Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Uber Plans Millions in Back Pay After Shortchanging NYC Drivers

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 234 posts

Re: Uber Plans Millions in Back Pay After Shortchanging NYC Drivers

#51

Post by DanBC »

gaius wrote: post #42
SilasX wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Someone else pays for the upkeep of those roads, without which their business could not exist. Everyone pays gas taxes that scale with the amount driven and therefore their use of the roads. Any unusually high driving would be made up by the higher gas consumption and the resultant taxes thereon. If anything: 1) Taxi routes are concentrated in cities, where they have lower miles per gallon and thus pay more taxes pe…

No, the government collects income taxes from everyone to provide universal health care through the NHS. Uber's drivers pay the social insurance taxes on their income. You've clearly not researched just how much Employer's NI is. It's a lot more than an employee pays. It's clearly not a subsidy if a company is paying their fair share in taxes. Also here in the UK we have workers on income support (welfare) because th…

> Also here in the UK we have workers on income support (welfare) because their employers underpay them

To qualify for income support a person has to be working less than 16 hours per week.

You also have to be one of these:

> pregnant or a carer or a lone parent with a child under 5 or, in some cases, unable to work because you’re sick or disabled

(There are 3 other requirements too)

The UK benefits system is comprehensive and complex, and there are some people in full time work who get benefits. This is a good thing - we want people to work. We want people to have at least a minimum wage. We don't want to set the minimum wage too high because it reduces jobs.

Some benefits are specifically "in work" benefits - working tax credit and child tax credit.

Re: Uber Plans Millions in Back Pay After Shortchanging NYC Drivers

#52

Post by accountyaccount »

Jabanga wrote: post #22
burkaman wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon? Spotify? Square? Grubhub? Robinhood? And probably lots more. You can have respect for people and laws and still succeed.

One could argue not all laws are moral and that following immoral laws is emphasising your own interests over those of humanity. If abiding by the law was people's only priority, there would be no widespread usage of public key cryptography (it was extremely illegal in the early 1990s, and only gained legal acceptance after cypherpunks pushed back against the laws and proliferated its use), which would have prevented…

Don't give me this happy horseshit masquerading as philosophy, this isn't about what "laws" or "ethics" are — Uber is constantly treating their drivers, who are people, like garbage.

Re: Uber Plans Millions in Back Pay After Shortchanging NYC Drivers

#53

Post by salesguy222 »

Haha wow, meanwhile at Oracle, having our commissions miscalculated by a team of experts is a feature, not a bug.

And somehow those miscalculations are NEVER in our favor, and always result in delayed payment.

It's like working for Crytek, but even worse.

Re: Uber Plans Millions in Back Pay After Shortchanging NYC Drivers

#54

Post by kirykl »

metamet wrote: post #21
DoofusOfDeath wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're both right and wrong. Uber is better than taxis for riders, and worse than taxis (in some ways) for drivers. Also consider that some Uber drivers couldn't realistically become taxi drivers in their spare time, and perhaps some of them would prefer to be underpaid by Uber rather than not working at all.

Has it always been that way though? I remember when they first launched in SF, and I remember drivers being pretty excited about how much they were making driving. I remember talking to some folks who also drove taxi, mentioning that Uber paid them substantially more.

Driver quality correlates with price/earnings per mile on an S-Curve. Per mile earnings and per mile prices have both dropped.

Re: Uber Plans Millions in Back Pay After Shortchanging NYC Drivers

#55

Post by blackguardx »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #44
bdcravens wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My first Uber was at RubyConf in San Diego a few years ago. We (a couple of devs that I met) were downtown at a meetup the day before, and we were going back to our hotel, a couple miles away downtown - nothing out of the ordinary. Our Uber driver had trouble communicating, and was asking us for directions. He revealed he had only been in town a couple of days. I was in the front seat, with two other devs in the back…

Can't say I've ever been treated to the sexual non-history of my taxi driver, but last weekend we grabbed a NYC cab with a driver who had no GPS, and no smart phone - we had to give him turn-by-turn directions to our destination in the Bronx. I don't expect my cabbies to have The Knowledge, but it would be nice if I didn't have to have my phone out the whole time, watching for upcoming turns and highway exits. At lea…

Was this one of the green cabs that service the outer boros? If not, normal cabs usually concentrate on Manhattan and have only basic knowledge of everywhere else. It's helpful if you know the name of the neighborhood you are going to as well.

