Uber and Lyft and this new women only drivers service are all equally bad. I get that people are excited but let me just toss a few concepts out there:
Cab drivers, as employees (when they are employees which is not all the time luckily in pdx we have radio cab) are held to certain standards. If a cab driver harasses you, you can report him.
Cabs have to be ADA compliant.
Cab drivers have to make minimum wage.There is a REASON cabs are more expensive and that reason, in Oregon at least, is that your cabby is making minimum wage.
This is not true of your uber driver, your Lyft driver, or your fancy new all woman driver but male owned service.
They are abusing the independent contractor system, as strip club owners are! to be falsely competitive in a market place they could never otherwise survive in and they are doing it at the expense of poor, vulnerable people, at the expense of cabbies, and at the expense of every other marginalised and misclassified worker because we are ALL in the same boat.So no, I’m not excited that some man saw an opportunity to capitalize on the frequency of sexual harassment into making a niche for himself in an already exploitative market.
I’m not excited that he is donating 2% of his profits to charity–this serves the exact same purpose as a pink yoplait top: if you want to do good, do good; don’t disguise your consumerism and liking for a product behind false altruism.
I’m not excited that in a city already drowning in literally tens of thousands of underpaid drivers, there will now be one more.And if you think women can’t be oppressive, shitty, hate on strippers and sex workers, and otherwise totally unpleasant, you’re dreaming. Especially once these women realise what a ferociously competitive starving market they’ve entered.
You better fucking tip 30%, is all I’m saying. And at that point, you might as well have taken a cab.
Ok wait a second wait a second. I’m seeing Uber hate on my dash.
First of all, the cab industry (at least in my city) is corrupt as hell. There are a limited number of cab “permits”, and they are all owned by super rich people who then rent them out to cabbies for outrageous fees.
Cab drivers don’t always take the most direct route, milking you for more money, because they do not make very much money. The REASON cabs are more expensive is the cab company is taking most of that money and putting it in the pocket of the super rich person, not in the pocket of the driver!
Uber, on the other hand, pays each driver significantly more, so even though you are paying less your uber driver is actually making more. Uber displays your route right on your phone so you can follow along – and you are agreeing to a certain fee to get to a certain location.
You can report your Uber driver easily, and Uber will take action. Also, riders are asked to rate their driver at the end of the trip.
You receive an email receipt at the end of your Uber ride.
You don’t need to carry cash with Uber, you pay through the app.
Oh, and with Uber Taxi, cab drivers can join Uber and make more money doing it!
The cab industry as it is needs to change. Uber has created an elegant 21st century solution. I honestly feel 100% safer riding in an Uber.
I do not speak for the other services - I’ve never used Lyft and only just heard about this service for women. But Uber is the bomb.
I feel like people keep reading this as a defense of cab companies when all it is is an indictment of uber.
Listen, I get that you like Uber.
But I PROMISE YOU:
Your drivers aren’t making enough to live. They aren’t. And they will continue not making enough to live because the people who are brave enough to sue for employee protections get bought off with settlements that don’t help the rest of the drivers.
So let’s put it this way:
None of your drivers, if you are outside Portland Oregon, are making enough to live, no matter what the service you use, unless it’s a surge night and you’re charged $300 and even THEN, the majority of that money is going to the man who developed the ap.
Stop defending it. It works really well for you, that’s great.
It is not working for the drivers. Trust me. I heard from them constantly. They are BEGGARED, and strategies like the introductions of thousands more into cities that are already flooded only cement the proof that the company doesn’t care about the drivers, it cares about profit.
So if it works for you that’s really great, but stop ignoring the fact that the workers across the board are getting screwed for your cheap ride.
Other points, as someone who doesn’t care much for cab companies but will defend cab workers being able to, well, survive:
- Cab drivers generally don’t own their cabs, but rent them (thus leading, in part, to the massive fees they need to pay). Uber/Lyft don’t provide cars, and the ones they do rent– well, what’s the difference between renting from them versus the cabbie companies?
- Cab drivers are largely immigrant and/or working class folk that work as cab drivers full-time and rely on the income. Uber/Lyft drivers don’t work on it full time: they generally have other jobs and are looking to make extra $$$, and in a large city, most of the folk who have cars also have $$$ (hint hint, gentrification).
- Uber drivers practice “client poaching” (driving up to someone and going “Uber?” and said person possibly getting into the car before they realize this is not their ride. Not only shitty, but also extremely dangerous esp for women).
- Not sure if they’ve changed it but up until Jan at least, Uber didn’t have a customer service number, and people accidentally calling (and suing) a design company regarding shitty drivers or poachers or whatever it may be and getting nowhere. So no, “Uber will take action” is false, bye.
