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Being able to put yourself on the driver shoes will help you see the scandal. Suppose we are starting a freelancing company together, the agreement is that you

by nakovet 10y ago

Being able to put yourself on the driver shoes will help you see the scandal. Suppose we are starting a freelancing company together, the agreement is that you will get 50% of every contract, I will get the other half. What I won't tell you is that I control the contracts we get to sign and I can adjust the contracts as I wish (we never agreed on that, I just do). This month we closed a deal, we will be incubated in a company for 2 months, 40 hours a week, the contract I signed was for 240$/hour for each one of us, totalling 150,000 $. The contract I show you shows a total of 80,000 $. How would you feel when you discovered that you should have made 75k on this deal instead of 40k?

asher_ 10y ago
To scale up the principle a little... Uber acts like a real estate agent, they charge the seller a percentage of the total for the service of connecting a buyer and a seller. Imagine you were selling a house, and your agent came to you with an offer of $1M, of which they would take a 10% commission. You agree to this, but find out later that the buyer actually offered $1.1M. The fact that each party agreed to the transaction with the real estate agent isn't relevant here. What is relevant is that if you charge for services based on a percentage of the price, you can't then set different prices at both ends, this strongly violates the expectations of the contract. Looking at https://www.uber.com/info/how-much-do-drivers-with-uber-make/ https://www.uber.com/info/how-much-do-drivers-with-uber-make..., it says "Drivers using the partner app are charged an Uber Fee as a percentage of each trip fare." This is analogous to the real estate agent example, and this is why this is fraud on Uber's behalf. If they told drivers that they were simply buying their services for an arbitrary price, then it would be fine, but they don't say that.
- usrusr 10y ago
  More to the point, Uber pretends to work like a real estate agent, while they are de facto acting like a reseller. Like you said, if they would not try to weasel out of the responsibility that comes with being a reseller, all of this would be perfectly fine.

by nakovet 10y ago

asher_ 10y ago

To scale up the principle a little... Uber acts like a real estate agent, they charge the seller a percentage of the total for the service of connecting a buyer and a seller. Imagine you were selling a house, and your agent came to you with an offer of $1M, of which they would take a 10% commission. You agree to this, but find out later that the buyer actually offered $1.1M. The fact that each party agreed to the transaction with the real estate agent isn't relevant here. What is relevant is that if you charge for services based on a percentage of the price, you can't then set different prices at both ends, this strongly violates the expectations of the contract. Looking at https://www.uber.com/info/how-much-do-drivers-with-uber-make/ https://www.uber.com/info/how-much-do-drivers-with-uber-make..., it says "Drivers using the partner app are charged an Uber Fee as a percentage of each trip fare." This is analogous to the real estate agent example, and this is why this is fraud on Uber's behalf. If they told drivers that they were simply buying their services for an arbitrary price, then it would be fine, but they don't say that.

usrusr 10y ago
More to the point, Uber pretends to work like a real estate agent, while they are de facto acting like a reseller. Like you said, if they would not try to weasel out of the responsibility that comes with being a reseller, all of this would be perfectly fine.