When Their Shifts End, Uber Drivers Set Up Camp in Parking Lots Across the US (bloomberg.com)

A feature report on Bloomberg today illustrates the lives of several Uber drivers, who find shelter in car parking at nights when it's too pricey and tiring to go home. An excerpt from the story: In Chicago, Walter Laquian Howard sleeps most nights at the "Uber Terminal." "I left my job thinking this would work, and it's getting harder and harder," Howard said. "They have to understand that some of us have decided to make this a full-time career." Howard has been parking and sleeping at the 7-Eleven four to five nights a week since March 2015, when he began leasing a car from Uber and needed to work more hours to make his minimum payments. Now that it's gotten cold, he wakes up every three hours to turn on the heater. He's rarely alone. Most nights, two to three other ride-hailing drivers sleep in cars parked next to his. It's safe, he said, and the employees let the drivers use the restroom. Howard has gotten to know the convenience store's staff -- Daddy-O and Uncle Mike -- over the past two years while driving for this global ride-hailing gargantuan, valued at $69 billion. "These guys have become my extended family," said Howard, 53. "It's my second home. We have this joke that I'm the resident. I keep asking them: 'Hey, did my mail come in yet?'"

Comments

Regular Taxi Service fears..

[foxalopex]

Interesting article, it pretty much explains why regular taxi service employees are so against Uber. When you have a competitor that undercuts the service so much that you need to live out of your car in a parking lot, it's somewhat hard to make a living from it.

Re:Regular Taxi Service fears..

[Anonymous Coward]

And makes you realize that the economics of Uber are not understood by the "contractors". They compare something like "$20/hr" from Uber to $15 an hour somewhere else and think Uber is better without realizing their effective wage may even be less than $0 from Uber after taxes. It also makes you realize how we ought to prioritize protecting people like Uber drivers rather than worrying about increasing minimum wages. Uber has destroyed many people's lives, generally to the benefit of the upper middle class and the wealthy having lower taxi fares.

I am a conservative but until we add financial literacy to the high school curriculum we need to protect the idiots that fall for these scams where you bring in the depreciating capital equipment to bear for another company. Uber is essentially a modern day Ponzi scheme. The only difference is you are not giving Uber cold hard cash - you are amortizing your capital investment in a car for their and their customers benefit.

leasing a car from Uber sounds like the company st

[Joe_Dragon]

leasing a car from Uber sounds like the company store days of the past where they lock you into the job and when the work slows down / something bad happens your on the hook to make the company full and you are not even an W2 worker.

Basic income

[djinn6]

This is why we need basic income. Nobody should have to live like that, especially people who are motivated and actively looking for more work.

As a society, we have 3 options:

1. 1. Ignore the problem as more and more people end up jobless, homeless, in the hospital or worse.
2. 2. Impose minimum wage regulation, which doesn't fix the problem and makes the jobs disappear instead.
3. 3. Give everyone what they need to live.

Now which one is it going to be?

Re: Basic income

[Ichijo]

With a basic income, the consequence of failure will no longer be debt and homelessness, but there will always be an economic incentive to succeed.

And you're correct that a basic income will reward stupid decisions, which means it will also eliminate a big part of the risk of starting a new business, and that would be a very good thing for the economy.

Re:Basic income

[Paco103]

It's pretty simple. You can't make the UBI be comfortable for the 99%. It should be "enough to survive", not $5000/month. Switzerland tried that with a $75K year minimum and it was shot down at the polls in overwhelming numbers. That is way too much money, and the fact that until you find a job that exceeds that you get no benefit means very few people would have incentive to work. Even if I do make more than that, why would I work 40 hour weeks for 48+ weeks a year for a mere few thousand dollars extra? I sure wouldn't.

But let's adjust that, lets give everyone the poverty level. Sure, maybe you can afford rent in a studio, or have a room mate. Maybe you can eat cheap, but you can't buy anything of luxury. Yeah, some people will take that one bedroom studio, ramen, and a bag of pot and an World of Warcraft subscription. Fine, they're out of the way and not committing crime, they weren't motivated to start with and arguably provide little value to society, and now they're out of the way and not resorting to crime for 'easy money'.

