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Uber Is Treating Its Drivers As Sweated Labor, Says Report (theguardian.com)
Uber treats its drivers as Victorian-style "sweated labor", with some taking home less than the minimum wage, according to a report into its working conditions based on the testimony of dozens of drivers. From a report on The Guardian: Drivers at the taxi-hailing app company reported feeling forced to work extremely long hours, sometimes more than 70 a week, just to make a basic living, said Frank Field, the Labor MP and chair of the work and pensions committee. Field received testimony from 83 drivers who said they often took home significantly less than the "national living wage" after paying their running costs. The report says they described conditions that matched the Victorian definition of sweated labor: "when earnings were barely sufficient to sustain existence, hours of labor were such as to make lives of workers periods of ceaseless toil; and conditions were injurious to the health of workers and dangerous to the public."
Uber profits from making it into one.
Wage slavery is never cost effective except for the slave owner. That's what makes it an unstable system which can only be perpetuated by government collusion, or lack of willpower by the employees to break out of slavery. e.g. Detroit used to have slave-level wages. Henry Ford decided to set up shop there and paid his factory workers much more than the prevailing wage. He accidentally discovered that when he paid people a fair wage, not only did their productivity increase, but they used those wages to buy the very product they were helping build. The resulting feedback loop multiplied his company's revenue and turned the Ford Motor Company into the behemoth it is today. No longer were cars affordable only to the privileged elite; the average middle class worker (by Ford factory standards) could afford to buy one.
If the only options you see are being a wage slave or starving to death, then you haven't really tried. A location where the people are being paid slave wages or starving is ripe for a new company to set up shop and hire willing employees for less than they'd have to pay at well-established locations. As more of these people become employed and spend their wages on local merchants, the economy picks up. There are fewer unemployed, resulting in wages increasing. This is how the market equalizes geographic wage inequality. If this isn't happening, then there are fundamental problems with the region not caused by slave wages. Maybe the location is too far from markets, or the highway/railroad access is poor, or people just don't want to live in that location. Unless the government is intentionally keeping business out, low wages are a symptom not a cause.
And yes I've had a rent check bounce. A rent check a tenant gave me. I was stupid and deposited it directly into our payroll bank account since it almost exactly topped off the amount we needed to make payroll. Normally I transfer the payroll money from our primary checking account, but I was lazy and decided to save a little work by depositing the checks directly into payroll. As a result I got charged a bounced check fee, but more importantly a bunch of my employees' paychecks bounced, causing more bounced check fees for both them and myself. The whole thing was a disaster. I called in each employee who was affected, apologized to them in person, and told them to bring in their bank statement so I could reimburse their bounced check fee (or fees if they then wrote checks which bounced). The ones who needed the money immediately, I paid in cash out of my own pocket. All told it was over $1300 in bank fees incurred because I was stupid/lazy, and because the person who wrote the first check did so knowing he didn't have enough money to cover it but thought it would be easier turning his problem into my problem.
It's cliche, but it's true. Your employees are your most valuable asset. A good business will do everything it can to protect them and to retain them. A business which pays slave wages is just ripe to be squeezed out by a business which will pay better (fair) wages. The only way a slave wage business can stay in business is if the government is blocking competing businesses, or if people like you have so discouraged others with your gloom and doom hopeless corporate feudalism talk that they don't even bother trying to start up their own business to compete.
They are hemorrhaging billions annually, so eventually they will implode and the problem will solve itself. If they actually manage to achieve their goal of a monopoly on the transportation market, they will just get nuked with the Sherman anti-trust act.
I think they know this, they are just a big pump n dump scam for early investors.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
And I'll still choose Uber over a Cab at, or even above, taxi prices. I've been using them since they called themselves "Ubercab", only offered the town car service, were only available in San Francisco, and were, yes, more expensive than a taxi.
Why? Because Uber drivers show up where and when they are dispatched. They will pick you up in the avenues (The Sunset and Richmond districts.), and don't throw a hissy fit when you need to be driven out there. They don't play the "my credit card reader is broken, cash only" scam. And their cars are clean, well-maintained, and don't stink of smoke, vomit or pee. None of the same is true of cabbies.
The only reason Uber, Lyft, and the like were able to catch on is because the legacy taxi companies offer an appallingly dismal service. They made their bed. Now they can lie in it. And I'll go on using the superior service; even if the price goes back up to what it was before they introduced UberX.
Imagine all the people...
Do you know how much gross shit you consume under the guise of an "A" rated restaurant?
I do, and that stuff happens even with the threat of a health inspector randomly showing up at any time. Imagine the shit that would go on if the regulations disappeared.
"BSD: Free as in speech. Linux: Free as in beer. Windows 10: Free as in herpes." --Man On Pink Corner in #52607549.
It might be a chicken and egg situation: A moving assembly line increased productivity while simultaneously demanding more employee effort: The higher wages were both compensation for the shittier working conditions and a reward for the higher productivity.
Unfortunately other industries, such as mining, had transferred costs onto employees for centuries (isolated living, pollution, injury and death) so they fought very long and violently to keep it that way. Also, mechanization was under-utilized at the time and paying better wages to all those labourers would make the businesses un-competitive.
Thanks to Ford, many businesses wanted to pay higher wages: That was soon discouraged by shareholders who demanded that businesses pay only the 'going rate' for employees. We've seen that wages did not keep pace with productivity and the extra money went into bonuses for C-level employees and 'wealth creators', not more factories and jobs.
The exception was the 1970s when increasing unionization meant employees could demand better wages. To offset the increased costs, businesses demanded reduced competition, in the form of import quotas and tariffs. The result of a near monopoly in manufacturing was wages rising while productivity decreased. That led to decreased exports, increased cost of living and a roll-back of protectionist laws.
It's easy to see what should happen, making it happen is difficult because there is so much interference when linking wages to productivity.