If sexual harassment is an issue among his company’s culture then such a letter reinforcing respectful rules for sexual behavior might be quite appropriate.
I don’t live in either country but I know an exploitative business model when I see one.
If a driver has to pay $100,000 just for the right to operate a taxi, how exactly is that helping the driver?
This is silly. What competition? Taxis? OK, so all the taxis are gone and everyone is using a rideshare service. Suddenly Uber doubles prices. Oh no, what do we do? Overnight everyone switches to some other rideshare service, drivers and customers alike.
The business model of “customer pull out their phone, offers to pay for a ride, and some driver nearby accepts” is obviously the future. But it’s also very likely that Uber won’t be a major player in that future. An app and communications infrastructure that connects customers and drivers is not that big a deal, and the ability to extract enormous profits out of being the middleman is very limited.
If Uber charges a really small amount to be that middleman, then they can easily keep their market share and be ubiquitous. But they can only do that if they keep their cut at a razor thin margin, or they can be replaced literally overnight.
And as for the notion that Uber is going to become the self-driving car taxi fleet, that’s completely antithetical to their current business model of having the drivers provide all the capital equipment and bear all the depreciation and risk themselves. Uber is going to buy a fleet of millions of cars? And service them and clean them and repair them and keep them on the road? Bullshit. Not happening, because operating a fleet of vehicles is a completely different business than running a software service that matches drivers to passengers and takes a cut.
Unless Uber is expecting people who own self-driving cars to send the car out on the road to pick up passengers when the owner doesn’t need the car. That would fit their model of making the “independent contractor” driver/owner bear all the capital costs themselves. Except how do you keep homeless people from camping in your self-driving car? I mean, my bedroom is empty all day while I’m at work, why shouldn’t I rent it out to transients while I’m gone? That’s not a great business model.
Yes, fleets of self-driving taxis that you hail from your phone are the future. And who knows, maybe the app you use to hail that self-driving taxi will be branded “Uber” 15 years from now. But Uber is not going to own fleets of those taxis, and they’re not going to be making giant profits.
You need this explained?
You’re buying a business with fixed pricing. The cost of buying the business is directly related to the income derived from the specifics of the (fixed) pricing minus overheads.
There is no such thing as “ridesharing”; Uber is not in the business in any way of “ridesharing” any more than restaurants are involved in “foodsharing”.
Please stop trying to help Uber maintain the fiction that they are anything other than a taxi or livery service.
I ask every time I go into a ride sharing service. The majority of answers I get is that these drivers put a high factor on independence, ability to set their own schedule, less regulation and higher pay (though my recent trip to NYC appears that that city is doing everything in its power to make it harder for rideshare drivers to operate). Everyone I have asked in Detroit, Chicago, LA, SF, NYC, Buffalo, Miami, Orlando, Austin, Houston, and DC (over the last year - year and a half) have all told me that they either have no benefits or some meager accumulation of benefits (like employee-funded health care, vacations are available, but not decided by the driver), and, surprise, surprise, are also independent contractors (the mechanics, shift supervisors, dispatch, those are all employees). In fact some of these cab drivers were franchisees, so even more of a hassle to keep more their money. Also, I would say that most have told me that they work longer hours with the cab company, and make less per hour as they are required to be on the road at times and in places not profitable.
All hail the beast that is white middle-class entitlement.
Are you sure? Maybe they were forced to become Uber drivers by a never-ending stream of text messages?
Of course they are a taxi service. But, where I live, it is the only taxi service that actually works. Call an “official” cab company and you might get a car an hour later, if you’re lucky.
While I think you make an excellent point, the list of wildly optimistic to outright fraudulent tech start-ups that have been burning through investors money lately make me thing it’d be no bad thing if investors became a little more discriminating in their funding. Truly solid business ideas will always get through.
Why are you asking me this question? Shouldn’t you be asking yourself, given that you are supporting taxis over Uber?
Unbelievable. You are participating in this thread and criticising others while you have absolutely no knowledge whatsoever of the key facts.
Taxi licences, medallions, call them what you will are simply a licence to participate in a monopoly and - at least in those jurisdictions with which I am familiar - the price is set by reference to what the market will bear. The price - pre Uber - was in the $1/2M range around here and a quick bit of googling suggests that wasn’t unusual in many places.
That means that taxi drivers directly or indirectly had the overhead that came with a business that required the purchase of a $500k asset, while the actual money earning asset (the car) was probably only worth say $20k. You want to talk exploitation? Maybe you should be aiming at the banks that lent the money or the licence owners that leased the licences to drivers.
