum wage would turn us into a sweatshop nation.
[1] https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/080515/5-dev...
Right, and they would also be in favor of unions killing a business via strikes if the union doesn't like what the business is doing. I live in Sweden, there is nothing legally that prevents a company from setting whatever wages they want, the only thing that is stopping them is that unions would make it really hard for them to find and hire people. The laws you have in USA are mostly to protect companies from unions, that is why your unions are weak.
The way it works: Lets say that a company is paying too little in a city according to the union. Then the union will pay those workers to strike, so they still get their money, until the company raises the wages. This makes workers much more powerful than companies in these scenarios, and is why worker rights are better in Sweden than USA.
Perhaps I'd be more in favor of doing away with the minimum wage if the US wasn't so anti union. However, it is and thus doing away with the minimum wage is a bad idea. It's one of the few labor protections we have.
Wikipedia makes this sound like an extreme niche theoretical position within Libertarianism, and you're claiming it as a mainstream position:
> Libertarians generally believe that voluntary slavery is a contradiction in terms.[60] However, certain right-libertarians dispute the Lockean claim that some rights are inalienable and maintain that even permanent voluntary slavery is possible and contractually binding.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debates_within_libertarianism#...
> That's what "abolishing the minimum wage" IS. It's about allowing slavery (https://www.libertariancountry.com/blogs/news/there-should-b...).
Of course, libertarians believe no such thing and indeed your own link refutes your claim.
> As for child sex workers, there are 2 simple questions to ask a libertarian that will reveal where they stand there.
This isn't even anecdotal evidence.
> It's seems like a strawman, but it isn't. You don't get to advocate for deregulation and allowing for anyone to contract for anything (a core tenant of libritarianism) without running into these issues.
You seem to be conflating "advocating against certain regulation (even most regulation)" with "advocating against all regulation (effectively anarchy)". At a minimum, virtually all libertarians believe in regulation against (involuntary) slavery, theft, assault, etc, so clearly they favor certain kinds of regulation which support liberty, and thus they can also take the view that "voluntary slavery" is illiberal and thus subject to regulation (and from the tone of that Wikipedia quote, it sounds like many "except certain right-libertarians" do hold this view).
> Libertarians generally believe that voluntary slavery is a contradiction in terms.
In otherwords, they don't believe there is such a thing as "voluntary slavery". That is, if you volunteer for it, it's not slavery. That's a cute word game they are playing just so they don't have to accept the fact that they condone slavery.
A Libertarian supports the idea a person could sign a contract where they get no pay AND they have to follow all the rules of their employer. IE, Indentured Servitude [1]
That's the more direct form of slavery. There is also indirect forms of slavery such as the Company town. [2] Again, if you are following the core libertarian notion that the only thing that government should enforce is contracts between people, then there's nothing wrong with a company buying a city and forcing the inhabitants to use their currency and pay them rent.
> Of course, libertarians believe no such thing and indeed your own link refutes your claim.
No, it doesn't. It tries to hand wave why a minimum wage is actually bad and someone not being paid could be good. A core of the article is this
> The real reason that the minimum wage is wrong is because the government should possess no authority to interfere with the employer/employee wage agreement or contract.
That's a fairly uncontroversial statement for libertarians and one that leads DIRECTLY to serfdom and slavery. But they don't want to take it to it's logical (and historical) conclusion so instead they say "Oh, well, slavery only means forced slavery and NOTHING ELSE".
> At a minimum, virtually all libertarians believe in regulation against (involuntary) slavery
And isn't that a problem? The fact that a political ideology could support voluntary slavery doesn't make it a good one. The fact that the ideology MUST play word games to feel better about itself is also not a good one.
> theft, assault, etc,
I never said libertarians were against personal injury. Though, they'd take it not in the form of regulations but rather a strict injury notion. IE, you don't need a law to say "thou shalt not steal" instead, a libritarian would have a judge say "Without a contract, you took x from someone, therefore you need to compensate them x". These are not regulations. Regulations are things like "buildings may not be more than x height in this area" or "Employers must pay a minimum wage".
> "voluntary slavery" is illiberal and thus subject to regulation (and from the tone of that Wikipedia quote, it sounds like many "except certain right-libertarians" do hold this view).
