Posts by BenWilson
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Speaker: Confessions of an Uber Driver…, in reply to Katita,
This in The Guardian today Has convenience turned you into a monster?
Heh, I had a right wing rider in stitches when I pointed out that the natural sympathy an exploited driver might get from a left wing passenger typically ended when the time came to pay the bill. He almost pissed himself.
ETA: I got one of my rare and much appreciated real rewards, a positive comment. A 5 star isn’t even a reward. It’s just the absence of a punishment.
ETA2: But I'll explain all that when I get to writing up on the ratings system.
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Speaker: Confessions of an Uber Driver…, in reply to Jason Kemp,
Don't give up all hope. Drivers here are working on getting that fair say. It won't happen immediately, but it could happen sooner than you think. I'll have plenty to say about this in future posts.
It could be a fair system, and a reasonably paid job. It's really not that much change before it is, in fact, fair. It has a lot going for it in terms of the way it works. I was hoping in this series of posts to say that it has a future in this country, if it stops the race to the bottom and starts acting fairly and legally. It could end up in an unassailable position, if it can get the drivers on its side. It's strange that it has absolutely no idea how to do that - I can only put it down to the erroneous idea that it is, in fact, a tech stock, which pretty much works like a tech company. It's not. It's a transport organization, and that works differently to how these Silicon Valley people think.
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Speaker: Confessions of an Uber Driver…, in reply to Alfie,
They’d attract investors to take care of that side of the business and continue to make even larger profits without the annoying involvement of those pesky wet robots.
I don't think there's hundreds of billions of dollars in venture capital just lying around dying to get ripped off for peanuts by Uber. The cost of writing their entire app and everything it does would only be in the tens of millions range. There are already several major competitors. There really is only one thing Uber has over them - it just doesn't give a shit about the laws of the countries it's racing to the money pot in, and it sure doesn't care about ripping off it's "partners".
But they're welcome to try, of course. It makes for great sci fi to think of the terrible future in which the genius corporation unleashes an army of robot cars. In reality land, Uber is crashing head first into organized labour all around the world, and backpedals furiously where-ever that happens. If their real plan is to rely on the future accelerating and delivering them robot cars so that organized labour can't possibly get a fair slice of what is already a pretty generous pie, then the childish naivety of their labour relations just got eclipsed by their even less realistic vision of the future, and the future of app-based taxi services is simply going to be one where Lyft or other similar apps dominate, and Uber will crash in a screaming, but hardly undeserved, heap.
But I don't think that really is their plan. Robot cars of the future are more likely to be their rhetorical assault, their way of saying that driver labour is essentially worthless, to justify the incredibly poor rates of pay they are aiming for. It doesn't matter if robot cars are pretty much pie-in-the-sky, the idea of them is damaging enough to the concept of a fair day's pay for a fair day's labour.
They're very good at this kind of tactical rhetoric. The use of the term "ridesharing" is a classic example. They're not ridesharing, but they trade on general public ignorance of what the idea is to hide the fact that they're simply not abiding to laws that actually have good reasons behind them. They want the public to think that there's something conceptually different about an Uber ride to an ordinary taxi ride, that somehow a new economy got created that works by different rules. Stuff and nonsense. It's nothing more than the same economy that always existed, just a bit more efficient, and far, far more effectively organized to deprive its workers of rights. It's exploitative capitalism, plain and simple.
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Sorry to sound a bit ranty about that, it’s a pet hate of mine. Robotics has been around for decades and yet it hasn’t ended human labour. Not even close, it’s still way cheaper to set up factories that aren’t robotic, even in businesses where the robotics are well developed. Because humans are amazingly cheap machines for what they can do.
To me the idea that Uber’s wet dream is the replacement of drivers is just symptomatic of how incredibly brutally and coldly they undervalue the one resource that made their entire fortune possible. It shows that they literally see their work forces as in the same category as machines, they literally think the same way about the flesh and blood out there making them billions as they would about a fucking robot. It pisses me off. Not just because it disgustingly undervalues humans, but because it’s so erroneous in its understanding of what they even do. Their wet dream won’t work.
There’s something childish in the way they think. It might even seem cutely naive if it wasn’t so goddamned exploitative. Apparently the initial contacts that the drivers have been getting recently have involved staff from Uber being surprised that the drivers are incredibly pissed off. It’s like they can’t even conceive that the way they treated us all was so fucked up that the nation doesn’t even seem to believe it happened, and has no answer. Yet.
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Speaker: Confessions of an Uber Driver…, in reply to Alfie,
The capital cost. Why should people living in cities pay the overheads of vehicle ownership when a cheap, electric, driverless car will take you wherever at a reasonable cost.
There's reasons why driverless cars would be awesome IF they happen before I die.
But why would it need to be an Uber? Currently they are a website, a database and an app. They don't even own any transport infrastructure anywhere. What you're talking about is a giant and fundamental transformation of their entire business model into something that is completely different to what they have. They'd be hardware suppliers who had to operate with proper transport licenses all around the world, insuring themselves and maintaining their own entire fleets. They don't currently do that anywhere. Their whole business model is built around distancing themselves from the actual dirty business of getting customers around. They don't even supply the routing software that helps me get from A to B, they just call Google for that.
