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Comment by crooked-v | Hacker News Reader

If they can't pay even minimum wage, it was already uneconomical and being subsidized by government welfare.

They offer a service and you can choose to drive for them. This in a lot of cases helps people make extra money or hold them over. But you think it’s better to let the government remove this option?

I just can’t get onboard with this thinking. I understand it for W2 jobs but for freelance and pick your own hours it does not make sense.

Exploiting underpaid workers is not a service. Even if they are in tough situation with few better options.

Cool talking point.

This would make more sense if people didn't need to work to continue living. As it stands, if people get into a dire enough situation they will be forced to take work on whatever terms the company wants to offer. The reason these laws exist is to protect workers from being forced into terrible situations for a company's benefit.

Of course, the service is voluntary, but for many people the options are "work for pennies or live on the street" -- that's hardly an unforced choice. Why should the state subsidize Uber's profits, given that the state will be the one to support people who end up in poverty?

So maybe stop subsidizing wages with government welfare, and labor will automatically gravitate away and uber/lyft won't find enough drivers and be forced to hike wages to find drivers.

Tax labor correctly then, so that it reflects how much the government wellfare will need to subsidize.

Simplistic feel-good minimum wage laws are creating unemployment. This is a perfect example.

Uber and Lyft can easily afford to pay their workers the minimum wage, it would however hurt their record profits and set a precedence that they would need to pay a living wage across all cities. Amazingly all other businesses in this city are already able to afford the minimum wage. This is a perfect example of a company tossing some of the lowest income members of society literally to the street rather than pay them a living wage. Thank god we have minimum wage laws.

Can you help me out with the money here? I was curious, so I went and looked.

https://investor.uber.com/news-events/news/press-release-det...

It looks like they made approximately 1.4 billion, with a gross bookings of around 37.5 billion. That would _seem_ to mean that drivers would get an increase of approximately 3% of the full booking price if Uber was a nonprofit?

Best I could find is that there are about 5.4 million drivers worldwide. So if Uber's profit was distributed evenly, each would get about $264/quarter? Without knowing hours driven, I'm not sure what all that boils down to. I suspect it doesn't factor in idle time, without rides.

Can you talk a little bit about how you came up with "easily afford to pay their workers minimum wage"?

A lot of people assume that just because a company has a lot of money that they can freely give away that money to their employees. We've seen this before, Starbucks for example, billion dollar company they have plenty of money to give their employees. No one really takes into account all of the expenses, and what that actually would look like.

How is that true? Plenty of people work minimum wage jobs that aren't subsidized by government welfare.

If someone has a roommate or a partner or a parent or a child that supports them?

There are some jobs that are only economically viable at a certain wage, and anything beyond that makes it not economically viable. So those jobs won't exist.

Exactly, if you can't afford to pay a living wage you have a bad business model, which is exactly what the comment you responded to was pointing out.

Incorrect. McDonalds might calculate that for every hour someone sweeps in front of their store, they make $7 in profit. If someone is willing to do that for $6 an hour, they will pay. If minimum wage is $8 an hour, they will leave the dirt and leaves there.

That has nothing to do with having an economically viable business model.

Please do not engage on HN if you are unable to understand basic economics. This is not a place to argue something this trivial.

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