Re: Uber Plans Millions in Back Pay After Shortchanging NYC Drivers

#56

Post by robbyking »

BoiledCabbage wrote: post #2

This company is absolutely astounding. The objects you hold up as ideals says a lot about the culture of your environment and its values. It is extremely disappointing that Uber is considered a crown jewel of Silicon Valley.

I have absolutely no respect for Travis Kalanick; he's the personification of a "the rules don't apply to me" attitude, and he's been rewarded for it time and time again.

Re: Uber Plans Millions in Back Pay After Shortchanging NYC Drivers

#58

Post by robbiemitchell »

This reminds me of how Seamless (now merged with GrubHub) took its percentage cut (~10-15%) of every meal delivery order after including taxes AND tip! That was as of a few years ago dating all the way back -- not sure whether it's still going on.

Re: Uber Plans Millions in Back Pay After Shortchanging NYC Drivers

#59

Post by ehsankia »

DoofusOfDeath wrote: post #15
iamdave wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is extremely disappointing that Uber is considered a crown jewel of Silicon Valley The common refrain I hear is "they're better than taxis" and more and more evidence is mounting against them (at the corporate level) that suggests: no, they really aren't.

I think you're both right and wrong. Uber is better than taxis for riders, and worse than taxis (in some ways) for drivers. Also consider that some Uber drivers couldn't realistically become taxi drivers in their spare time, and perhaps some of them would prefer to be underpaid by Uber rather than not working at all.

Right, when we say Uber is better than Taxis, we generally mean "the Uber model is better than Taxis". We can exchange Uber with Lyft or any other company that works with thath model. It's about the general environment that ride sharing brings.

Things like how using an app makes hailing a ride easier, how having a rating system forces drivers and riders to behave better, how mobile payment removes the awkwardness of exchanging money, etc.

There's nothing specific to Uber in there, and when it does come to specifics, Uber is pretty awful as we've seen.

Re: Uber Plans Millions in Back Pay After Shortchanging NYC Drivers

#60

Post by manarth »

SilasX wrote: post #46
gaius wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the government collects income taxes from everyone to provide universal health care through the NHS. Uber's drivers pay the social insurance taxes on their income. You've clearly not researched just how much Employer's NI is. It's a lot more than an employee pays. It's clearly not a subsidy if a company is paying their fair share in taxes. Also here in the UK we have workers on income support (welfare) because th…

>You've clearly not researched just how much Employer's NI is. It's a lot more than an employee pays. If it works anything like the US, there is a portion[1] assessed to the employer and to the employee. If you report income as an independent contractor/self-employment, you pay both sides of it (since otherwise people would artificially class themselves as contractors to pay less). Are you saying Uber drivers in the…

  If you report income as an independent contractor/self-employment,
  you pay both sides of it (since otherwise people would artificially
  class themselves as contractors to pay less).
In general, that's true in the UK, but because of the various allowances, categories, and thresholds, if Uber is a contracting company, and the drivers are individual freelancers/contractors, less tax is paid.

There are complicated rules to ensure this is only allowed in cases of genuine freelancing/self-employment (IR35 is one part of those rules), but Uber has previously lost court cases on parts of those rules, where drivers were ruled to be employees rather than freelancers [1].

In IT consultancy (and other high-paid jobs), it's generally more tax-efficient for the worker to be an independent contractor (but has to satisfy various rules to do so). For lower-paid jobs like driving for Uber (and the general "gig economy"), it's in the companies' interest to label the worker as "self-employed", which means the worker misses out on all sorts of worker protection regulations whilst the employer saves on costs and taxes. Many companies skirt the limit of the regulations, and end up in court as a result.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/oct/28/uber-uk-t...

Post reply on HN