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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
become a taxi driver. Uber is for ride-sharing. Not full-time taxi service.
If they could do that they wouldn't be out protesting, now would they.
They can it's called find another client. Uber with no drivers dies.
No sir I dont like it.
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.
This isn't complicated. If you don't like the pay, don't work for them.
No matter where you go, there you are.
Uber is already moving to driverless cars, and that was always the plan. Not only is that the plan, the long term prognosis for Taxi and Uber like drivers is dim. Eventually, driverless cars will be the norm and we'll see drivers go the way of the buggy whip.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
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'm of the opinion that anyone doing full-time work deserves a wage to live on. Meager living fine, but enough for a roof over one's head and food in one's mouth.
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Expect the rise across the board isn't uniform. So people in the middle of the income bracket will take a pay cut as the price of everything increases, but the percentage of their pay increases in smaller than the low end.
When Uber implements driver-less cars (which they do want to do) how are they going to continue to claim that they are not a transportation company and instead are just an app to connect drivers and riders? Are they going to have third party driver-less car owners and have them provide the "ride"? It seems it will be harder for them to lie to government regulators about what their business model is at that point...
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 ?
I think that's rather the point - no one is proposing raising wages across the board - they're proposing raising wages at the bottom, but not the top.
AC is right - a burger flipper doesn't deserve as much as a skilled electrician, but what they do deserve is enough to live on (as anyone working full time does). The disparity between top and bottom has got so large that it's not possible to live at the bottom any more. That needs to be fixed.
I too did Lyft for a while when I lived in Atlanta. Paid pretty well as well. My record was a guy who had me drive all over the place in a day - made $105 on that one trip. Floor was $6.
AC is right - a burger flipper doesn't deserve as much as a skilled electrician, but what they do deserve is enough to live on (as anyone working full time does)
What does deserving have to do with anything?
I could "work full time" counting blades of grass in the park. I imagine it's time-consuming work, with a lot of job-specific challenges.
What, no one wants me to do that? No one wants to pay me for it? But I deserve enough to live on for working full time!
"Deserving" is irrelevant. Your work gets you what someone else is willing to pay for it.
Burger flipping is at the point in the supply-demand curve that it's not worth what an adult needs to live on.
Such a naÃve viewpoint. Let's look at the real world.
1. Gap wealth continues to increase between the top and bottom.
2. Wages, especially minimum wage, have not kept up with inflation.
3. Skilled labor jobs have decreased and the economy has switched to a service-based economy, partly so those at the top can make more money.
4. Minimum wage should be tied to living expenses of the region. I can absolutely agree that a burger flipper in San Francisco should make as much as a skilled laborer in Cleveland, OH. I don't have the exact figure but it's probably 3 times cheaper to live in Cleveland so that $15/hr will go much farther. I don't think a burger flipper in Cleveland should make $15/hr.
This reluctance to pay people enough to pay the bills, I just don't understand. Anyone that puts in 30+ hours/week should make a wage that keeps them above the poverty line. As a society, we are keeping our product pricing artificially low by allowing our government to make laws that benefit the corporation profits instead of the workers. The Dems barely have a better record than the Repubs in this matter which is why so many people decided to vote Trump. Either way the worker was going to continue to get screwed over.
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
we'll see drivers go the way of the buggy whip - what? only used in kinky dungeon scenes?
"Bring out the Gimp"
"Say, didn't you drive me to the LAX a couple of years ago?"
[shutters]
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
It's complicated. You'll get some conservative-side arguments about pay raises being the devil in disguise and causing inflation or destroying our moral fiber; and you'll get liberal-side arguments about pay raises being fair and somehow creating jobs. It's neither.
Wages are paid from revenue, which is paid of the income of consumers. In any given time frame, there's a fixed amount of income: the Fed increases this by issuing cash, adjusting treasury interest rates, and changing the fractional reserve system, allowing consumers to take on bigger loans and spend more money now with (devalued) income earned later (thus they spend $10,000 today and pay it off with $8,000 tomorrow--just that $8,000 is called $14,000 by then, even if it buys no more). The Fed tries to adjust for population growth, trade, and technical progress to grow the money supply 2% faster than production--that is, to maintain 2% inflation, thus widening the gap between your loan payments and your income.
This means a number of things.
For one, it means increasing wages paid doesn't create new jobs. Wage inequality means I can work 1 hour at $20/hr and make you work 2 hours at $10/hr when I buy your stuff; and it means my 40 hours of work pays two of your low-wage comrades for their 40 hours. Increasing lower wages actually reduces the number of jobs. Higher-wage workers--mainly the middle-class (90% of workers today make under $152k/year)--who don't receive an increase spend a larger proportion of their income on those lower-wage jobs which raised their costs (and thus prices); that means fewer things are bought, and thus fewer jobs are required to make and sell, while the revenue to pay those workers stops flowing. The lower-wage workers get a buying power increase; this concentrates that income into fewer hands, rather than creating new income. There's an often-repeated myth that every $1 gets spent 6 times and so creates 6 jobs on wage increases, and it's a brilliant move of handwaving away a bunch of economic facts in favor of pointing out that certain people end the week with additional spending money while ignoring the consequences of that change.
