‘Stop or I’ll fire you’: the driver who defied Uber’s automated HR
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
I agree with this as long as there is a healthy free market, and 2 or 3 companies to choose from isn't a healthy free market. Either we need to bust these companies up, or regulate them better. In D&D terms, a single company shouldn't be able to give you a permanent stat penalty just because you did something like use the word "young". Many of these companies are so big that if one of the big 2 or 3 ban you, your entire life will be affected. Another example is LinkedIn, if I get banned from LinkedIn I guess I'll just take the -50% to all future job opportunities. Once these companies get big enough they owe society better than automated support processes and surprise lifetime bans once an algorithm determines you might not be profitable enough to bother with.
There is also an argument that lift should be paying the government 10 cents a mile to use the states roads.
Do you realized the cost will simply be passed on to the consumer in the end either way leading to higher inflation?
I would love to see some data to support your claim.
My take is that cars/pickups/suvs are overpaying by a lot and commercial trucks are underpaying by a lot.
My biggest concern is that taxes, like inflation, only ever seem to go up, never down.
In this case I would be in favor of correcting this inequality if we reduce gas taxes for standard vehicles while increasing taxes on commercial trucks, but given their track record I suspect governments will never reduce taxes, only increase them.
[0] https://truecostblog.com/2009/06/02/the-hidden-trucking-indu...
They are a necessity if you live in a small town, the suburbs, a rural area, an area with extreme weather, have a family with young children, etc.
* In the US, 93% of households have access to a personal vehicle [0].
* 77.3% of respondents think owning a car is necessary [0]
If we increase taxes on personal vehicles it would disproportionately impact lower income workers who can barely afford to get by as it is. Forcing a single mom on a low income such that she could no longer afford to drive would tax her 10’s of hours every week resulting in untold hardship. It would be a disaster.
What you are advocating would only work if we invested trillions of dollars in transit infrastructure.
Taxation or more debt isn’t enough to pay for that transformation without absolutely destroying the economy and the quality of life of hundreds of millions of Americans.
Personal vehicles are only a luxury if you live in a fantasy.
[0] https://www.thezebra.com/resources/research/car-ownership-st...
I could see an argument both ways but taxing electric vehicles would tend to negate the incentive to switch from polluting cars.
Would you rather those Uber drivers pollute our air or would it make sense to encourage switching to zero emission vehicles?
Air pollution is a different issue and electric cars have rebates to encourage purchases.
Everything we consume is shipped and if the price of everything goes up the standard of living of everyone goes down. This would be a regressive tax that would disproportionately impact those who can least afford it.
This would be incredibly inflationary and hurt the poorest the most. Bad idea.
Frankly, the antitrust regulators and legislators have been asleep at the wheel for decades and have allowed an unimaginable level of consolidation in multiple sectors of the market. We should never have gotten to this point, but now that we’re here I feel like we need to follow the Big Bell example.
Make it clear what you won't accept, have a whole web page with every single thing that you have decided on as corporate taboo.
What about if some VC decides to use 200 million USD to undercut your prices? Would you consider that a healthy free market?
It's pretty funny how lots of people that are more or less rabidly anti-regulation never manage to consider limited liability to be regulation.
Is anyone else confused how this is discriminatory? And what kind of guideline does it violate?
In US every description is a discrimination. Fat, slim, black, white ( they say caucasian in movies without knowing what skin color the people living in that region have), master, slave, red, yellow.
And i bet Lyft will never hire a Dick (Chenney) or a Peacock .
That's some great customer service right there.
> played back the audio of her conversation
Am I reading this right? She gave a verbal statement to a rep, ostensibly to support their internal processes. They turned around and hypercriticized her exact wording, looking for reasons to punish her? If you squint hard enough, you can almost understand why companies want to avoid any possibly-misconstruable language in public posts, regardless of how unreasonable the possible PR blowup would be. But this is the next level.