But single mom Jane can now afford to go to school and just work part time. Poor orphan kid can go to school when he turns 18, instead of just being dumped on the streets to figure out life on his own because he aged out of the social care for children. Abused uber driver can afford to quit and get a better job. Incredibly smart but poor entreprenuer can afford to take time to build out his idea and make a million dollar business. Yes, these are all hypotheticals, but Finland is testing that right now. (http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/universal-basic-income-finland-ubi-test-scheme-experiment-a7211241.html)

The thing is, a family father trying to provide for his family needs to see benefit from going to work as a janitor. Not everyone can be an engineer, and lets face it at some point even that job will be replaced by automation. Now he gets that UBI, but when he goes to work he still makes his family's life better. Sure, maybe he's taxed at 50%, but he still benefits, so he does a job that nobody else wants to do.

Let's face it, all minimum wage is is a UBI that is only applied to people lucky enough to get jobs, and it encourages companies to not offer some jobs in the first place, or try to automate them away as fast as possible. And then by requiring benefits ONLY to people working over so many hours just ensures they don't let people work over that many hours, and hire 2 people instead of 1. Is it bad to spread the wealth over 2 people instead of 1? Probably not, for the executives of the world. 10 people making $100K is arguably much better than 1 person making $1 million and 9 people starving.

In order to get to a UBI, the first thing we have to accept is that UBI doesn't mean you get everything taken care of. It means you can survive while you try to better yourself, or you can stay out of the way. We already do this with various food stamp, rent assistance, child care credits, and scholarships, but the problem is the beurocratic overhead, stigma, and it's hard to get everything to line up to where you can actually get out of the dependency loop. Yes people do it, but can we make things better? UBI might be a bad answer. Finland will tell us soon. Right now we're stuck in a loop of doing things the way we do them because that's the way we've always done them, and that may not be the right mindset.

the cognitive dissonance between hype and reality.

[nimbius]

marketing: our billion dollar business idea is to empower the gig economy with a system that frees them from the shackles of the traditional labour paradigm by allowing drivers to work their own hours on their own terms. the government hates us because we're revolutionary disruptors of traditional capitalism
Reality: live out of a parking lot, subsist on slurpees and hotdogs, work more hours than you ever imagined, get sick, die somewhere conveniently outside any media scrutiny of your employe...er..i mean, app.

"They" don't have to understand anything

[rsilvergun]

I'm always amazed when I hear stuff like this. People really believe that other people will treat them right when a) it's not in their interests and b) they're not being forced.

When I tell people I'm a socialist one of the responses is: "Well, are you gonna force people?". Yes. Yes I am. This is civilization. You don't get to say 'no' to civilization. Just like you don't get to say no to the polio vaccine. That's because your actions do not happen in a vacuum. They don't just hurt you, they hurt me too.

So yeah, I'm gonna force Uber to pay a living wage or go out of business. I'm gonna force everyone to give everyone else health care (aka "single payer"). Because that's civilization. We're all humans. We're all valuable. Yes, everybody gets an ever-loving Gold Star. We all earned the right to a good life simply by being born human.

Re:I don't even like Uber but

[Anubis IV]

Uber's own ad campaigns bend over backwards to emphasize that this is supposed to be a side gig to make some extra money.

Uber was just this week fined $20M by the FTC for doing the exact opposite of what you're saying, so pardon me if I don't believe anything you've just said. They were overstating median incomes by as much as $29,000/year, advertising unlimited mileage for leases that didn't actually have unlimited mileage, and advertising that their leases were lower-cost than their competitors (which wasn't true in the least). The FTC found that in some markets, only around 10% of the drivers were making as much as the "median" incomes that Uber was advertising.

So while I do generally agree that the world doesn't owe anyone anything, I'll add the caveat that companies are obligated to not make fraudulent claims, which is exactly what Uber is being fined for having done.