At the same time, an economic system which keeps its minimum standard of living based on a minimum wage must raise its minimum wage to keep up with inflation. That means we accept that some jobs are lost so as to ensure that workers at the bottom--but not the unemployed or underemployed--are receiving sufficient income. Alternate systems, such as my Universal Social Security (a form of basic income), carve off a portion of all income to establish a baseline, which largely obviates minimum wages by giving the worker a stronger position to negotiate for his own wages (with the same impact: if he gets higher wages, it's the same as a minimum-wage raise); and this is itself an extension of the current type of welfare system which covers the unemployed and underemployed with a form of insurance, itself a small portion of our total production.
So we have arguments for and against increasing minimum wages and, by extension, any subset of wages. We also have a system of wage increases called "inflation", designed largely to decay the impact of long-term loans on consumer spending power even when banks gain interest larger than inflation. Wages themselves represent labor time in one way or another (the same way taxes all represent a proportion of income, however you want to collect them--this is why a sales tax is regressive, for example), so only the relative dollar amount of wages matters. Trade and technical progress reduce the price of products relative to the wage of laborers, increasing consumer purchasing power.
The simple explanation of all this is that someone must have less if someone else is to have more. In large populations, that "less" tends to be a hell of a lot, and it tends to be measured in job loss among the poorest as well as in standard-of-living of the middle-class; targeting the upper income earners doesn't work for
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"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.
That's why in most of the world with minimum wages, the minimum wage is lower for people who aren't old enough to leave school yet.
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.
CEOs and VPs have total compensation including stock options and such, which devalue the secondary security market by dilution. The actual cash portion--the part paid by company revenues (thus payable to any employee)--is usually around a quarter to a third.
In total, CEOs gain cash salary and bonuses (from revenue; pay full income tax); dividends (from revenue; pay full income tax, even if reinvested); stock options (new issue stock, cost effectively siphoned from any 401(k)s and IRAs and such holding the stock; taxed as full income when exercised); stocks (new issue stock; taxed as full income); and from stock sales (capital gains, the difference between the purchase price of the stock and its sale price; taxed at 15%). For the most part, they pay full taxes on this.
So we have cash compensation to deal with here. Moreover, stock and options are income; part of that cash compensation diverts to paying taxes, meaning $10 million of stock grabbed as an exercised option leaves you owing $4 million to the IRS out-of-pocket, so you might have to sell some stock if you don't have cash compensation to offset it. That means issuing stock to employees has some consequences on their finances which said employees might not know how to handle (along with simply devaluing their own retirement funds slightly--the compound effect of mass-issuance to employees is sort of a wash).
CFO of Ford Motor Company used to make more than their CEO. His $42M total compensation in 2012(ish?) consisted of $8 million of cash compensation. Dividing this among the 150,000 Ford Motor Co. employees gives them each $53/year, $4.44/month, or 95 cents per week. Not much. Compound all 20 executives and you could get $20/week in there--53 cents per hour, even, on top of a $21/hr paycheck. That's roughly the same 2.5% raise said employees enjoy annually--that is to say: it's the kind of impact that doesn't matter at all, and will be forgotten in two or three years.
Steve Ellis, CEO of Chipotle, took $1.5 million of cash compensation and a staggering $12 million in stocks in 2015. Per each of 45,200 employees, that's $33 per year, 64 cents per week; 20 such executives could furnish a 33 cent hourly pay raise, which is a decent 4% raise on an $8.25/hr minimum wage--and that's all it is. Decent for a raise, but nothing striking. For comparison, I make $75k, and a 4% raise would add $80 after taxes to my paycheck; it's $25 for a minimum-wage worker before taxes, and maybe $20 after.
The CEO salary argument is a desperate lashing out at people you don't like because they have more than you. It doesn't solve any problem except for your desperate need to exercise a neurotic downward social comparison to elevate your self-image. These discussions inevitably reach a conclusion where the party arguing against high CEO salaries eventually admits that it doesn't help anyone, but it at least "would be fair" or somehow otherwise makes them feel good--because poor people aren't important, rather only your own feeling that someone you don't like got hammered is the big issue here.
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I disagree.
After being born, the world does not owe you a living.
I disagree. As a child, the world owes you a living. The basic definition of adulthood is that "this stops being true". We seem to have a lot of tall children these days.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.