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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."
I'm not so sure its about aging... I think its mostly that anyone else has given up on this place and moved on... arguing with Alt right or hyper libertarian or whatever the flavor of the month zealots are, its exhausting... and this place isn't important enough anymore to make it worth defending from idiots with poorly formed world views who can't see past the end of their own noses.
There are a few old timers still around... like me they tend to post less an less and just ignore the cesspool that this place has become out of a sense of nostalgia.
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
Are you by chance related to Marie Antoinette?
Table-ized A.I.
So any source of income must guarantee a living wage?
If you spend *seventy* hours a week doing it, then yeah it better damn well have.
The key is to run a business that is profitable enough to pay its workers a wage sufficient to cover food and medical and housing. Otherwise, my tax money does it and those dollars essentially make the business owner a welfare recipient by enabling him to be artificially enriched.
If your business doesn't sell a product people are willing to spend enough for you pay your workers a living wage, then your business should go bankrupt. I'm not paying for your beach house.
If you post it, they will read.
Translation:
Now, why on earth would sellers stay on a market this shitty? Bandwagon effect. Other competing exchanges don't have the liquidity. Why people use Microsoft products? Bandwagon effect. Once you get something shitty going, it can keep going on its momentum alone.
That the exchange can dictate price levels really is a problem because it creates race-to-the-bottom pressures - negative feedback loop - drivers can't go to competing markets which treat em better, because their cheap labor keeps those alternative companies out of the business (and even if those adopt similiarly shitty business practices, they end up being no better than uber). Thus the accusations of entrapment.
If Uber wants to be merely a clearing house for car hailing settlements that's fine, but people should call it out on their attempts to corner the market in order to keep their first mover monopoly.