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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

#181

Post by hopler »

tomjakubowski wrote: post #94
pishpash wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is what it should be no? Drivers are still paid by the minute on top of that, which in LA is 21 cents/minute according to the news, working out to $12.6/hour. Not quite $15 minimum wage, but close.

21 cents per minute that you have a passenger in your car. With Uber, but not Lyft, you might get paid a bonus to drive some distance to pick up a passenger. But time you spend adding value to the company by working as slack capacity (and slowly burning down the value of your vehicle) isn't directly compensated.

This is an important concern but paying per mile on the clock isn't the way to solve it.

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

#182

Post by hopler »

seibelj wrote: post #146
adamqureshi wrote: post #118

My brother works for uber, He is 54 years old smokes a pack day and has had 2 heart attacks. He drives a Cadillac and pays $500-month for commercial insurance and has a monthly payment for his car. He has TLC plates to work in NYC ( fees apply) he makes about $300 a day works like a dog 12-14 hours a day. All of his friends are the same (uber drivers in NYC) Here you have the typical uber driver who does this for a l…

I’m sorry about your brother, but I’m not going say Uber’s responsible for his heart attacks and pack a day cigarette habit. Uber might be short changing him on money but you can’t blame them for poor lifestyle decisions.

Uber did destroy his industry.

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

#183

Post by hopler »

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…

This is nothing to do with self driving cars and everything to do with the imbalance of power when management acts an an organized team but labor doesn't.

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

#184

Post by hopler »

frotak wrote: post #61
quadcore wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

That's why effective unions, like every government, use the threat of violece to enforce the social contract. They can delegate completely to the government if they can win recognition as employees (they aren't ICs under a reasonable reading of law) and jump through the appropriate hoops to get a closed shop.

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

#185

Post by rightbyte »

creato wrote: post #77
frotak wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

I mean, the surge in pricing wouldn't even be a thing someone has to do. It would just happen automatically. That's the whole problem with this issue: Uber has made the market for taxis/rides incredibly liquid, which has driven the prices down to pretty much exactly the marginal costs. There are plenty of people who have already sunk the cost of a car, and have nothing else to do, so it still makes economic sense to…

Uber operates with a loss. The prices are under marginal cost. The drivers have no scale benefits like ordinary Taxi companies when it comes to buying cars or maintenance.

It only makes economical sense to drive for Uber with the car if you can't sell it for a good price (you know the car is good and not abused, the buyer doesn't) and that you don't plan on buying a new car after the wheels fall off on the present one, or you need to liquidize your assets a little bit, i.e. getting approx. 100USD for decreasing the value of the car and buying gas driving for Uber for 100USD.

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

#186

Post by remote_phone »

akudha wrote: post #161
remote_phone wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea that Lyft and Uber prey on these “people who can’t find jobs” in record low employment is laughable. There are hundreds of thousands of drivers for Lyft and Uber in California alone. If these were only those poor victims that were preyed upon by Lyft then that would be a huge number. The fact is they aren’t victims or preyed upon. They know how much they get paid and if they want to take the job, they can. I…

If they don’t want, there are plenty of other jobs out there Maybe there are lots of jobs there, but do these jobs give the flexibility of working whenever one wants, like Uber does? In life, nothing is as simple as that. Applying the same logic, we can say if a woman is mistreated by her husband/bf, she can simply leave him. If a manager is bad, find another job. If a country is hostile to immigrants, leave and move…

So now Lyft is forced to not only give 100% flexibility to its drivers but also pay above market rates as well? Why? The point is the job is flexible but it pays lower than other jobs. If you are okay with that then take it. If not, leave it. Why does Lyft have to pay more than what the drivers are worth to them as well as provide 100% flexibility?

If lyft/Uber/instacart are forced to make them employees instead of contractors then the first thing they will lose is the flexibility. They will likely not be allowed to work for other companies and have to drive X number of hours, etc. The drivers can’t have their cake and eat it too.

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

#187

Post by xrd »

maximente wrote: post #143
xrd wrote: post #139

I just got back from Brazil. There is a startup ride sharing service called 99 that is interesting. As a comparison, a ride that costs 40 R$ (~$12 USD) on Uber will cost half that on 99. And, I heard while I was there that incredibly 99 pays the drivers more. I don't know if this is a technical advancement that 99 hasn't needed to make the massive investment that Uber did now that lots more is understood about the ri…

in Colombia, there's an app that allows the person soliciting the ride to offer a price, then various drivers can either counter offer or take the fare as bid

As a foreigner, I would hate that choice. I want to use an app that makes me feel like the parties are aligned on the agreement. When the driver didn't cancel my fare, it made me suspect he was needing to cheat me to make it fair, and I stopped using 99 completely since I started to assume everyone would need to do something like that to make money. A poor marketplace if that is the case.

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

#188

Post by pxue »

mdorazio wrote: post #107
kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They aren't profitable because they're burning money on crap outside of matchmaking riders with drivers.

Do you actually have numbers to support that assertion? I have a hard time believing it.

Read lyfts s-1 filling. Under"cost of revenue" I'd imaging Uber would be similar

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

#189

Post by akudha »

remote_phone wrote: post #186
akudha wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they don’t want, there are plenty of other jobs out there Maybe there are lots of jobs there, but do these jobs give the flexibility of working whenever one wants, like Uber does? In life, nothing is as simple as that. Applying the same logic, we can say if a woman is mistreated by her husband/bf, she can simply leave him. If a manager is bad, find another job. If a country is hostile to immigrants, leave and move…

So now Lyft is forced to not only give 100% flexibility to its drivers but also pay above market rates as well? Why? The point is the job is flexible but it pays lower than other jobs. If you are okay with that then take it. If not, leave it. Why does Lyft have to pay more than what the drivers are worth to them as well as provide 100% flexibility? If lyft/Uber/instacart are forced to make them employees instead of c…

If not, leave it.

Again, life isn't as simple as that. Maybe it is easy for highly skilled software engineers to pick jobs of their choosing, but for majority of the workforce, it isn't as simple as "leave it". Which is what I am trying to explain.

I am simply pointing out that the whole situation is one sided, with these companies having all the power, and Uber (Lyft, Instacart etc) are simply taking advantage of it and exploiting their workforce. Sure, from a pure ruthless business view, it makes sense to pay as little as possible and extract as much as possible. A lot of companies do it and legally, they are not in the wrong. Ethically and morally, they are. And yes, they do prey upon the weakest among us and they do exploit them, you can sugar coat it any which way, but the fact remains.

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

#190

Post by jtms »

bksenior wrote: post #83
tunesmith wrote: post #54

So many parallels to the music industry here. You have a vc-funded company, operating at a loss, commoditizing the "talent" (drivers/musicians), thereby conditioning the audience (passengers/listeners) to expect an unsustainable cost for the service, using that loss leader mentality to drive other solutions out of business, until they argue or take action that the talent should expect even lower rates than they've hi…

What? One is a marginal cost business and one is not. Not a great take.

I disagree, there are more parallels than not
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