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Comment by ryan_f | Hacker News Reader

It's not as simple as you state. Uber gets a lot of the business so the drivers won't have work without them. That 4.7 is out of 5 also and it is true about the terminations. I have witnessed the mass firings and how they are handled.

Drivers also can't dispute their ratings so it takes one person to give them a one star which could lead to being fired. And can you truly say all customers are fair in their ratings?

The best thing that could happen for these drivers is having another company open up to compete against uber. Then they wouldn't be a commodity.

If they were not "taxi drivers" than everyone would be furious at how they are treated.

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I've never used Uber but that is absolutely insane!! How is that not a management nightmare!? I'm floored that this is seen as good management of their driver fleet.

How could anyone introduce such a rating/firing system? Is that the way you would want to be treated as an employee or contractor?

What exactly were these drivers doing before Uber showed up?

Working of course which I am guessing you realized?

I am not debating that Uber is a huge help for getting business. I just feel that their employee conditions are not what many others expect in their daily jobs. I don't feel that is wrong.

Working for car services - many of whom Uber has soundly defeated in the relevant cities and no longer exist.

The "if you don't like it, tough!" angle sounds nice, but is untenable in cities where Uber has absorbed the lion's share of the towncar market.

Just because Uber is "one of us" doesn't mean they're scrupulous. I'd be very wary of trading disparate, crappy towncar companies for a single monolithic one with startupy roots.

Uber should have audio and video captured. And review the audio/video whenever a rating is poor.

That solves one problem but creates ten more.

Exactly, just what I want, another SOB potentially watching and listening to me, and or recording me/posting me to youtube.

Have you ridden in any cab recently? Every single one of them is equipped with video and audio recording. As is BART and Muni buses.

it seems kind of ridiculous to presume that one rogue one star rating would get a driver fired. i would assume that there is more to firing drivers than simply the rating system – someone must talk to the passenger to figure out what is up.

That's one of the reasons they are complaining because it is ridiculous there isn't anything set up. Now it might not just be one rogue star rating but maybe a collection of others. But there is no room for error when you can get fired by having a 4.6 and not 4.7 star rating.

I don't know if Uber still does this, but at one point in the past they would drop you an email if you rated a driver 3 or lower to ask what happened.

"drop" you an email? what does that mean? do you mean "send"?

Why would you post this? Of course that is what they mean

I'm calling him out for his douchebag double-speak hipster talk. Is he too cool to say "send"? Vacuous style over substance.

My English dictionary (Collins) has: to drop (vb-16 transitive) "to send or post".

I think the douchebag labeling might've backfired? People have been dropping one another emails for years and years. Maybe it's less common where you're from.

you're amusingly vitriolic about this

No, he means they print out the email in and drop it on your head.

you need 12 5 star rides to make up for 1 one star and get above 4.7. If your average is say 4.8 (you get 4 or 3 stars every now and then because people assume it's "average"), when you get a 1 star review, you need 37 "normal" rides to make up for it and come back to 4.7. This is pretty insane IMO

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