I honestly think you misread that wiki qoute. It is not saying that voluntary slavery is illiberal, but rather just not a thing. The words contradict and thus make not sense. The further right libertarians are arguing for involuntary slavery. Generally of the form of "I and my family will work for you for 5 generations if you give us Y". The 3rd generation did not volunteer for that. That is what libertarians debate on whether or not it is slavery (with most being against it for obvious reasons).
In otherwords, libertarians argue that slavery isn't slavery when the person signs a contracts willingly. In that case it's just signing a contract. [3]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indentured_servitude
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town
[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/Libertarian/comments/34vqo6/change_...
No, I really don't. I was looking at the quote in its totality, not carving out little bits that purport to support my claims.
> In otherwords, they don't believe there is such a thing as "voluntary slavery". That is, if you volunteer for it, it's not slavery. That's a cute word game they are playing just so they don't have to accept the fact that they condone slavery.
No, progressives were the ones who extended slavery to refer to people who needed to take low paying jobs to subsist (which was the default state for most people for all of human history). Outside of progressive contexts, slavery has never meant anything other than forced servitude. These libertarians are using "slavery" correctly (that doesn't imply that indentured servitude is a desirable state of affairs).
> A Libertarian supports the idea a person could sign a contract where they get no pay AND they have to follow all the rules of their employer. IE, Indentured Servitude [1]
They believe that minimum wages lead to more people losing their income altogether and thus starving to death, and that this is a worse state of affairs than taking a low paying job.
> that's the more direct form of slavery.
Indentured servitude isn't slavery, per your own link. You are now the one playing word games. Anyway, it looks like you're going to manipulate semantics, which is the dullest way to debate, so I'm ducking out.
Isn't a straw man argument like
1 -"We should ban porno in libraries"
2- "What if they ban history books next"
What you are talking about is a slippery slope argument.
Re "HN appears to lean pretty heavily":
HN users have a variety of ideological points of view, just like any large-enough, distributed-enough population sample does. Most perceptions about this are in the eye of the beholder, i.e. strongly affected by cognitive bias - lots of past explanation at these links if anyone cares:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26148870
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32069498.
> Uber’s real impact has been to make life worse for virtually everyone it touches.
Are we just going to ignore the millions of satisfied riders and drivers?
TBH, I don't feel this article belongs on HN, it's pure politics and basically a repost of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32045906
What's next, a global war on drugs, terror or poverty?
Heck even most Burger King stores have kiosks that are replacing people.
Are the kiosks to replace people or due to the lack of people?
IMO the lack of people is due to salary. If they were paying 400 dollars an hour, I'd sign up.
These things are a godsend, for multiple reasons:
- no wasting time trying to establish a common language with the cashiers, particularly when you're not in your home country
- no nearly exploding in line behind a ten people group haggling with the cashier over how many cheeseburgers they want
- if you are in a large group, the inverse of the above: no need to fear pissing off everyone behind you
- you actually see your entire order prior to payment and can make sure the cashier didn't fail to register an item
But when fully driverless cars eventually do hit the road then it will indeed be the end of the taxi driver (and of most drivers for that matter).
Despite any convenience offered you fundamentally had a phone in your hand and the ability to ring a taxi if you planned ahead. This is entirely being lazy and self centred.
Sure I feel for drivers, they had a hard time. Definitely they got the raw end of the deal.
Ridesharing companies are doing the same. They promised less cars but now there are more. People getting into crazy debt to just drive around the streets looking for clients, creating more traffic and more pollution.
The amazing thing is the brazen twists of logic that laws protecting taxi monopolies that price gouge consumers are somehow ethical, and that Uber is somehow unethical in challenging those laws.
Existing taxi drivers don't have a 'right' to not compete.
> ‘Violence guarantee[s] success,’ said CEO Travis Kalanick after some executives expressed reservations about a plan to send drivers to a 2016 protest in Paris where they could be attacked.
That's a blatant attempt to spin Travis' words as wishing Uber drivers got hurt. Knowing the Guardian (who previously had to apologise for incorrectly saying Mark Duggan, a drug dealer shot by police, was unarmed when Duggan had a gun in his vehicle) I want to see the actual text messages.