- Unless the state/city requires it, Uber (idk abt Lyft) cars are not required to undergo safety inspections, and even when required, it is a frighteningly basic “inspection” that consists of another Uber driver coming out to “inspect” the make/model/take pictures of the car and the licence plate, and getting paid $20 for it, a process that takes 30 minutes. (Hullinger). As opposed to cab drivers that, as stated, have to undergo: car/safety inspections, driving screenings, and their cabs abide by ADA regulations.
- Please trust me when I tell you that you want to make sure your driver can drive well, because taxi driving is one of the most dangerous jobs in the US (and more so than for cops, but that’s a different convo)
- Uber does not regulate their drivers as much as police them– you know, considering they’re trackable, even when not at work, and generate massive data for the company that folks aren’t compensated for? And no, Uber does not pay drivers “significantly more” and there’s a lot of info about Uber drivers not even making minimum wage. Also they dropped their rates even more recently. (Cassano)
- Not sure why people favour Uber/Lyft over cabbies as ~well their money goes to rich people too~. Yeah. But only cab drivers and cab companies are regulated and have fees applied that Uber/Lyft drivers don’t have to abide by. Tax evasions aren’t very progressive tbqh.
- No really, Uber/Lyft is directly aiding gentrification and it’s hurting people. Here’s an account by a cab driver why you should reconsider ride-share apps and how they aid gentrification.
- Ultimately when it comes down to it, Uber= gentrification and it’s one thing to have to deal with shitty government policies regarding working as a cabbie (which they do, whoa, guess what! many of them are in unions and/or community organizers), but add gentrification, the loss of income, and additional racism and this becomes much worse.
@socialjusticemunchkin this responds to many of your points and a bunch of other ones and also does yes have some philosophical differences.
I … I think for the most part you were agreeing with at least 70% of the above?
Like I think the main jut of the above comments was specifically against the “sharing economy” which denies that the workers it actively controls are. workers. that they exert control (and thus ought to have responsibilities toward) over. Which I think was the main point of your final paragraph?
Like, in order of what you said emphatically, then going back through the above posts for the points that you mentioned off-hand:
Accountability: This is a fundamental difference you have, whether being held legally accountable is more or less powerful than being held market-based accountable. (Given that, what is your opinion on the ADA and stuff? ‘Cause that seemed to work pretty well, no?…) (I also don’t quite understand why you think that because cabs are held legally accountable they won’t be held accountable by the market, too…)
Surge Pricing: I’ve seen arguments for and against it – I’m not convinced either way, and I also don’t think either of the above people are, on a moral level – but for the purpose of this context, that was only mentioned once in the above two posts, in a single fragment of a sentence, as a PS at the end. It was explicitly not a fundamental part of their argument. (Possibly a good way to handle it is with multiple companies, at least one of which has surge pricing, at least one of which doesn’t, all trying to win brand loyalty? Which… seems much more possible and fair with the multi-taxi-company apps like Way2Ride and Arro, than single-app-per-company stuff like Uber, Lyft, and Chariot.)
Employee vs. no: Uber actually specifically has a system (which they brag about) to create drivers without control over their means of production:
- Rode with a Lyft driver who also drives for Uber. His car is lease-to-own, paid via Uber. If he doesn’t make $350/week, his car won’t start. – sha
@shashashasha 6:47 AM - 17 Jan 2016
- http://ww2.kqed.org/news/2015/04/24/one-uber-drivers-story-how-he-was-trapped-by-auto-loan-programI don’t know about Lyft, or the new one, but especially for something advertising itself as “Uber but ~Feminist~ in this one specific way”, I seriously don’t have much hope.
I’m pretty sure they would agree with you after only a small discussion about the medallions.
(Frankly, I think I’m a bit frustrated at Uber about this, because wow, you looked at this bleeped-up system and found out how to make a copy of it – without medallions propping it up – so much worse.)
Also, here’s an entire article about how no, Uber drivers are in very few ways their own independent contractors. Comes with a published academic paper and 9 months of collected data. Samples: “Uber’s system enforces blind acceptance of passengers, as drivers are not shown the passenger’s destination or how much they could earn on the fare.” “In order to remain active on the system, drivers must meet an average rating target that hovers around 4.6 out of 5 stars.”
So I think they would agree that there are advantages to not being an “employee” – just that the’re pretty sure Uber deliberately removes most of them.
Unions: Uber, at least, is VERY anti-union. I dunno about Lyft?
Um… okay this post got unfocused and I think I claimed I would keep a consistent argument throughout but I’m not sure I did. I’m ending this now.
Tagged: Uber is EVIL, (And I’m glad we all agree on that fact. And the disagreement is more ‘is their more than a single thing they might have done okay-ly’.).
