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Uber Drivers Demand Higher Pay in Nationwide Protest (cnet.com)
Uber drivers will join forces with fast food, home care and airport workers in a nationwide protest on Tuesday. Their demand: higher pay. From a report on CNET: Calling it the "Day of Disruption," drivers for the ride-hailing company in two dozen cities, including Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco, will march at airports and in shopping areas carrying signs that read, "Your Uber Driver is Arriving Striking." The protest underscores the dilemma Uber faces as it balances the needs of its drivers with its business. Valued at $68 billion, Uber is the highest-valued venture-backed company worldwide. But as it has cut the cost of rides to compete with traditional taxi services, Uber reportedly has experienced trouble turning a profit. Unlike many other workers involved in Tuesday's protests, Uber drivers are not members of a union. In fact, Uber doesn't even classify its drivers as employees. Instead the company considers drivers independent contractors. This classification means the company isn't responsible for many costs, including health insurance, paid sick days, gas, car maintenance and much more. However, Uber still sets drivers' rates and the commission it pays itself, which ranges between 20 percent and 30 percent. "I'd like a fair day's pay for my hard work," Adam Shahim, a 40-year-old driver from Pittsburgh, California, said in a statement. "So I'm joining with the fast-food, airport, home care, child care and higher education workers who are leading the way and showing the country how to build an economy that works for everyone, not just the few at the top."
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There are choices, y'know! And Lyft gives a higher priority to drivers, so if you all just delete that Uber Partner app and sign up on Lyft, you'll be a lot better off
The drivers were much higher quality when they were a bit more expensive. Now I exclusively take Uber black or select
become a taxi driver. Uber is for ride-sharing. Not full-time taxi service.
Being contractors, they should just charge uber more for their services.
But not every job is supposed to be a career. Some jobs are made to be low-wage and filled by students and as supplemental income for others. If all you're doing is flipping burgers, you don't deserve the same wage as a skilled laborer.
These are Uber drivers in their off hours doing a march? So if a rider were to hail a Uber during this time they would not be impacted. I'm not seeing the disruption.
However, Uber still sets drivers' rates and the commission it pays itself, which ranges between 20 percent and 30 percent.
Contractors can set their own rates.
So... this means all-day surge pricing for the Uber drivers who don't strike?
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
So Adam Shahim is going to start his on ride-sharing business? Because surely then he can pay everyone a fair days pay?
Think this would work for us lowly IT contractors?
This isn't complicated. If you don't like the pay, don't work for them.
No matter where you go, there you are.
Lyft has been advertising a $500 sign on bonus here in Atlanta and with TIPS!
Which is great for us who have been thrown aside for H1-Bs.
C, Java, C#, DB2, .... 55 years old ....don't have the skills, washed up loser.
My kids? MEDICAL!
How can Uber have trouble turning a profit? What expenses do they have? Are they literally wiping their asses with money, or something? I can't imagine how maintaining a few little apps would cost billions of dollars a year.
These ride sharing services were set up to allow people to casually earn a little extra money. They do this by bypassing the cruft that's accumulated around traditional taxi services. So immediately, government, workers, and to some extent even the public wants to re-load all the baggage - destroying what ride-sharing was intended to be. It's not the 30's, in a company town - if they don't like the wages, there are other agencies and other industries.
Next, everyone strikes to have an above-average income.
I find the argument that Uber drivers should be considered employees because "Uber still sets drivers' rates and the commission it pays itself, which ranges between 20 percent and 30 percent" to be specious.
If someone says how much they are going to pay for a job in advance of the job, that does not mean that anyone who takes that job is suddenly more likely to be considered an employee simply because the person who will pay them set that amount. Presumably, an independent contractor who finds the amount inadequate may try to negotiate or not do the work for that person at all, but in no way is anyone who chooses to hire an independent contractor actually *obligated* to negotiate with the independent contractor simply so that the person will not somehow be considered an employee.
There may be other reasons to consider Uber drivers as employees, but how they are paid is definitely not one of them.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
" "I'd like a fair day's pay for my hard work," Adam Shahim, a 40-year-old driver from Pittsburgh, California, said in a statement."
Then get a real job for a real company rather than an Internet-Ride-Share-gone-corporate hobby (you aren't an Uber "employee", there's part of your problem right there).
I'd just call a taxi but I can't do that anymore, because Uber without all the same regulations applied to them drove all my local cab options out of business. Now I'm back to a market with only one option who is on the brink of holding the customer hostage for greater pay. Isn't it nice how no matter what happens the end user suffers...
