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Uber is dropping rates for drivers down from 80 cents/mile to 60 cents/mile

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Re: Uber is dropping rates for drivers down from 80 cents/mile to 60 cents/mile

#61

Post by frotak »

quadcore wrote: post #48
frotak wrote: post #23

My girlfriend tried out the Instacart gig for a while as she finally got her chronic low energy and fatigue addressed through B12 shots and wanted something to occupy her and give her a little extra spending money outside of what's budgeted. That experience was absolutely demoralizing in terms of what she was able to actually make. Granted we live in a lower density city in the southeast so that result makes sense. B…

I guess they should form a union and strike.

I imagine that would only be orders of magnitude harder to manager in this circumstances than in previous generations.

Especially for Uber who can incentivize payouts in an elastic fashion as the available labor pool shrinks. Service quality might decline a bit as available drivers decrease...but Uber won't even have to explicitly go out and find "scabs" - they can simply temporarily surge pricing to entice some of the drivers who either aren't striking or who aren't as committed.

Difficult indeed to really cut at the heart of Uber in this case and really swing some leverage as organized labor.

Especially with the setback face in U.S. court.

Re: Uber is dropping rates for drivers down from 80 cents/mile to 60 cents/mile

#62

Post by Nasrudith »

mbreese wrote: post #19
kerng wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. For Uber both riders and drivers are their customers. So keeping drivers happy and paying them well would pay off long term.

It’s a strange market dynamic though — if Uber pays drivers more per mile, you’d have more people that will want to drive for Uber. This would mean fewer rides (per driver), which would cause the average take-home pay for a driver to be lower. Which would cause drivers to leave, but everything would eventually equilibrate. But if you also lower the per-mile rate (and total take home pay), then drivers won’t have much…

Well it is a matter of what they are trying for - growth or profitability and how much in either direction. Amazon is an example of a success story of 'pump growth and then pump margin when huge'. What they are doing now is losing money and trying to make up for it through scale.

The sustainable equilibrium approach is the summation of profit margin x ride numbers.

Re: Uber is dropping rates for drivers down from 80 cents/mile to 60 cents/mile

#63

Post by frotak »

xref wrote: post #58
quadcore wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess they should form a union and strike.

Paragraph #2 > As independent contractors who can’t unionize, drivers are isolated from one another.

I mean...if they could organize they could have the effective weight of a union - but the circumstances of Uber's employment scheme make that more difficult.

Re: Uber is dropping rates for drivers down from 80 cents/mile to 60 cents/mile

#64

Post by quickthrower2 »

reilly3000 wrote: post #47

Its like they see developers and drivers as two different species. For every twenty something dev that makes $132K, there is a fourty something trying to rebuild a life post-trauma, doing their best to net $13K. Since insurance and gas aren't cheaper, the driver now will net $6K next year, while the dev would jump ship to another company if they didn't get a $6K bonus. While my head understands the economic principle…

Yeah this has me thinking that Uber doesn’t have a long time viable business model, unless driverless gets a real move on.

Re: Uber is dropping rates for drivers down from 80 cents/mile to 60 cents/mile

#65

Post by wonnage »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #39
xiphias2 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My personal belief is that the most unethical thing is the banks driving up asset prices with freely printed money. With sound money workers wouldn't have to work so much to be able to afford rent.

Huh? For most people the delay from paycheck to rent payment is weeks to months, and the inflation suffered on that money is less than one percent. How would locking the amount of money affect that in any notable way? And a housing bubble can still happen in a deflationary economy. Money can still move from the workers to the rich. The effective price goes up even if the dollar amount doesn't.

Inflation was not the point, cheap loans = cheap mortgages = expensive houses.

Re: Uber is dropping rates for drivers down from 80 cents/mile to 60 cents/mile

#66

Post by ehnto »

mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #43
pmorici wrote: post #26

The IRS deduction for business vehicle use in 2019 is 58 cents per mile. So they have effectively reduced the per mile payment to the cost of operating the vehicle. Seems like they are on the verge of turning driving for Uber into a reverse mortgage for your car.

And quite frankly the business model might be to just bank on a steady supply of ex-criminals who have a hard time getting other work and may not understand the financial arrangement they are entering into. Exploit them for a while and when they realize they aren’t making money, just chalk it up to built-in turnover and on to the next unwitting driver.

You don't have to be an ex-criminal to have a hard time getting work and tendancy to get involved in harmful financial arrangements. I would argue, the latter at least, is the median individual.

Re: Uber is dropping rates for drivers down from 80 cents/mile to 60 cents/mile

#67

Post by m23khan »

reilly3000 wrote: post #47

Its like they see developers and drivers as two different species. For every twenty something dev that makes $132K, there is a fourty something trying to rebuild a life post-trauma, doing their best to net $13K. Since insurance and gas aren't cheaper, the driver now will net $6K next year, while the dev would jump ship to another company if they didn't get a $6K bonus. While my head understands the economic principle…

yeh but if u work for financial firm then u see that devs make maybe 50% or less of what investors make.

Re: Uber is dropping rates for drivers down from 80 cents/mile to 60 cents/mile

#68

Post by wonnage »

School-Cotton wrote: post #15
fucking_tragedy wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Isn’t the proper solution to find another job? If more people stopped driving for ridesharing companies the prices would rise to attract them back. Instead of assuming stupidity on one party's end, why not consider that there is a rational explanation for people's behavior? A very rational explanation is that for many people, driving for Uber beats not being able to pay bills, going hungry or being homeless.

I think that's the point of the argument you're replying to. Assuming Uber drivers are rational, it means they're better off driving with Uber than they would be otherwise. In which case, why does Uber attract so much criticism? I'd understand if you criticized the general economic/social system that causes shitty jobs to be people's best option, but why criticize specific actors within it that (1) didn't create it,…

People like you miss the point that companies like Uber could pay drivers more at the expense of paying you less, and come up with all sorts of handwavy econ 101 justifications for why that's morally acceptable.

Re: Uber is dropping rates for drivers down from 80 cents/mile to 60 cents/mile

#69

Post by usaphp »

empath75 wrote: post #59
reilly3000 wrote: post #47

Its like they see developers and drivers as two different species. For every twenty something dev that makes $132K, there is a fourty something trying to rebuild a life post-trauma, doing their best to net $13K. Since insurance and gas aren't cheaper, the driver now will net $6K next year, while the dev would jump ship to another company if they didn't get a $6K bonus. While my head understands the economic principle…

I think it’s obscene how much I make for what I do, having grown up in a blue collar family, working jobs that are far harder than what I do now, making minimum wage. If I didn’t have a family, I’d probably still rather be a software developer at $10 an hour instead of working at a KFC kitchen making what I make as a software developer now.

I don’t know what you do but to me working as a programmer, thinking all day and solving problems, is much harder than just driving around people.

Re: Uber is dropping rates for drivers down from 80 cents/mile to 60 cents/mile

#70

Post by manicdee »

reilly3000 wrote: post #47

Its like they see developers and drivers as two different species. For every twenty something dev that makes $132K, there is a fourty something trying to rebuild a life post-trauma, doing their best to net $13K. Since insurance and gas aren't cheaper, the driver now will net $6K next year, while the dev would jump ship to another company if they didn't get a $6K bonus. While my head understands the economic principle…

It doesn’t need to, but that same developer that will jump ship for a pay rise will also jump ship if their pay is cut to afford higher rates for the workers bringing the actual value to the company.

Why should I take a 50% pay cut just so the people driving the cars earning our incomes can afford to eat?

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