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How Uber Profits Even When Its Drivers Aren't Earning Money (vice.com)
tedlistens writes: Jay Cassano spoke to Uber drivers about "dead miles" and what work means when your boss is an algorithm, and considers a new frontier of labor concerns and big data. "Uber is the closest thing to an employer we've ever seen in this industry," Bhairavi Desai, founder of the New York Taxi Workers Alliance, told him. "They not only direct every aspect of a driver's workday, they also profit off the entire day through data collection, not just the 'sale of a product.'"
Let's see. An organization with a vested interest in perpetuating the Taxi industry's grip and pricing doesn't like something about Uber and it's ilk. I think there's a picture of Captain Picard captioned "I've just shat myself with surprise!".
Fuck cabbies. Fuck cab owners. Let 'em all starve like buggy whip manufacturers. Price gouging, monopoly having, tourist and local abusing, talking to their overseas family on the phone motherfuckers.
I don't give a single shit about your labor concerns. You screwed yourself out of that with your attitude, your work ethic, and your lies. Fuck off and die already.
"Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I'm fucked."; ~ Donald J. Trump
They're collecting all this "dead time" behavior (as well as the rest) to help them figure out how to best have the driverless uber cars 10 years down the road. If you drive for uber, you're working to put yourself out of a "job."
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Currently, apps work for their makers.
How about an app that works for the user? That uses semantic web technologies (are we there yet?) to book taxis in a peer-to-peer fashion? That preferences cabbies that *I've* previously rated high (or my connections have), and negotiates and communicates the fare clearly as a number (not hiding away the impact of surge pricing).
On the cabbies side, his user-agent-app works the same way as mine, communicates availability and pricing, sends me recommended peers if not, etc.
..but they're exactly a product of our current political and economic environment.
Uber drivers will get paid for that which they have the economic power to extract payment for and not anything else.
Is that unfair? Yes. Everything TFA suggests about how Uber is screwing drivers is true. It's also irrelevant. Uber is scum. The idea that they aren't employing people is among the most evil types of legal fictions aimed at perpetuating and protecting a corrupt and exploitive economic relationship under color of law.
The solution isn't to make Uber marginally less evil toward its employees.
The solution is to pull up a terminal and type sudo ECONOMY=$ECONOMY/socialism
Depending on your distro you may need to use $ECONOMY/democratic_socialsm. Make sure you don't under any circumstances add "comunism" to your ECONOMY vars. If you do that you'll have to rm -rf on your whole society.
Also I love TFA was all about how companies exploit freelancers in the gig economy. Check the byline. Sure enough, it's by a freelance journalist. It's not like VICE media is a small struggling company anymore. They're worth more than several mainstream media companies I've worked for.
That's the icing on the shit cake they feed their drivers. They bypass traditional worker protections that require people to be paid for work done. They wouldn't exist otherwise, just like all the other companies that tried this and didn't managed to fend off the courts (that maid for hire service comes to mind).
Oh, and better hope you don't get hit by an Uber driver during that 'downtime'. The $1 mil insurance they like to tout doesn't cover you if there's no passenger in the car. Even if they're on the way to a fare. Come to think of it you better hope you don't get hit by one period. $1 mil wouldn't cover med bills from a debilitating accident either and I know drivers doing the "gig" economy and they're all running on non-commercial insurance. I wonder if there's an uptick in hit n run where Uber shows up?...
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Hey, falafel is delicious. Don't disparage good food just because some crazy people also like it.
Uber makes money because their drivers are often not earning any.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
That's an outright lie. Uber collects the fares and pays the driver, after collecting its cut.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
They Steal IT.
Next year, they PRINT IT !
Ha ha
If Uber can skirt the law, why can I drive as a private driver, and screw the middle man? After all, it is my time and my car. What I do need Uber for in an interconnected world?
That's how business wants it. Tell us we're "self employed" but control our hours and other things about work without compensation for our risk.
If your customer controls that much of your work, then you are not self employed, you just have a different tax status that benefits the "employer".
The IRS needs to do what they did to Microsoft back in the day - that's why kids when you want to contract with a big company, you have to go through a body shop and give up 40% of your bill rate.
Unfortunately Uber makes the company money and the executives. But does little to improve incomes where it counts which is the drivers. After all these drivers are considered self employed and absorb all the variable costs that tend to make or break transportation. Uber to me is a slap in the face to the people who really represent this business model. Yes, I agree Taxi's in general are not very good, but frankly I think people are dreaming if you think a taxi cab should be a good experience. Much of this is the result of costs major cities place on taxi companies. They require so many operating costs from buying medallions to other operating costs. Uber tries hard to get around some of this, but is meeting some serious resistance in many cities.
I'm as white as they come, and I think Uber is a massive con job.
Uber == Skynet or what?
Corporation makes a profit while employees struggle to make ends meet. What a shocker.
Google has been collecting this type of data for years from every type of driver. I'm pretty sure by now they have machine learning algorithms that can predict if a particular driver is a Taxi, delivery van, private person, etc ... Probably they can even predict if a Taxi driver is an actual Taxi driver or an Uber driver (since Taxis probably spot themselves at particular Taxi hubs whereas Uber drivers will have other behavior).
Despite recent, nonsense, court decisions Uber drivers are in fact employees. If they were independent contractors there can be no acts of supervision. The IRS has defined independent contractors for decades and Uber drivers meet every inch of what an employee is compared to actually being an iDC.
Time and again we see the claim that Uber is a taxi company, despite the obvious differences between Uber and traditional taxi companies. What you are saying is that the differences between taxis and Uber are inconsequential and irrelevant, hence "Uber drivers are taxi drivers". You are entitled to your opinion about the differences between Uber and taxis, but that doesn't mean that everyone has to agree with you. I find the differences between Uber and taxis to be both relevant and consequential, so I believe that Uber drivers are NOT taxi drivers. As for Uber being a monopoly, I fear that you have not really looked closely enough into the market that Uber serves. There is significant competition to Uber, and if Uber falters in its remarkable record of satisfying its customers, its competitors will swoop in to claim its market share.
Uber won't come to Ahwatukee, a neighborhood in Phoenix, because we're basically a big cul-de-sac.
Uber will charge demand pricing for New Year's Eve type nights, making a 20 dollar cab ride into a 400 dollar ripoff.
Uber lowers wages, and so lowers tax revenue, while using tax payer funded resources.
The profits, when they turn a profit, will be taken from local economies and sent to shareholders and hedge fund managers.
But don't worry about the big picture, just enjoy having your movements tracked and sold to data consolidators, so someday you can be charged even more money, which will also be sent to Wall Street.
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