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
Nationwide freaked out for a moment when they read the headline. They were wondering what the hell these Uber drivers wanted from them.
And you are the reason why Hillary lost, even though you probably voted for her (or Stein or Bernie). You have NO point other than to cry "racism", which you cry so often that now that there are REAL racists out there, your message of "Racism" is lost, because nobody is listening to you. So, keep calling everyone you disagree with "Racist" because that is all the proof I need that you are devoid of any real thought.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Contractors decide who much they are willing to work for, and people paying contractors decide how much they are willing to pay.
I recently placed an ad on Craigslist looking for a HVAC tech to install an air conditioner for me. I got several calls giving different estimates these were contractors telling me their rates. One said $1200, another said $450, two said $600.
I quickly determined I could get the job done well for $600, so I set my offered rate at $600. The contractors set their (asking) price, I set my (offer) price. The contractor can accept my offered rate, decline, or negotiate.
Uber is offering different rates in different areas at different times. Contract drivers can decide where they are willing to drive, when, for what rate.
Employees also decide what rate they'll accept - when recruiters call me they normally ask me about my salary requirements. What makes contractors different from employees is they decide what hours they work, what tools they use, which helpers they want to hire, etc. The AC guy showed up yesterday at the time HE said he'd be here, with his father-in-law to help him. He left for the day when he needed to. As his customer, rather than his employer, I didn't decide who his helper would be, or what hours he would be here (though I agreed to open the door at the time he offered to arrive.)
Pittsburgh is in Pennsylvania. There are plenty of Pittsburgs all over the country, but hands off our "h", California.
Whoooooooosh.
Taking it a step further, Uber, Lyft, AirBnB, heck even eBay are just hookup services. Their end form is going to be a stock market-like exchange. People place bids and offers on the market. The line (price) where the bids meet the offers is the fair market price.
e.g. You bid to pay $12 for a ride from your house in the north suburbs to a restaurant downtown. Historically pricing for this route has been about $12, so you figure that should get you an offer soon.. But unbeknownst to you, a ballgame in the nearby sports arena is just ending, resulting in a shortage of drivers. So the offers you're seeing are around $20. You have to decide if you want to wait until the pricing drops down to its historical norm, or if you want to withdraw the bid and place a new one at $20 so you can get a ride quicker.
The "cut" the hookup service takes should be on par with what online brokerages take - around $1 to $10 per "trade". This whole thing where they take a flat % is stupid, since the hookup service's costs are the same whether it's a $10 local ride, or a $200 ride across several states. Licensing and insurance should be managed by the government, just as it is for private vehicles. The only difference is that you should be able to check on a government website that the guy offering you a ride is properly licensed and his insurance is current (an online version of the driver ID placards in taxis). For bonus points, you can set up a system where for the safety of the driver and passenger, both use government-issued ID to mutually register their ride as occurring. The passenger is protected from a crazy driver who kidnaps them, the driver is protected from a mugger posing as passenger. If a crime occurs, it'll be on record who the other party is.
Here's a few:
. Arcade.city [ https://arcade.city/ ] - started by p1553d off Uber drivers
. Cell 411 [ https://getcell411.com/ ] - includes ride-share feature
. ReachNow [ http://www.bmwcarsharing.com/ ] - pay-per-minute car rental
You sure about that? ;)
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Wasn't it that it was a "oh I'm at Point A, let me pick up some who also happens to be going to Point B and get a some cash for driving to my errand?" It was a way to cover the cost of your car. True RIDE...SHARING. Now it's become some type of job?
AirBnB is just shout term renting / hotels without the taxes / safety rules they just take a cut / fees with limited control.
eBay just takes fees / a cut with limited control.
They have listings like an Flea Market / on line store front. They also have auctions where they just run the auction part and take fees for doing that.
Uber, Lyft Set a lot of rules, set the prices, can enforce you must take X number / % of rides per X time on the clock, can force long / shout trips.
On ebay an seller can say local pick up only / buyer must cover all shipping costs or say not responsible for shipping and buyer is on there own it there is damage with the shipping picked out by the buyer.
"Valued at $68 billion, Uber is the highest-valued venture-backed company worldwide. But as it has cut the cost of rides to compete with traditional taxi services, Uber reportedly has experienced trouble turning a profit..."
Funny thing about profit; it's kind of necessary for success and survival.
Given that identified struggle, I would say this is a $68 billion bullshit valuation.
what about cutting VP / CEO pay?
