I thought Uber's line was that the drivers were independent contractors. By their own logic Uber only employs the engineers and support staff that actually work at Uber not the 4 million drivers.
Edit:
> They operate across all regions. All of that adds complexity.
I thought the idea was that by operating in multiple regions Uber could leverage economies of scale and deliver ride-hailing services cheaper than traditional taxi companies. Is this hypothesis completely incorrect then?
So your theory is probably correct, economies of scale don't exist. This is the same reason why a delivery company in Texas isn't also doing bike courier deliveries in Hanoi. On the surface it is very similar but they really have nothing to do with one another.
Pretty much yes. A local taxi services usually pays for their drivers and a few dispatchers. In my city they'd even introduced basic mobile apps around the same time Uber popped up. There's not really many places for money to go to waste.
Uber removes the dispatcher and then introduces software engineers, translators, product managers, SREs, executives, scrum masters, marketing, sales, etc.
From a customer perspective Uber is often worse as well. Pre-booking simply doesn't work. A traditional taxi company will make sure they have someone available at the right time for the booking. Uber just hopes someone will be available 30 minutes beforehand. Uber also doesn't seem to make it obvious to the driver that it's a pre-booking as they often show up 15 minutes early and angry that I'm not ready for them.
Correct. Which is exactly why they go to great lengths to reduce the power of the labour without which the company is a black hole of wasted capital.
so you should only count those drivers in jurdistiction where they've been clearly defined as Uber's employees