Re:I don't even like Uber but

[cryptizard]

Hate to break it to you but most jobs, by the numbers, require "almost no skills." 40% of US workers are unskilled. Should they all starve to death?

Re:I don't even like Uber but

[The-Ixian]

It seems like what you are saying is "some jobs aren't meant to pay for someone's subsistence"

My question is "what jobs are those?"

Are they "unskilled" jobs? If so, are you suggesting that there needs to remain a majority of people without proper education in order to have an "unskilled" work force so that you can go to the grocery store on Sunday or out to eat in the evening?

What happens if everybody has an education and is competing on the same level for "skilled" jobs and nobody wants to do the "unskilled" jobs? What happens if we don't have anyone to man the register or pick your food from a field? Wouldn't you say those jobs are necessary?

Is this a reason why we shouldn't make education easily accessible to all?

It seems to me that "unskilled" workers are necessary in order to provide a quality of life for the workers in "skilled" jobs. So why don't those "unskilled" workers, people who wake up every day and GO TO WORK in a job that they probably HATE, not deserve to be able to live a reasonably comfortable life?

I certainly appreciate the ability to order food that arrives at my doorstep or a cab/uber that can take me to where I want to go.

I am guessing that you appreciate those things too.... but you somehow don't feel that the people doing those jobs deserve a wage that will allow them to live at or above the poverty line....

Re:I don't even like Uber but

[Fire_Wraith]

And what do you propose should happen to those who don't have the skills, and can't acquire them? What about those who try, but just aren't good enough? There are presently some 3 million or so drivers in the U.S., between taxis, Uber, delivery trucks, and long haul trucks. What should happen to them as demand for their previously valuable skill dwindles to the point they can't support themselves anymore, or wind up unemployed en masse when the vehicles can drive themselves? There are some 3.6 million fast food employees in the U.S. - what about them?

Perhaps you think they should learn to program, or become auto mechanics, or HVAC technicians, or some other job that remains in demand. Some of them may well be able to, but is there really immediate demand for several million more of them? Did it ever occur to you that some of them might like to learn those skills, but lack the time and money it takes to do so? Education isn't cheap, and it's getting significantly more expensive by the year. And worse, you might find after you complete it that you can't get a job in that field, because the competition is high, and others are simply better at it than you are.

So what then? Because I'm going to hazard a guess that you're not suggesting that we fund a robust social safety net with programs to make sure those people don't starve, or some form of universal basic income.

Re:Welcome to the future of capitalism

[XXongo]

And they have 99% of the new ideas, .

No, actually they don't. Some of the 1% did get there by work, but most of them got there by inheriting money. They don't have any ideas; they don't need to have any ideas. They can buy ideas. The world is full of people with ideas, but most of them don't have the resources to do anything with them.

provide 99% of the funding to develop new stuff, own/run most of the private infrastructure,

Yeah, that's the thing. They control all the funding, so if you have an idea you want to commercialize, you are pretty much guaranteed that you'll have to sell it to somebody with cash. And they own the infrastructure. One way or the other, you end up paying them.

Re:America!

[cayenne8]

Well, to be fair...not every job out there is meant to be a full time, "real" job that you earn your full living from....

I mean, uber is just a side money job, that's it. I mean, should I pay a living wage to the kid down he block to mow my lawn or rake leaves...or baby site my kid, and throw in full blown benefits too?

I know I"m moving closer and closer to the "get off my lawn" crowd, but please tell me, I missed it..when did things change an EVERY job available became one where you were supposed to make a living from and have a career?

I mean, when did burger flipping become a "real job" instead of something teens did in high school?

Re:America!

[smooth wombat]

when did things change an EVERY job available became one where you were supposed to make a living from and have a career?

Uber advertised the median salary in New York for Uber drivers was $90K per year while in San Francisco the median was $74K per year. People then went to work for Uber based on those advertisements.

You're not implying that Uber lied when telling people they could have a full-time, good paying job driving people around like is done in every other cab company, are you?