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.
And there ARE alternatives, in more and more places – if you need to hail via your phone or pay with your card you can still support drivers that have to have accessible cars and have unions and are further down the road of creating reasonable working conditions and compensation for their drivers, you can use Way2Ride and Arro and quite a few others at this point, depending on where you are. And they don’t have fucking surge pricing.
Rideshare drivers could be held to the same standards if the rideshare companies wanted (aka. were forced by pressure from the public) to implement proper accountability. Cab companies can ignore reports that don’t have enough proof/social clout to get them in trouble with cops/social media, and at least Uber can reliably check who drove whom from its databases so abuses are inherently more investigable (and that’s why not taking sufficient action when they happen is even more damning).
Surge pricing is the best. I’m totally a fan of surge pricing, speaking as a person who has once hit a 3.1 multiplier. Supply and demand. I find it slightly ironic that a post simultaneously supports higher compensation for drivers and rejects it when it happens in its most natural form. Surge pricing gives the drivers extra compensation, to reward them for their work when their contribution is the most important. In fact, I get a slight joy from paying surge prices because it means that not only is the system working and probably making the waiting times a lot shorter, but also that I am paying the worker the fair price (some terms and conditions apply; “less unfair” is closer to reality) of the moment, not an unfair fixed rate that deprives them of the full value of their work. I ship free markets and economic fairness so hard.
Also, why has nobody mentioned the downsides of being an employee? Control over one’s means of production for example. Driving a cab is materially not that capital-intensive, so of course the System (I’m antropomorphizing it because this is one of the things that makes me angry enough to warrant it even if there probably isn’t such intentional malice involved) creates alternative barriers to entry to establish an owning class that can get free money from others’ work without needing to create any value (or comparable value) themselves. An assembly line worker can’t just save up a bit of cash and start their own factory, so they will remain bound to wage slavery and dependent on the local capitalist, but anyone with a car can start carrying people around unless something is done to stop it.
Enter regulation, to legislatively deprive people of the means of production even when they materially could control them pretty easily.
When one needs a medallion to drive a taxi, and the medallions are artificially scarce and thus expensive as fuck and thus probably owned by companies or rich people instead of the workers, the capitalists don’t need to fear competition. They just send the cops (their cops, it’s always the interests of the powerful that are protected and served first and foremost) to chase down anyone who doesn’t submit to vehicular serfdom in which the non-value-creating rentier class exploits the workers and slaps a little bit of socdem PR like minimum wages on top like a pink yoplait, and if challenged, fills the media with propaganda about how evil it is to only take 20% instead of $100 a day (yes, the taxi capitalists, propped up by the state apparatus of violence and nothing more, make the workers toil the equivalent of one and a half days of minimum wage before they get to keep a single cent to themselves; compared to that pure rent and exploitation, ridesharers’ 20% for something that actually creates value (as a customer, I’m willing to pay slightly more for the convenience etc.) seems downright saintly). When a permit to work costs a million dollars, the industry is inherently controlled by millionaires.
(Incidentally, this is also why I get immensely angry at anyone on the left who ever says the words “licensed brothels” because the rule #1 of communism is you never enclose the commons and licensed legalization is a fucking forcible enclosure act; decriminalization and deregulation is how one does not piss in the cereal of sex workers. Free sex workers are inherently in control of their own means of production, and only violence can take it away so why the fuck do so many leftists want to turn them from independent workers to brothel proletariat ausetdiuesideutoiuuhunao (that’s dvorak for “asdf…”))
As far as unions are concerned, my emotional reaction to them is quite… all over the place. Free unions make my brain go all solidarity! liberty! workers of the world unite! while the instant the state gets involved and enforces collective bargaining my brain does a 180 and starts screaming about leeches! and moochers! and redwashed rentiers! (”right to work” laws are just as terrible; I’m definitely not taking a knee-jerk “pro-business” stance); so I’m not exactly the most impartial observer to comment on them. But I’m not surprised that tomato pickers in Florida (left outside normal labor laws because redwashed rentiers always need a precariat beneath them to exploit) extracted concessions from even Walmart by voluntary organizing, using tactics that would be illegal for corporatist state-sanctioned unions; while stevedores in Finland get super-comfy wages and benefits because they can nuke the economy any time they want and labor regulations prevent them from being replaced with less extortionate and rentseeky laborers (and they still threw a hissy fit and nuked the economy a few years ago because they wanted their employers to pay them an entire years’ wages for zero work if they got laid off, despite being already entitled to 500 days [sic!] of state-mandated income-dependent unemployment insurance only the middle class gets because fuck the poor and precarious).
And obvious disclaimer: Uber is evil anyway. But it’s not evil because it competes with taxi capitalists, it’s evil despite competing with them. The obvious ideal solution is to cut out the middleman and create an independent, worker-owned-and-controlled system for tracking reputation, ensuring safety, processing payments and matching riders to passengers (and having surge pricing! surge pricing is important!), but even ridesharing corporations are actually doing a lot of things right and should be only fairly maligned, instead of unfairly.
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2 months ago · tagged #free markets x fairness is my otp #the best heuristic for oppressed people since sharp stick time #i'm only angry at the left because i care about the poor #this is a social democracy hateblog #bitching about the country of birth · 1,618 notes · source: clarawebbwillcutoffyourhead · .permalink