If you're interested, next time you take a car, ask the driver what their end is - you may be surprised how little of the fare they actually take home. That share will only decrease unless they all get on one side of a table.
Banning payday loans tends to shift borrowers to worse forms of credit.
One imagines worsening the economics of ride share jobs will do the same.
Some of these workers might find that the only gig that they can rely on is ride share for various reasons.
I wonder if Americans would have more positive opinions on this if unions were called platforms, and were for profit companies that you can trade the shares.
When they sign up enough people they can enough information and use financial instruments to force fair market value and eat into other companies margins and share that with their subscribers.
Why is there prostitution?
Why are slaves doing work for their masters?
Why are children going through our garbage in some distant country, if they hardly earn enough to eat?
So yeah, the comparisons are hyperboles, but I totally feel why they're upset and hope collective bargaining helps better their situation.
Similarly, there are Uber and Lyft drivers that don't have the economic freedom or level of education to work anywhere else.
I doubt this is true. There are much, much worse jobs. This is just their best option, and it's easier to band together and demand more and more even if it kills the host.
But consider this: if collectively all drivers would go on strike indefinitely (or at least, stop using platforms and instead hustled their rides old school). Would that mean the end for Uber and Lyft? Off course not. They'd take a few punches financially, but they'd be able to pivot, build something else. They have great engineers and money, and no one is forcing them to take such a huge cut.
Maybe drop that one from the list.
flexible, supplemental income.
Well it's the drivers themselves who voted to join the union, so presumably there's something they want to see changed. No need to speak for people who've already found their voice.
Not sure why you want to bring race into this, people from all backgrounds have the right to free association and deserve labor representation.
A union using their power to increase workers wages is not "reducing exploitation" they are using their bargaining power just as selfishly as corporations do.
When we talk about labor negotiations, that word should indicate theres no exploitation happening, its two parties negotiating and coming to an agreement.
So in a world where no labor negotiation is happening, is exploitation possible? If Uber drivers had no legal recourse to form a union (or no avenue to otherwise participate in genuine negotiation with their employer), would it be fair to say that they might be in an exploitative employment relationship?
> Everyone working for Uber is doing so voluntarily.
Personally I don't feel that this precludes exploitation taking place. Exploiting someone is taking advantage of their hard circumstances or lack of alternatives to unethically profit (in the usage that I'm familiar with). For example I would consider hiding fare pricing breakdowns from employees and consumers, so that you can leverage their lack of information to increase your profit share, to be 'exploitative'; particularly if you hold a virtual monopoly on the taxi market in an area. For an example outside the gig-work world I'd point to price-gouging as another type of 'voluntary' exploitation; consumers may be 'consenting' to pay extremely elevated prices, but if they have no meaningful alternative and genuinely require what is being sold then it's not really 'consent' so much as 'resignation'. IMO true consent requires genuine options, not just that you signed your name on the dotted line.
so again, unless you think all trade is exploitative, im not understanding your argument. Selling labor for money is the exact same transaction as walking into Walmart and buying a banana.
In the same comment you say that the government has to help guarantee that Walmart won't exploit you in this banana purchase transaction by outlawing price gouging and monopolization. If labor is the same type of transaction, it stands to reason that certain types of employment can be exploitative, despite the 'voluntary nature' of the transaction. Is your issue with the 'Uber exploits their contractors' framing simply based in the fact that Uber has not broken any labor laws?
Since you're having trouble following me I'll give a quick summary here. You initially said:
> if all these drivers are getting horribly exploited why are they doing it?
My point is simply that this is crap reasoning: people voluntarily participate in exploitative interactions all the time if they lack genuine alternatives.
How can you say this with straight face?
People need to eat, dude.
What makes it okay to exploit them?
Personal agents will search every app for the lowest fare, when in the past the apps had a moat due to the economic frictions involved in sampling more than one app. Uber is also ripe for vibe coding.
Won't be much consolation to drivers as they'll get automated soon after probably.
I don't think all software companies are in imminent danger but Uber does seem particularly vulnerable.
> If someone could run and popularize an open ride platform, that quarter billion would go somewhere else, maybe to the drivers, maybe to the riders.
So if you found an equally effective management team that worked for free, you would save the customer about 1% at checkout. That is a tiny benefit, even granting the massive assumption.
Those numbers suggest a competitive environment with small profits, not an abusive monoply exploiting it's position.
There was this story I was reading yesterday, here or reddit, where a driver got $27 for a $65 (or so) ride. That is a horrible markup. The driver is not happy, but if the driver can survive for $27, we (the people) should be able to figure out how to charge $40 for the ride. Not saying it will be easy with the entrenched interests and the for-profit goal of our country, but still ... the markup seemed obscene when I read it.
There's probably a big opportunity in the startup world for building businesses that have an end goal. Like a TV show that has a whole story to tell and then stops... a business that has an entire development plan which finishes and at the end you have a stable business that stops adding features, cuts development costs to maintenance, and just exists.
Like I don't need my taxi app to change, we're good, you can just be done making new stuff.
For the companies in my areas, their apps feel kinda clunky, but are generally fully-functional, and don’t contain ads like the Uber app.
Complete looney toons over here if you think this is at all acceptable. I bet the workers would figure out a better use of the budget than the executives at this rate too.
Yours is a pretty normal idea for nearly any business before 100 years ago, plus still the way all small businesses with 1 owner generally work (they call it a “Lifestyle business” today). But any public company that just said “Yeah we basically just print $400 million in profit every year, and have no plans to grow that, nor to change anything besides doing maintenance” gets the kind of treatment Southwest just did: taken over by the enshittification engineers and destroyed. Everything must have infinite growth!!
It doesn't seem to me that ride share drivers should be paid while idling or repositioning. Nor am I in favor of California forcing a minimum wage on ride share drivers. In general, I don't understand how this qualifies as "rent seeking".
I think a lot of people just don't like big tech companies. They're entitled to their opinions but I think they're wrong.
I've begun to realize we now live in a time where there are a lot of adults who are too young to remember the bad old days. Are you one of those people? Because the taxi companies absolutely made their bed. Be careful of rose-colored glasses.