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from the employee-rules-for-contractor-pay dept.
Uber remains unprofitable at the same time its drivers work 80-hour weeks for less than minimum wage and without health care packages. They must also cover vehicle costs including fuel, maintenance, and insurance.
The ride-hailing company Uber has made its long-awaited debut as a publicly traded stock, but investor demand for the May 10 initial public offering (IPO) fell short of the company's hopes. Part of the reason is a lingering question about its workforce: Does the still-unprofitable firm deliver low-cost rides for passengers at the expense of decent treatment for drivers, and could the resulting discontent undermine Uber's business model?
The issue over whether Uber drivers are employees (entitled to company benefits such as sick pay and retirement) or contractors (entitled to nothing) has been at the center of the labor controversy since the company launched a decade ago. It is still largely unresolved.
Earlier on SN:
New Research Confirms That Ride-Hailing Companies Are Causing a Ton of Traffic Congestion (2019)
Uber and Lyft Drivers to go on Strike (2019)
Uber Posts $1 Billion Loss in Quarter as Growth in Bookings Slows (2018)
and quite a few more...
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday May 22 2019, @12:05PM (4 children)
What's anti-competitive about the dumping? It's quite competitive. And if the dumping doesn't work and the company goes out of business as a result, then the disease is the cure.
What's also missed here is that the business was really bad and noncompetitive prior to such ride hailing services. Uber and company aren't generating many billions of dollars a year because of dumping, but rather because of really sweet cartel situations across much of the urbanized world.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 22 2019, @03:33PM (3 children)
First off, you're a fucking lazy moron that could have looked that up.
Secondly, dumping has a specific meaning, it's when you price goods at impossibly low prices in an effort to run the competition out of business. If you can't comprehend why that's a problem, you're a grade A moron. That's the business model they're using, after expenses, the drivers wind up with something like 6 cents a mile in pay and no benefits. Taxis that do pay enough for people to support themselves on can't compete with a company that effectively doesn't have to pay it's employees and doesn't have to adhere to any of the regulations that were put into place in order to prevent abuses.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday May 22 2019, @11:03PM (2 children)
Looked what up? And so what? It's not like you matter enough to research anything.
I think you are the grade A moron here. It's only poor for the inefficient competitors.
So what? I'm fine with ending taxis as an industry.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Thursday May 23 2019, @01:38AM (1 child)
You don't see an AC moderated to +5 every day, do you? There's a good reason for above AC being modded up. He's right.
I suggest that you try driving for Uber for a while. It seems pretty informal - you can probably do the paperwork in just an hour or two. You don't sign any long-term contracts it seems. Just do it for a few weeks, in your spare time. 6 cents a mile, after expenses? That's enough to keep a guy in coffee - maybe. Uber has learned how to out-exploit the fly-by-night trucking companies - THEY pay drivers upwards of fifty cents per mile these days.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday May 23 2019, @11:50AM
One person can mod two clueless AC posts to 5 every day. The problem here is that these things are merely assumed to be bad. Sorry, but this is a typical problem with economics debate. Label something as bad, then assume it's bad, then conclude it's bad.
Sorry, I don't see the relevance of that. I suspect you don't either.
One of the things missed here is that Uber is spending aggressively on all kinds of things, particularly marketing. For example, it lost $1.8 billion [nytimes.com] in 2018. Its marketing spending that year was $3.2 billion [businessinsider.com]. It spent a quarter of a billion [techcrunch.com] on self-driving cars. Here, two spending items that that aren't costs of supporting the company's present markets are twice as big as their losses.
In other words, Uber isn't dumping. That burn rate goes to attempts to expand their markets not costs of existing ones.
As to the alleged badness of dumping, I happen to be of the opinion that very little in market activities should be illegal. That includes dumping. Save the law enforcement machinery for serious stuff like fraud or murder. Here, it's bizarre how the interests of taxi cartels (or hypothetical people who work 80 hours a week as Uber drivers) are supposed to be more important than the interests of millions of people who travel every day.
So to summarize, I'm not impressed by the AC's quality of argument, Uber isn't dumping in the first place, and dumping doesn't make it onto my list of the evils of markets in the first place.