(Joining the two threads for trackkeepability)
So first of all, Uber is evils georg and I don’t know how bad the situation is with the competitors, other than “less bad” but that’s once again best described as “burying the bar”. I’ve even heard that Uber has an easy time attracting talent because conservative douchebros find the rest of Silicon Valley a bunch of neotenic degenerates who aren’t douchebro-y enough while Uber has a sufficiently respectable and elitist “screw the poor” attitude for them. “Ridesharing” as an idea is excellent and if Uber etc. bust the cartels and then get replaced by better and less abusive alternatives it would probably be the ideal outcome. I don’t oppose fairly maligning things that need to be maligned as long as it’s not used to defend other things that need to be maligned just as well.
And speaking of maligning, that cab driver’s account in huffpost was…pretty much what one’d expect from a working-class cartelmember. Sympathetic, but terrible.
For cabbies to earn a decent living there has to be proper regulation of the industry. Too few cabs and the public isn’t served and too many and drivers can’t make decent money.
If there are “too many” cabs and drivers don’t make decent money, where do the drivers come from? Where do they go if they can’t be cab drivers? Whatever it is, it’s likely to be even worse than being a cab driver who can’t make decent money. (Unless there’s fraud or coercion, which Uber’s financing schemes seem to, unsurprisingly, be very good at. In fact, the financing is exactly as predatory as the medallion cabs’ in Toronto. That thing needs to be stopped with overwhelming force if necessary.)
The article basically says, “we’re poor, and should be allowed to have [disguised welfare]” and I don’t like [disguised welfare]. This would be solved by UBI (I’m starting to keep track of how many times I repeat my standard talking points of “UBI” and “liberalized zoning and better urban planning” (abbr. LZ) because I suspect they are going to come up a lot) so that everyone would make ends meet anyway.
Good jobs are scarce in this city for the working-class and driving a cab is one of those good jobs.
Good jobs are scarce, let’s maintain that scarcity, never mind those who can’t become cab drivers because they can’t get the medallions. Most of the customers are poor so they are effectively subsidized by the few who aren’t. UBI + LZ would help with the one-two of better income and lower housing costs. And unlike a cartel, it would also help those who aren’t cab drivers.
Then we get a broadside of binary politics and applause lights about how there are pros and cons and cons are bad and pros are good and pros must support regulation. As a lel I feel erased and marginalized and oppressed by this discourse, and this pro really needs to check his binary-political privilege. My eyes glazed over because there was no substance.
And then exciting words like gentrification! If 10 000 hipsters really want to move in to where 10 000 poor people live, they really can’t be stopped in any reasonable way. Hipsters are effectively a force of nature, an inevitable calamity, so it’s better that the neighborhood is rebuilt to accommodate 20 000 people so the original residents don’t need to move away just because hipsters move in. LZ, turn rent control into bostadsrett, etc. instead, and try to achieve a mix of classes and races which is the Objectively Correct Way to do cities because it leads to higher social mobility, better services for the poor and black people because they live where the rich and white people live and thus get rich white people services, and because the rich white people have more money they inject it into the local economy (the complaints about staffing bars with non-locals only are perfectly valid though, and I support voluntary initiatives to increase the diversity of workers in hipster bars and would participate if I ran a hipster bar and would pressure bars to participate if such a thing existed and I was a patron of an eligible hipster bar) which is better than poor black people being segregated in separate areas and economies with poor black people only. (If any city suffering from such issues wants to hire me as urban planning czar to experiment with cracking the question of how to replace regular gentrification with this kind of “hybrid gentrification” which could benefit the poor as well, I’m available.)
And then something about unions, and asfdgasfgd the current system is so broken. Right-to-work is bullshit, state-enforced collective bargaining is bullshit, everything in the current labor laws of apparently everywhere is bullshit. Let’s just introduce the UBI and erase most of the labor laws, let workers unionize and negotiate freely, let employers not employ if they disagree, and let someone else outcompete the troglodytes by offering something of actual value to then-inherently-consensual labor because people can just tell the employers to do something anatomically impossible if they don’t make a fair offer. And then something about local politics and “hail regulatory capture!” (total: 3 UBI and 2 LZ)
Okay, back to the rest of it. So Uber is terrible, treats workers like shit, news at eleven. So does the government. Everyone treats poor people like shit, except sometimes other poor people who know what they are dealing with, and I wouldn’t trust regulations a priori as not effectively treating poor people like shit exactly the same. The questions about safety etc. are not exactly lgbtq rights where the state just follows popular opinion and probably is a net negative, and I’m a fan of some things like ADA (or at least parts of it, not familiar with everything) because accessibility is awesome and at least California seemed to have made substantially more progress on that front than Finland, but those things can also be overdone. I don’t know the specifics of ADA requirements so I deliberately avoided commenting on that part.
