Uber Is Locking Out NYC Drivers Mid-Shift to Lower Minimum Pay

Hyperbole about equating selling your time to "lives [being] bought and sold" aside, I'm not sure what exactly the issue with such a trade is. Did the market cause such desperate circumstances in the first place? Would the people be better served by not being able to work for money, and (presumably) starve instead? Moreover, if you're upset at the prospect of having to trade a non-trivial proportion of your life in exchange for resources, shouldn't your displeasure be directed at the universe for having entropy (which all living beings must expend time/energy to fight against) in the first place?

If someone during the current period of time can’t figure out they can do similar money for less time at McDonald’s, they do not possess the financial literacy required to “get that”.

Here is a quick brainstorm of one possible fix, without any promises I didn’t overlook a flaw in this idea: maybe the minimum wage per some suitably granular time period when not currently or recently driving a passenger could be made to vary somewhat depending on whether enough other vehicles from the fleet are in the area, and could then potentially have a percentage penalty subtracted for not accepting and timely arriving to a high enough percentage of offered ride opportunities.

Plus, of course, if some drivers game the system, Uber and Lyft can notice those abusive patterns in the data and stop working with them, disincentivizing other drivers from similar abuse. That’s the biggest countermeasure. The problem we are discussing is only Uber and Lyft abruptly locking out a driver mid-shift purely to save money. Nobody is objecting to Uber ending a relationship abruptly due to documented driver abuse or even doing so without driver misconduct but with reasonable notice.

And no, I don’t assume that movers are already paired up with customers. They present the minimum number of billable hours per visit as part of their standard terms during the first conversation with a new potential customer, and at least in the residential moving space, customers don’t generally argue with it.

The reason customers don’t argue with it is largely because movers can easily get another customer by doing almost nothing (at least in the big cities where I’ve lived) whereas it’s a hassle for customers to juggle too many different potential moving companies when planning the move.

But another factor is that the minimum hourly rate billings are reasonable, typically 1-3 hours per visit in my personal experience, likely because there is enough competition among moving companies that offering unreasonable terms will lose them customers.

I completely realize the power dynamic is different in the ride-sharing space, and I acknowledged that in my previous comment. But that just changes how the negotiation has to occur in order to balance out Uber and Lyft’s disproportionate power, not whether it can work in a gig worker context.

That is true: initially the business model exploited people and society before we could mobilize our slow government to force them to be more decent and less exploitative.

We as a society, acting through our government, aren't under an obligation to make sure every business model that everyone wants to use is legal, and we decided their old one shouldn't be, because it was exploitative.

> It was only due to the minimum wage law... that caused uber to restrict when drivers could take rides.

The law didn't cause that. Uber's decisions caused that, and they could have decided differently. Indeed, the decent response for Uber and Lyft would be to figure out the spirit of the law, and comply with that as well as the letter. Treating drivers decently, as employees, would be one way to accomplish that. Another way might be lowering ride prices when supply exceeds demand.

In contrast, the companies are trying to eat their cake and have it too, by continuing to be exploitative with these actions in the article. Unfortunately they will need to be slapped down again, because the actions are illegal, as pointed out in my post above.

> the minimum wage law... essentially forced uber to pay for time even if there wasn't any riders

Correct: that is precisely what we wanted when we passed the law. This isn't an error that we need Uber and Lyft's help fixing. If Uber decides what work its workers can do and when (perhaps because it's more profitable for Uber that way), then that makes the workers, employees.

Big deal if it doesn't run as fast as you'd like. That doesn't make it not a train.

Also, MTA buses run at a normal vehicle speed. So I don't even know what you're complaining about. You really need to get to your terminal, what, 5 minutes faster? You need a bullet train between terminals or something?

Yes I know what trains in Europe are like. You're changing the subject. Your point seemed to be that NYC airports aren't connected to convenient public train transportation, but the fact is that 2 out of 3 of them are.

Even if it's not technically the MTA subway itself that is the train that brings you directly to your terminal. Still, quite literally, 100%, a train.