Have a think about how much it has cost them to set up a network of several thousand cars with drivers here? Almost NOTHING except legal bills, a sales force, and whatever giveaway rides they use to buy market share. The drivers themselves paid for everything else. Have a think about how much several thousand driverless cars would cost to set up, if they cost, say, $100,000 at the start. We're talking $200 million in set up costs.
There's no way that they are throwing that kind of money at NZ. Then they'd have to get regulators on board, something they have zero experience with, quite the opposite, their primary experience is in getting offside with regulators. Then they'd have the much harder job of turning profit on all that capital investment. Gas to pay, insurance to pay, depreciation to write off, maintenance of vehicles to manage. Imagine the size and experience of a support team keeping 2,000 machines on the road, the staff cost? It wouldn't be the current 15 odd salespeople that they employ in NZ. Imagine the nightmare involved any time a software upgrade has to be rolled out in a way that requires some kind of hard-restart? Or what sort of disaster plan would need to be in place the day their servers die, or the vehicles find themselves unable to connect to the network?
This is just in a comparatively small city like Auckland. Can we really see Uber managing the current growth around the world of about 50,000 driver per month? 50,000 cars per month at 100k each is 5 billion in capital expenditure every month, 60 billion a year. I really don't see them being able to do anything like that. They're a software company, not a hardware company. The margins just wouldn't be there. Each car would take years to pay itself off, because it would still have to be cheap to be competitive. It would have to be cheaper than the cost to people of buying and using a driverless car themselves. Quite a lot cheaper because it would not be as good to have to use a shared car than to have your own one with all your own stuff already in it. The margins would be TINY.
So, yeah, driverless cars, YAY! Boon to the world! All part of Uber's big dream? Only if their dreams are usually wet. In practice, it's the end of Uber.
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Speaker: Confessions of an Uber Driver…, in reply to Alfie,
Keep your eye on the bigger picture. Uber is actively involved in developing driverless cars.
I really don't see this as anywhere near the problem it is popularly seen to be. For starters, this is NZ, not Silicon Valley. And secondly, once driverless cars are possible, I think Uber's days are also numbered. Why pay Uber, when you could just own the car yourself?
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Speaker: Confessions of an Uber Driver…, in reply to MargaretB,
Thanks for your comment MargaretB. It looks like you're in an ever so slightly better set of circumstances than the average Uber driver. None of them earn a wage at all. The entire business is off fares. No fare, no pay. Which is sometimes good, when fares are flooding in, but on the average case, it's looking like it's much worse than a wage. In fact, it's much worse than the minimum wage.
The closest we got to a wage was the "guaranteed minimum rates". These were ONLY offered at drunk-o'clock.
How flexible are your hours and location, though? If you don't own your car, I'd expect the employer to want to you to do some kind of minimum hours, and to work some kind of area?
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Speaker: Confessions of an Uber Driver…, in reply to Moz,
I do hope it doesn’t take someone actually getting slapped by the plod for Uber to see reason.
Unfortunately, it's going to take more than that, because that has already happened, in a number of blitzes done last week, by the accounts given by the NZTA. Uber may or may not foot the bill - they always intimate that they will, but of course are far too canny to sign any kind of contract to that effect. Just as they are too canny to let us actually see the contingent liability insurance they have to cover that guy the day their insurance company won't pay because the policy was not a commercial one. I expect that contingent liability policy either does not actually exist, or is under lock and key somewhere.
He seemed to think that getting $20/hour from Uber was an excellent deal.
Well if it was after costs, it would be a living wage. But before costs that would be appallingly low, could easily come to something like $8 per hour in real terms.
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Speaker: Confessions of an Uber Driver…, in reply to Moz,
Yes, the kind of headline grabbing direct actions that could be taken are all the kind of things that are way premature. You've got to be organized into some recognizable body to even make demands, otherwise you're just an anarchic rabble who can be shut down in short order. You've got to have huge numbers for a a strike to do anything, and things like pickets and blockades are way too confrontational to the general public.
Before all of that, you at least try to exhaust the less militant options, like writing to the company, alerting the media, forming an association, getting legal advocates to review your options, contacting the regulators about your concerns, getting politicians on your side. We've been doing all of that instead. I can't speak for the grumbling masses of drivers in general, only those who have chosen to at least make an attempt at getting organized.
It's progressing just fine, albeit not in a way that will hit headlines, certainly not if Uber gets the message and begins a backdown. I've had the first indications of that possibility already reported in. I like to think they're run by sane people, and they see disaster looming down the path they trod. It's not too late to get their foot out of that quicksand. Otherwise, we will quite literally suck them down to their demise.
This is a New Zealand story and they're not getting away with this shit. Not in my country. I have some faith in the resilience of our institutions to deal with foreign attempts to act like some kind of mafia, that can dictate slavery terms and induce people into widespread lawbreaking for their profit.
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Speaker: Confessions of an Uber Driver…, in reply to Katita,
Well I find it hard to believe that I've cost Uber anywhere near the thousands of dollars that I've already generated for them in a few months. But I don't know what their business model is - it would seem to be aggressive growth at all costs, most particularly at human cost, which they 100% externalize. So maybe it's true they're not making money. But there's a reason that their valuation is skyrocketing, and it's not because they're just a Ponzi scheme. It's because they're literally trying to tap into an enormous global industry and seize primary control over it. There are billions of dollars in fares for them to take. It's not funny imaginary tech stock money these guys are chasing.