Running a business as a top-down dictatorial entity with zero accountability says something bad about the founders and owners. The standard excuse is that 'if we give out too much information, people will game the system'. But by evading accountability and often regulation, it's these companies who are gaming the marketplace/regulatory system in which they operate, while offering themselves as victims of unscrupulous individuals whenever one of their counterparties exhibits even a slight degree of autonomy. This kind of control freakery is recapitulating the worst aspects of 20th century Taylorism.
I was very much in favor of Uber as a disruptive entity when they first appeared, given the numerous flaws in the in then-dominant taxicab model. But (along with many other companies that adhere to the same platform mentality) have mutated into something significantly worse.
You're probably not gonna believe it, but it's because they don't know much, especially the context in which they're making decisions.
How could they really? The reality of any company is not its ideas, but its implementation details. For tech companies that's really difficult.
You know how everyone with a room temperature IQ keeps insisting that AI is gonna take away programming jobs? Imagine that it already happened except that instead of losing your job you have been left to manage the robots... that's the position they're in, but the robots are instead extremely stubborn 20-something contrarians who want to rewrite everything in Rust.
That, and liability. The fewer reasons they give the harder it is to be held liable for getting it wrong.
It does need to be easier to give feedback without opening yourself up for a frivolous lawsuit.
Many employees are at-will, and that means that they can quit any time, for any reason, and their employer can terminate them at any time, for any reason. That means the company is not required to give context or information about their reasons; they don't need a reason and they don't need to tell anyone, so they won't.
The approach you describe is like a major league baseball player crushing little league kids. Sure, the major league player is winning through superior ability, but it's also a shitty way to behave.
Problem is that in reality, the decision is made by some heuristics that can be flawed due to software issues and/or eventual consistency (and the developer who brought up these issues got told "don't worry, it'll only affect 0.1% of users"), and the "escalation path" is an outsourced idiot that presses random buttons while moonlighting as a tech support scammer.
Because they're extraordinarily self-centered and irresponsible. Issuing decisions without context is cheaper (e.g. the can use an insane algorithm without human backup), makes them harder to challenge, and insulates them from legal liability (because it's hard to know if they were improper).
IIRC, Google's about to get slapped by the courts because even its top executives were willfully avoiding legal record-keeping requirements around their decisionmaking.
They don’t think they have the right, they do have the right, at least in the US.
That's a very bad way of saying they aren't sorry they got caught doing unethical automated decisions that would've left the driver with no recourse, had he not belonged to a Union.
Don't care if it's on behalf of a company, have some shame.
When it comes to matters of litigation such as these - you can be very sure that the message comes straight from the top.
It's this tolerance of misdirection that enables unethical practices in companies.
“These rulings only relate to a few specific drivers from the UK that were deactivated in the period between 2018 and 2020 in relation to very specific circumstances.”
That’s corporate speak for: we’re assholes who use automated processes to rule about some of our human drivers in a way that may be unfair and leaves them with no recourse. It’s ok though, because it only ruins a few people’s livelihoods.
I’m glad this guy stuck it to them in the courts, I hope he got a good settlement. The article didn’t say.
This is the kind of stuff punitive damages are for.
So bad that even "meat bags" would be sympathetic, so gotta replace them with algorithms
my government at least lets me speak to a "meat bag" who has helped me through the bureaucracy, Uber's goal is to eliminate all help, including even that
1. They'll ask to cancel the ride if it's an online payment and then say pay me in cash and I'll take you. That ride is effectively void from Uber's end and the only recourse I have is to either rebook which takes very long (reason[0]), or take the ride, risking my safety.
2. They'll just reroute without asking, and not notify you. Wait too long at turns, red lights, just to increase the trip time. I've had 30min trips take 1hr and upwards. Which have increased my fare when I had to pay.