Sexual assault is where the government obviously should be protecting people, but has proven to be relatively reluctant in practice, which is kind of what I’m referring to with the claim that the markets (broadly interpreted) are what actually deliver the outcomes. Unlike curb cuts and wheelchair ramps, sexual assault is one of those things that are disgustingly open to interpretation, so just banning it doesn’t help much if the actual de facto will to enforce it isn’t there. Cops are often not very cooperative, etc. so the standard tendency is to just sweep stuff under the rug everywhere. If there are actual credible methods for dealing with abuses, and not just a nominal complaint system, then great. But Uber still has the advantage of being inherently more capable of addressing them (because it tracks more data, while hailing a cab from the street is a hail mary in comparison); the same deal with driver safety, as they don’t carry money and riders are less anonymous.
Other regulations obviously sound superficially appealing to many, but my prior is to be skeptical, because often such things seem to devolve into mere barriers to entry with little actual content. At least around here a lot of certifications are basically paying some crony’s company to deliver a specified amount of lessons (which far exceeds the time an effective course would need, and still doesn’t really teach the material half as well) because it managed to lobby such a criterion. And then there’s the fact that there’s no way to avoid all tragedies; I do know that my utopia would have a steady stream of unfortunate fates because the harm from stopping people from having them is too great, and that’s terrible but I don’t pretend I can fix everything YGM. It’s easy to sweep the unfortunate fates under the rug with regulation, and thus we get things like the FDA which prevent spectacular bad things from happening, at the cost of creating far more bad things in a less spectacular form (I wouldn’t necessarily abolish it completely but I’d tone down the strictness a lot and accept that every now and then we’ll get a thalidomide or vioxx as the price of getting important things to the market faster; of course that’s probably impossible in a democracy because the voters would just vote back the regulations as big unspectacular tragedies are more politically viable than smaller spectacular ones, just ask anyone who’s gotten sick from the coal we burn to avoid scary ~nukular powaa~).
And I don’t consider taxpaying necessarily virtuous either; anyone who’s done the GWWC pledge has IMO a carte blanche ethically to do all the tax evasion they want because EA is so much better than the state. Bednets don’t shoot black people. There seems to be a “standard progressive fallacy” that if the tax is nominally paid by the employer it reduces the employer’s profit instead of the workers’ wages, which just isn’t expected in an elastic market; if you slap a tax of $20 on a thing costing $100 which initially is divided 50/50 with the worker and employer, I’d guess the prior for the actual outcome would be more like 40/40 once the market has adjusted, regardless of where it’s hidden. And once again there’s this “a real progressive is a socdem” thing which is really turning me off from progressivism even if I probably agree with many of the values regarding whether poor people should stay poor or not.
The situation with employee vs. contractor vs. fake contractor I agree with, and would definitely prefer to see an actual market instead of this bullshit, but I really think that there should be a better distinction; Uber isn’t evil because it has contractors instead of employees, it’s evil because it lies and calls its employees “contractors”, and this should be addressed properly so that a honest platform for independent workers wouldn’t be saddled with the fallout of re-designating Uber as an employer, because I’m kind of afraid that something along those lines might be a risk.
And surge pricing is very important, and it was called “fucking surge pricing”, so I kind of assumed that the writer of that part disagrees with me. I like flexible prices, I even buy my electricity by the hour (because I can’t buy it by the minute YGM) from Nord Pool Spot. Of course, the actual impact of optimizing my electricity consumption this way isn’t technically “worth it” but my kink is the great chain instead of the party whip (sorry, I simply had to say it) so it’s kind of a hobby and a cheap signaling effort to shift my consumption around the prices because I’m contributing! to! the! market!
Whether Uber is actually worse or just slightly less terrible than traditional cabs when accounting for the totality, not just the drivers (because being in a cartel can definitely be comparatively nice and distorts the data if the people who can’t get a job because of it aren’t accounted for) is not a question I can answer here right now because it would require scrutinizing a lot of data I don’t have. What I can say is that I could totally do better.
To the question in the tags: I do think Uber is doing relatively well (for a certain value of “well”) in many things; the things they claim to be doing sound good on paper and I think the actual problem is the inherent exploitability of a desperate workforce on a shitty market. As long as it exists unscrupulous companies will keep trying to find loopholes for exploiting, and patching the loopholes without addressing the core issues just creates a regulatory hell that leaks constantly and makes legislators and unions play a silly whack-a-mole that ends up whacking a lot of innocent people too. And this is what’s letting Uber get away with being evilness georg and not delivering what it promises, not the lack of enough regulations everywhere.
(via thetransintransgenic)
2 months ago · tagged #i'm only angry at the left because i care about the poor #this is a social democracy hateblog #the best heuristic for oppressed people since sharp stick time · 1,618 notes · source: clarawebbwillcutoffyourhead · .permalink
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