"Uber is having a hard time finding enough people with cars willing to work for them.
To solve that problem, the company has raised $1 billion to start Xchange Leasing, a sub-prime lender with the sole purpose of getting poor people into new cars so they can drive for the ride-hailing service.
If you’ve got a license and are willing to drive, Uber will hook you up with a new car, no matter how bad your credit. To make sure you make your payments, though, Uber will automatically deduct them weekly from what you earn as a driver. If you don’t drive enough, or you fail to make your lease payment, Xchange has folks to take the car back.
As for the terms, well, here’s what Mark Williams, a lecturer at Boston University’s business school told Bloomberg News: "The terms, the way they’re proposed, are predatory and are very much driven toward profiting off drivers.“
"
Uber is in the sub-prime auto business - Houston Chronicle (via shinyandloud)
i’m so happy i’ve deleted my account with this shitty company which also doesn’t care about sexual assault or ppl’s money
(via starbelliedking)
———————————————————————
I have a lot of patients who miss most of their appointments because they don’t have cars, and can’t afford them because they don’t have a job. Half the time they can’t get a job because they don’t have a car, and the other half it’s because they have kids, or don’t have a degree, or have a record, or whatever. These people are trapped and nobody has anything to say to them except “Haha, go starve to death”
Whenever they ask for a loan, the bank turns them down because their credit isn’t good enough, which makes sense because these people are poor and usually maxed out on their credit card bills.
Uber is offering leases that give them a car and a job all at once. The terms of the lease say that they need to put down a $250 deposit, and if working for Uber doesn’t work out for them, they can give them back the car and lose the deposit. If you work for Uber a reasonable amount, you’ll be able to pay off the car and make money to afford things like food and housing. I don’t know if Uber’s terms are the best, but they come bundled and easy for people who don’t have the resources to comparison-shop and coordinate a bunch of different actors.
What I find shocking about this is that the only way anybody can think of to help poor people is to wait for it to be convenient to Uber to do so. Uber is like the only functional part of our society right now. Banks, governments, other businesses, etc, say “leave these people to die”, and Uber is actually coming up with win-win solutions.
And so of course everybody hates them and wants to destroy them, and probably they’ll succeed. They’ll just say “It’s ‘exploitative’ because if you don’t pay the lease, they take the car back”, and everyone will ban them for being mean. Okay. Good luck finding someone willing to offer a non-exploitative loan then. This is why there are no good routes out of poverty anymore.
(via slatestarscratchpad)
From the Bloomberg article linked by the Houston Chronicle article:
“””Two weeks after he picked up the car, Uber deactivated his driver account for no specific reason, he said. Durham is now struggling to make payments. Every month, he calls Uber to pay over the phone. If he keeps the lease to the end of its term, he’d end up paying Uber about $31,200. To buy the car, he’d need to pay Uber another $6,000 to cover the car’s residual value, he says. The fair purchase price of the car, according to Kelley Blue Book, is $16,419.”””
Bloomberg claims that for the article they interviewed 6 people who did the lending program. Including the above, they talked about two people who it failed hard for. They talked about one person who it is succeeding for – that person was referred to them by Uber.
Uber has shown itself REPEATEDLY to be incredibly irresponsible, exploitative, and manipulative – so forgive me if I am suspicious that a solution that they propose, manage, and control literally almost everything it is possible to control in the situation might not be a “win-win”.
I might be able to be convinced that this specific maneuver of theirs is not exploitative, but it’ll require a much stronger argument than just “well, people need something roughly shaped like this”.
Like I agree this is shaped like something that people need – but Uber is the WRONG corporation to be anywhere NEAR this.
(via thetransintransgenic)
Of course, what this situation warrants is for others to start offering better terms than Uber to steal their worker-customers from them. And obviously the change of all the pointless public sector spending on ~*~programs~*~ that don’t actually do jack shit for the people they claim to be helping, into an universal impartial incorruptible basic income that would render those exploitable subprime people a bit more prime and a bit less exploitable to begin with.
(via thetransintransgenic)
3 weeks ago · tagged #win-win is my superpower · 2,054 notes · source: houstonchronicle.com · .permalink
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