You have no clue whatever on this subject. Few if any taxi drivers get any of the payments you mention. They are casuals that receive a cut of the earnings, not a wage.
As to unsocial hours, excessive working and strain on family, you just look more ignorant on this subject the more you open your trap.
Standard taxi shifts are 4am to 4pm and 4pm to 4am around here. Sorry, did you mention something about unsocial hours, excessive working and family strain?
Contrastingly, Uber drivers work when they want. I’ve met several who say they get up early and Uber, then go home and pick up their children and take them to school, drive Uber till school finishes and then go pick their kids up etc. And at least if they work unsocial hours (middle of the night etc) they have a better chance of getting surge ie higher fares.
It’s cheaper because their overhead is their car (usually a small cheap $10k car around here) and registration, fuel, maintenance. While for a taxi it’s all that plus $500k of dead debt for a licence. You have no clue.
No more, no less. The pricing model is the same here.
I know of a major highly respectable US bank that has rules around the same thing. It’s not tone deafness it’s realism. Co-workers have sex. Always have, always will. Being adult enough to recognise reality and put a framework around it, instead of turning a blind eye and hoping for the best doesn’t seem to me to be a bad thing, in principle. Whether any given set of rules is well or badly thought through is another issue.
It’s what I said; you buy a ready-made business for $500k.
The structure of fixed pricing by the licensing body allows licensees to make their own arrangements for sick pay, holiday pay, etc, while at the same time generating sufficient income for a reasonable standard of family life.
That’s the entire point.
Your chums in Silicon Valley are like early Victorian entrepreneurs, using new technologies, getting ahead of the legal framework, exploiting the bollocks out of new territories, and being so clever by undercutting the market, like it’s what technology is for, maaan.
I know enough to see what you’re about; exploitation - zero security; zero statutory sick pay, zero holiday pay, zero trade union representation, no unfair dismissal process, etc. But you keep telling yourself it’s all about the convenience.
A business is ordinarily priced on the basis of fixed net assets and goodwill, and goodwill is usually priced by reference to its earning potential based on the transferable reputation etc of the previous owner.
A basic commodity passenger car service (eg taxi or uber) has no transferable goodwill whatever (it will earn the same amount no matter who drives or owns it). And the car itself is worth (relatively speaking) peanuts.
The only reason taxi licences cost as much as they do is that they are a government monopoly. That’s what inflates the prices.
Read this:
or this
They’re about exploitation of drivers and they are about taxis. And the second article is pre-Uber. You’re living in a fantasy world on this subject. You are doing that classic small-c conservative thing of hating on a new thing, and harking back to some golden age that never existed.
Citing US working conditions on any level isn’t exactly smart; a more exploittive, owner-frendly environment it would be ghard to find inthe developed world. You’re citing the only developed country where there is no paid maternity leave, FFS. None.
Add to that - for regular employees - minimal holiday pay, minimal employment rights, helthcare tied to employment, etc, etc - it is already a Dickensian society.
And you want to quote taxi driver income in Chicago and Miami. sounds about right for you.
Your mates in silicon valley are the new Victorians, avoiding social responsibilities, parasitically feeding off societies without contributing tax, exploiting workers by staying ahead of employment laws. It’s fucking endless.
A great app. It’s cheaper, right.
So…since the United States is horrible for workers, and taxi drivers have no rights, we should ban services like Uber, because…why was that again? Because Uber doesn’t give their drivers paid maternity leave?
In the classic sense (i.e. under IRS rules), they meet the definition of independent contractors quite well. They provide their own equipment, set their own working hours, are free to accept or reject assignments as they please, can work for competitors, are paid piecemeal, are responsible for the primary costs of doing business, can make a profit or loss, etc.
The question is whether the contract for individual services is between the customer and Uber or the customer and the driver. Given that neither the driver or the passenger have any ability to modify the terms of carriage, it’s hard to argue that the driver is the contracting party.
Yay me! As long as I’m white middle-class entitled, I’m going to use my privilege.
Boy, fetch me some grapes while I call my stock-broker to sell orphans to cat-food factories on the margin.
(BTW: Your jargon is out of date. If you’re going to use old leftie phrasing, you at least should toss around classics “bourgeois” and “landlords” (as a term of disdain) )
I agree that in the classic sense, Uber drivers are quite clearly ICs. Uber’s model is to propagate and build their ride-sharing app, not have people drive cars (yes, they have a whole department that aids drivers get better cars, get licensed, etc.). However, Uber drivers are free to drive whatever hours they want and they don’t have to pick up passengers, a common practice in NY (going to NJ? I’m not.)
You didn’t make any sense the last time you posted. You are now shout at the traffic.