A lot of people turn to jobs like Uber because they can't easily find a job. There are many people who desperately try for weeks or months to find employment. Companies like Uber love to prey on such people.
Uber pays people who otherwise might not have a job at all. That doesn't mean paying them incredibly low wages is something that should be free of criticism.
If Uber were kidnapping people and forcing them to become drivers at gunpoint, you might have a point.
Slave by its very definition implies lack of choice by the other person.
> Uber pays people who otherwise might not have a job at all. That doesn't mean paying them incredibly low wages is something that should be free of criticism.
Yes, actually, it does mean that. That's the nature of choice.
If someone is offering you something you otherwise would not have, you don't get the right to complain that they are not giving you more.
There are a lot of moving pieces. The abolishment of slavery didn't end slavery and it's conditions. It changed the name and the rules. Many slaves became trapped in indentured servitude without enough pay to cover the cost of housing. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indentured_servitude Eventually this became illegal as well, another tactic was paying employees through company credits to buy goods at the company store. Eventually this too became illegal. During all of this Jim Crow laws were made to prevent further integration, schooling, and the advancement to higher paying jobs. The origin of the phrase grandfather clause came about as a way to prevent voting for representatives who could represent them. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grandfather_clause
This hasn't ended either, we now deal with gerrymandering.
I don't believe the ability choose a log of last resort means that job can be free of criticism. Yes it provides a vital service: given that service is insufficient to meet basic needs, improvements are needed. That may mean better services to provide jobs or providing a minimum pay with which basic needs can be guaranteed.
Sure, and why is it Uber's responsibility to make those improvements?
What is even the purpose of a company? Make unicorn valuation through low wages, write a couple blog posts, then dip?
Yeah, that sums it up. Companies have a responsibility to keep the agreements they make, and to not harm anyone. They don't have a positive responsibility to improve people's lives -- they're not charities.
> What is even the purpose of a company?
To make some people better off than they were before, by way of voluntary exchange, without hurting anyone.
If they're not doing that, if they're actually making people worse off than they would be otherwise, then that should of course be stopped.
A raise is a negotiation. You ask for a raise, they say yes or no. If they say no, you go find another job that pays what you want, and you take that one instead. Which is why, when you have that option, they may say yes to begin with.
> That may mean better services to provide jobs or providing a minimum pay with which basic needs can be guaranteed.
Expecting this to be provided by the employer of last resort is ridiculously inefficient.
The underlying problem is that the cost of living is more than the value of the labor of some people. The two main solutions that are to reduce the cost of living (e.g. housing costs), or to give up and subsidize their compensation somehow as a humanitarian gesture. The first is vastly preferable, but even when you resign yourself to the second, you want something like a UBI rather than price controls because it spreads the burden more evenly across everyone rather than imposing it only on the companies who employ the people at the bottom.
Price controls, by contrast, create a bunch of weird cliffs and perverse incentives. They cause reductions in hours or unemployment, and they're arbitrary lines. So if you raise the minimum to $10 then you do nothing for someone who is currently making $10, even though they're struggling too and it would be preferable for them to have some assistance as well. e.g. because they receive the same UBI but since they make more money than the person making $6 they also pay proportionally more taxes and give a small amount of it back. The person making $25/hour ends up paying even more taxes, and so on, until the taxes exceed the UBI.
Whereas if you raise the minimum to $25 to try to also help the person at $10 then you cause a lot more unemployment.
You’re hearing from Some drivers that think they deserve to be paid 6 figures because they drive people around. It’s by definition a low-skill job. If they want more money they need to make themselves more valuable and find better jobs.
I use the jobspotter app to make extra money on the side so I know first hand how many “hiring” signs are shown in various areas in the Bay Area. You can find a job if you want. Almost every place is hiring. To say that Uber is your only choice is bullshit.
If you can’t find a better job in this economy and market then it’s you, not the market. And if you don’t like what you’re being paid then find a new job. It’s really as simple as that.
However, that is not the point being made by the people quoted in this article, who are instead framing it in much more general terms that I might sum up as "any company not paying their employees a 'living wage' is unethical".
And a housing bubble can still happen in a deflationary economy. Money can still move from the workers to the rich. The effective price goes up even if the dollar amount doesn't.
Life is full of disappointment.
This is impossible to say, since we cannot run a simulation in which Uber/Lyft never existed, just like we can't measure the crimes that weren't committed because of laws.
We can only examine the world as it is, including the economic conditions that precipitate a person taking a ride share job, the long-term financial implications of slowing selling time and vehicle condition, combined with the diminishing returns offered by the company to make some inferences about whether this whole thing is 'good for people' or 'not.' And, I gotta say, the situation is looking more like the latter than the former.