[0]: There's a common pattern when you book an Uber, they'll call you and ask you where you want to go, if it doesn't fall within their day plan they'll outright tell you to cancel and then not pick up the call. Cancelling from my end often results in a penalty since the ride has been booked, and that causes a lot of issues and a waste of time. This is very common when you want cabs to the airport since they're located well out of city limits and a lot of drivers just don't want to make the trip.
Edit: Thinking about this a bit more, God help any tourists who travel here, since Uber is their safest bet. Local *-rickshaws/taxis can charge you anywhere from 5-20x if they see you're not a local let alone a foreigner.
One would think that some interface where the drivers set the limits where they want to go would benefit all parties here. But yeah, Uber is in very intense disagreement since they launched.
Anyway, your #2 is outright fraud. The same kind that taxis were famous worldwide for practicing, and that pushed people into applications like Uber.
I only started doing that after I was scammed twice though :p
https://help.lyft.com/hc/e/all/articles/115013081128-How-to-...
https://www.uber.com/us/en/drive/basics/driver-destinations/...
algorithmic wage optimization doesn't find the lowest price of service, it externalizes the largest acceptable bribe.
So…don’t cancel? If the driver bails on a ride, that should hurt their score, not yours. If you need to book a replacement ride immediately, just use another app.
It’s happened to me a handful of times in the US, I just waited for 10-15 minutes until the heuristics decided the driver wasn’t coming and assigned another one.
Regardless, sounds miserable to deal with regularly. Sorry about that.
Uber is the best bet and usually people don't have the extra 10-15 minutes to spare, since you're already waiting outside and probably have a time-sensitive task to attend to (that's the norm here btw, if you have something urgent you take a cab otherwise public transport since that's more likely to be delayed).
That sounds really odd. What happens if there's unexpected traffic on the way to your time sensitive destination?
You can never really plan for it well.
I understand it's a bit more difficult if the matched driver gets into an interminable argument beforehand.
Do Visa and Mastercard have a much higher bar for chargebacks where you live?
Also, issuing a chargeback would probably get you banned from the whole platform.
The credit/debit card distinction is mostly a legal one (in certain countries, credit cards have extra protection regardless of the outcome of a card network dispute), but as far as I know the actual card network rules apply to all types of cards.
The problem is that as long as the competition is just as bad, it's cheaper for them to let this behavior continue and annoy all riders than actually clamp down on it and risk pissing off drivers for good.
So I think they have to deal with A LOT of fraudulent riders.
- does the driver ever have a chance to interact with the person making this judgement? Do they have an opportunity to provide information which Uber was not in a position to automatically collect (e.g. a road was blocked due to construction or an accident)?
- what is the goal of the human reviewer and what incentives are put on them? Are they required to 'judge' a number of cases per hour, which places a limit on how much context they can actually consider? Are they responsible with arriving at a "fair" decision, or merely one which minimizes costs to the company?
- what outputs from the human reviewer inform future automated decisions? Are they merely adjudicating individual cases, or will their decisions help train the algorithms that automatically flag drivers going forward?
Merely having a human in the loop is insufficient. It's easy to create a system in which humans effectively rubber-stamp and amplify issues in the automated systems.
> Just before the case came to court, Uber apologised and acknowledged it had made a mistake.
So Uber tried to stop the court from making a ruling which would bind it by apologizing to the driver. Then when the court still goes on to make a ruling, Uber complains, and seeks to limit application of the ruling:
> An Uber spokesperson said: “We are disappointed that the court did not recognise the robust processes we have in place, including meaningful human review, when making a decision to deactivate a driver’s account due to suspected fraud.
> “These rulings only relate to a few specific drivers from the UK that were deactivated in the period between 2018 and 2020 in relation to very specific circumstances.”
This is why settlements are not always the societally best outcome of lawsuits.
And I don't get how Uber is trying to limit it to UK drivers when the court decision also applied to Portugal drivers.
Yet again we see that unions are important, as the only reason anything stopped uber in this case was their union. Every argument companies make against unions is false, the only reason they don't want unions is because it means they can't defraud and abuse employees (I mean "contractors").