Maybe if they only made 10M /year vs 20M /year they can hire more people / pay then more.
should be paid to wait for a ride! firemen are payed to wait for the call. People in stores are payed to be there waiting for a customer
Is ride sharing? They recruit drivers using the same hiring techniques businesses use to find employees. They control what the drivers can charge and they punish drivers for declining low paying work. The drivers aren't sharing, they're working.
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Creative accounting. That and massive legal fees.
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The drivers should be getting 80%, not 20-30.
In a system in which the knowledge of the relevant facts is dispersed among many people, prices act to efficiently coordinate the separate actions of different people.
Prices are important information in the economic calculus.
If a government sets price floors or ceilings, it damages the price system, and leads to shortages or gluts.
If you think poor people need money, then redistribute money to them via taxes. But don't break the price system, because when you do, you reduce the size of the entire economy through inefficiencies.
joining with the fast-food, airport, home care, child care and higher education workers who are leading the way and showing the country how to build an economy
Because everybody knows that Uber drivers, fast-food, airport, home care, child care, and higher education workers are the best experts to look to for economic knowledge.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
If the Uber drivers are self-employed and work as contractors for Uber, won't the strike just hurt their own personal companies?
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I have issues with Uber, but the problem here isn't Uber. The problem is regulation and the stupidity of people. There is this refusal of certain groups of people to take responsibility for themselves. If these gigs don't pay well enough get an actual job somewhere else / start a business / etc and if you say "I can't because there are no jobs" I say this *move*. There are jobs. They just may not be where you currently reside. I'm sorry if you like where you live now- but the world changes and sometimes you need to adapt to it. I know that can be hard. But it's the only honest thing to do.
Unfortunately most people seem to demand government action today so that they can personally benefit. This is nothing less than theft of other people's money and everybody is doing it. It doesn't matter if you are demanding a new tax to benefit the poor/working class or demanding a monopoly (copy"right" / phone / cable lines / etc) and providing some excuse like "for the public good" or "it would be unworkable / a mess to have multiple cable companies". Even arguing "if every body got health insurance prices would drop therefore we need to mandate people buy health insurance". Sorry. But that doesn't fly either. What this is doing is funnelling money into private hands. This seemingly socialist idea is really little more than a money grab. There might have been a bone thrown in for those with issues so costly they were unable to get health insurance (pre-existing conditions and all that).
There are alternatives to Uber so it's not even like you can't switch to a different solution. Cell 411 lets drivers and passengers set rates and haggle with each other over price. That doesn't mean one is going to make more. It probably is better for drivers and passengers, but it's not necessarily going to result in more money for the driver when driving is at this point providing an essentially no-skill required service. If you can't make enough to get by move and find a job somewhere else. You've only got an excuse if you are in some country where there literally is no where with jobs to move. That's just not the case in the United States. We have open boarders between states.
I'd rather see us eliminate welfare, government indoctrination programs (public 'schools'), etc and instead near-eliminate taxes. The reality is the government has created a dependence on it via stealing peoples money through rents (property taxes), vehicular registrations (another form of tax, in some states), sales taxes, income taxes, business taxes, and similar.
Through regulation many of the problems we have and the solution often ends up being worse- more bad regulation tends not to solve problems in a positive way. It merely benefits special interests and the elites even when a bone is thrown to socialists (ie people with certain conditions can now get health insurance as an example).
You gave a company a monopoly on providing cable TV and now you want to mandate service? No. That's not the answer. The answer is competition. Unfortunately we already gave certain companies an advantage which we probably do need to offset with temporary regulations to foster competition in these markets! Errr.. and yet that is what we need to get away from.
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Can this be made even across the world? I'd love to vote for anti-Islamic parties in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Afghanistan and a whole lot of countries, even though I'm not a citizen of any of them
I really don't get it. Call a taxi. They're licensed and insured for carrying passengers.
Why would you get into a stranger's car with no idea if they are insured or even legally allowed to drive? Who is going to cover you in case of an accident? Not the Uber driver because most likely they are violating their insurance by using their car for commercial purposes.
Centuries worth of hard fought gains by the working class (minimum wage, OSHA, overtime pay, etc, etc)? People died for the 40 hour work week, ya know?
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because this is how you get replaced by driverless cars.
Uber drivers are NOT employees. Uber is just a web-based service asking for people interested in driving for them, whenever and however long at a time they feel like driving for them, subject to payment terms Uber offers.