Uber didn't necessarily create the conditions, but it does knowingly exploit them. That kind exploitation is not value neutral and can be wrong.
It's more of a government responsibility to take care its citizen well being.
Maybe there are lots of jobs there, but do these jobs give the flexibility of working whenever one wants, like Uber does? In life, nothing is as simple as that. Applying the same logic, we can say if a woman is mistreated by her husband/bf, she can simply leave him. If a manager is bad, find another job. If a country is hostile to immigrants, leave and move back home or to another country. And so on. The reality is somewhere in between "just pack up and go" and "stuck indefinitely".
Uber/Lyft/Instacart etc are in fact exploiting their drivers simply because they can. The drivers aren't unionized, they aren't getting much help from government regulations (it isn't illegal yet, just immoral and unethical), so they are at the mercy of these gig economy companies.
Here is an exercise. Can you name one gig economy company that is treating its workforce well? I am trying, and failing.
If lyft/Uber/instacart are forced to make them employees instead of contractors then the first thing they will lose is the flexibility. They will likely not be allowed to work for other companies and have to drive X number of hours, etc. The drivers can’t have their cake and eat it too.
Again, life isn't as simple as that. Maybe it is easy for highly skilled software engineers to pick jobs of their choosing, but for majority of the workforce, it isn't as simple as "leave it". Which is what I am trying to explain.
I am simply pointing out that the whole situation is one sided, with these companies having all the power, and Uber (Lyft, Instacart etc) are simply taking advantage of it and exploiting their workforce. Sure, from a pure ruthless business view, it makes sense to pay as little as possible and extract as much as possible. A lot of companies do it and legally, they are not in the wrong. Ethically and morally, they are. And yes, they do prey upon the weakest among us and they do exploit them, you can sugar coat it any which way, but the fact remains.
But they have hundreds of thousands of drivers. If you’re somehow saying that only the weakest of the weak are driving for Uber, with no other options, you are delusional and just feeding your own narrative.
There is a significant barrier to start driving for Uber. You need a relatively new car with insurance and registration, drivers license, etc. You can’t have that if you’re so weak with no options as you suggest.
The Value of Flexible Work: Evidence from Uber Drivers
https://www.nber.org/papers/w23296?sy=296
There are jobs that pay more with less flexibility. These individuals are free to pursue those jobs. Personally, I would easily trade a third of my salary in exchange for the flexibility of 4 months of vacation each year if my employer offered it. I'm sure I'm not alone in wanting to trade salary for flexibility because flexibility has greater marginal utility to me.
Offering someone a job is preying? Either they want it or they don't. Either it makes them money or they don't.
You're talking like they are better off if Uber didn't offer them the job.
Your rationale could be extended outward to every adverse outcome for poor: "Well, poor people have higher rates of obesity and cancer because of their poor life choices in eating fast food and smoking."
It's a convenient out for the exploiters to blame their victims.
Sorry-not-sorry, for assuming people are not idiots. Either they have money to pay bills or they don't. It's not that complicated, and people are not idiots.
> "Well, poor people have higher rates of obesity and cancer because of their poor life choices in eating fast food and smoking."
And your plan is to what? Micro-manage people's life and tell them what they can, and can't do?
> It's a convenient out for the exploiters to blame their victims.
It's only exploiting if you trick them, mislead them, lie to them, or force them.
Fine print no one reads? Sure, complain about it. Hidden fees and the like? Outlaw those.
But a straightforward transaction? What are you complaining for?
The only thing these people are complaining about is that they want the freedom to drive for Lyft but they want to get paid more. That’s all it is. There’s no exploitation.
But if the wages are too low, find a better job. It’s really that simple.
Being uninformed (because a system is complex) and/or acting irrationally (because of financing stress) are not aptly described as "idiocy," which is a value judgement about individuals, not a description of those individuals information.
>Either they have money to pay bills or they don't. It's not that complicated.
The long term financial heath of individuals and families is complicated. Complicated by information asymmetry, financial uncertainly, and unscrupulous lenders who sell short-term solutions (like lending you money to buy a car that you have to drive to earn enough money to pay for the car -- and then dropping the rate at which you can earn to pay off the car). Usury laws exist, for example, not because people are "stupid," but because well-heeled companies can and do financially exploit people in bad positions.
Basically, driving for Uber is a bad idea and almost always not worth it financially for the drivers. And yet people do it. Not because they are idiots, but because start-ups have been able to skirt hard-won labor protections and safety laws to exploit a group of ad-hoc workers, whose time would be better spent collecting welfare checks and gaining marketable skills to land a full time position.