SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Uber will lay off 3,700 people from its customer support and recruiting teams, the company announced in a Wednesday regulatory filing. That figure represents 14 percent of Uber's 26,900 employees, CNBC reports.
Uber has already frozen hiring, and CEO Dara Khosrowshahi will forego his salary for the remainder of the year, the company says.
The Information reported last week that Uber's ride bookings have fallen 80 percent from the same period a year earlier. Uber has tried to compensate by expanding its delivery business, launching two new services called Uber Connect and Uber Direct. But rides have historically been the largest part of Uber's business, making an 80 percent drop difficult to stomach.
Last week, Uber's main US rival, Lyft, announced 1,000 layoffs—a 17-percent reduction of the company's workforce.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday May 08 2020, @09:18PM
The bright bulbs trying to pay for this scheme will start with the usual taxing the rich. The rich will remove every asset that they can (often very easily since a good portion of them never lived in the US in the first place and already experienced with such things) with the early result that much of the expected tax base evaporates overnight. I figure they'll move on to the easy targets next - people who have jobs and of course, taxing the UBI itself say through sales and excise taxes. We'll probably see a lot of gimmicky taxes like sin taxes with a generous definition of what sin is.
Corruption will of course get worse, since only the more fraudulent can promise that everything will get better and the gullible will vote for that to protect or even increase their UBI checks. Meanwhile, with the combo of people dropping out of the workforce and things just costing more due to higher labor costs, we'll see the peculiar phenomena of increasing amounts of money and work required to do even mundane things. This is the "stall", a sharp reversal in productivity coming as a combination of higher cost labor, business which relies on substantial government support and corruption instead of the providing of services to prosper, and government entities which grow ever less capable of fulfilling basic functions.
I think the whole thing would end in a few years with a bout of austerity as external creditors impose a financial discipline of sorts, which would probably include a great curbing of the UBI, a moderate correction of the excesses of the past. Past that who knows? Civil war, mergers with other countries, or just another plodding country in the world are possible futures.