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French taxi drivers are the latest to protest the entry of Uber into their protected market. Their protests feature vandalism and blocking roads. From the AP story:
French taxi drivers pulled out the throttle in an all-out confrontation with the ultra-cheap Uber car service Thursday, smashing livery cars, setting tires ablaze and blocking traffic during a nationwide strike that caught tourists and celebrities alike in the mayhem.
[...] Taxi drivers justified their rage, saying Uber's lowest-cost service UberPop was ruining their livihoods.[sic]
[...] Anger seethed across France, with riot police chasing strikers from Paris' ring road, where protesters torched tires and swarmed onto exit ramps during rush hour on the busy artery that leads to Charles de Gaulle airport. In Toulouse in the southwest, angry taxi drivers dumped flour onto UberPop cars, tires were burned in Nantes in the west, and in Lyon, in the southeast, roads were blocked.
Compare this to Uber protests in London.
Vive le monopole!
Original Submission
(Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 29 2015, @12:02AM
Don't many taxi cab drivers use their own personal vehicles.
And if employees really thought they could do better with a traditional taxi cab company or working for someone else they still have those options. Those that choose Uber do so because it is better than their next best alternative. To take that away would be to force them into worse conditions and to allow someone else to better take advantage of their desperation and pay them less. Just having Uber as an option encourages employers to pay employees more or else face them doing Uber. Of course this is not what big corporations want, they want low pay slaves with no other options which is exactly why they hate Uber so much.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 29 2015, @02:13AM
Don't many taxi cab drivers use their own personal vehicles.
That's incredibly rare. Anyone that can afford a medallion has more profitable things to do with their time than drive. Like sit on their capital and extract rent. Why do you think most drivers are migrants? Don't believe me, ask your driver next time you are in a cab.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by hemocyanin on Monday June 29 2015, @06:00AM
And as long as we keep creating types of "employment" that is at best, a crappy option, we're all on a downward spiral into 3d world wages. To praphrase,
First they came for the ditch diggers, but I wasn't a ditch digger so I didn't care,
Then they came for the taxi drivers, but I wasn't ....
Then they came for the programmers ...
Then they came for the doctors, but I wasn't a doctor so I didn't care (*),
Then they came for me, but everyone was homeless and starving and couldn't help me anyway.
There is no job that can't be either outsourced or uberized. And that's frightening. These processes help only the extremely wealthy at the expense of the regular rich, the middle class, and the poor.
(*) http://articles.latimes.com/2012/jul/25/business/la-fi-healthcare-offshore-20120725 [latimes.com]
(Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 29 2015, @03:39PM
The sentiment is more a scary bedtime than anything. The market adjusts. People find or make new jobs, or live off the state. In 200 years, when robots do almost all manually labor, why do we need people working? We definitely don't need 15 billion white collar workers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 30 2015, @05:03PM
In response to this question by Bill Moyers: What do you see happening to the idea of dignity to human species if this population growth continues at its present rate? Asimov answered: [wikiquote.org]
"It's going to destroy it all. I use what I call my bathroom metaphor.
If two people live in an apartment, and there are two bathrooms, then both have what I call freedom of the bathroom, go to the bathroom any time you want, and stay as long as you want to for whatever you need. And this to my way is ideal. And everyone believes in the freedom of the bathroom. It should be right there in the Constitution.
But if you have 20 people in the apartment and two bathrooms, no matter how much every person believes in freedom of the bathroom, there is no such thing. You have to set up, you have to set up times for each person, you have to bang at the door, aren't you through yet, and so on. And in the same way, democracy cannot survive overpopulation. Human dignity cannot survive it. Convenience and decency cannot survive it. As you put more and more people onto the world, the value of life not only declines, but it disappears. It doesn't matter if someone dies."