People complaining that they're underpaid driving for Uber should probably stop and consider the other side of the argument. How much would it cost you to make enough people aware of your own taxi service, if you decided to go it on your own? What would you have to pay to have developers build and maintain an app for you that runs on multiple OS platforms?
The small town I used to live in has a couple of residents I know who used to drive for Uber and quit, because they realized they made better money as independent drivers, offering to do courier type deliveries or to give people rides. It's a viable alternative there because the town has no official taxi-cab company and it's essentially a bedroom community for people who work in the DC area. So just by hanging out on the right forum on Facebook, you can find people all the time who want to pay for a ride to the airport or what-not.
But in most cases, the real value Uber brings to the table is pairing you up with all the people who want to pay for a ride. Making 2x the amount per hour does you no good if you have hours of down-time with no paid fares. And that's where you'd probably be if you were on your own, doing a bit of traditional advertising and asking people to just call you if they need a ride.
I get the argument that working for Uber or Lyft isn't really making you any money because of all the wear and tear on your vehicle, fuel costs and so on. But that's always been true for people delivering pizzas or working for couriers -- yet people still eagerly do it. I think that's because some people underestimate the value of getting some money back out of what you have to pay into the sinkhole of vehicle ownership. (EG. Whether I drive for Uber with my new car or I just use it for personal use, my monthly payment to the auto finance company is the same. And for X number of years, my factory warranty and possibly an extended warranty I purchased covers anything that breaks on it beyond standard wear items. Especially if it gets decent gas mileage, it definitely can generate some decent positive cash flow doing this kind of work -- even if the "bean counters" insist it's not because the true amortized cost of driving it per mile comes out to whatever number of cents. For many of us, that figure doesn't matter because we're content to push off some of those costs to the "back end" of the vehicle ownership, when it's paid off and past the warranty period with high mileage on it. By then, we have options like trading it in on something new and starting the cycle over, or selling it off as-is. The bills we had to pay each month for other things didn't offer that kind of flexibility in payments.)
I'm sure in Uber's management, they're seeing these protests and simply accelerating research into automated vehicles. That was always the end-state for them after all.
Yes, but I'm not even sure I'd compare pizza delivery with taxi service? A pizza doesn't care about the impression you make with the vehicle you pull up in for the delivery, and if your old beater car breaks down in the middle of a delivery? Well, you owe somebody another pizza or a refund of a whole $20 or whatever they spent. If it breaks down in the middle of driving someone to the airport and causes them to miss a flight? Much bigger problem.
Personally, I'm not that comfortable just chatting it up with random strangers - so the idea of driving around to deliver things instead of people appeals to me. But for others, it's just the opposite. They'd be bored to death if it wasn't for the fact they get to meet a bunch of new people and talk with them while they drive.
Uber drivers undercut and killed Taxis with rock bottom rates, now they want more money? Sorry, but you are stuck with what no longer regulated market will bear. If Uber, which is not making much profit, raises driver pay, they will have to raise fares and then customers will take Lyft or drive.
The only alternative is to offer more premium product like fancier cars, better certified drivers, snack and beverage service etc.
Who wrote this terrible article? There is no such Pittsburgh in California. There is a Pittsburg though.
with the millions of people who are just barely together enough to flip burgers. I just want to hear you say you're going to abandon them to poverty and death. Go on, say it. Strip away the bullshit and economic lies your kind hides behind and then the rest of us can identify you for what you are and maybe get on with forging a civilization.
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it helps anyone who can't afford to strike while hurting Uber. For one thing It'll put them into direct competition with taxis & limos and they'll lose that (real professional drivers are much better at it, 3 of 4 Ubers I took got lost along the way. Yeah I got picked up 30 minutes sooner, and I got dropped off a quarter mile from my destination because neither one of us knew where we were going).
For another it means less rides. Uber needs volume. If Surge pricing 100% of the time brought in more money they'd be doing it. Non stop Surge pricing hurts Uber.
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and enough desperation to figure out that you're working for about $3/hour after factoring in wear and tear on your car. There's only so many recently laid off people trying to make rent.
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Move? That is your solution?
Few jobs pay your moving expenses.
You might need a mortgage to unload.
Moving kids around is a very bad idea.
All for some job that might not pay very well or that you could lose at any time?
Moron
I think the question never even occurred to people then.
The whole point of Uber was supposed to be matching supply and demand. When the pay isn't high enough, drivers stay home until it is. So if drivers don't make enough, yet they come out anyhow,who fault is that?