Even as a fairly educated decently paid software engineer I got screwed over by a somewhat similar situation.. I took a job where I was paid through an interna

Even as a fairly educated decently paid software engineer I got screwed over by a somewhat similar situation.. I took a job where I was paid through an international company (well 3/4 of my pay was that way, and the rest was a normal contract) here in Spain. When I saw my pay go in before taxes it looked significantly more than what I had seen before, and I though I was doing well out of the deal. Of course I had to pay all the taxes anyway. It was only a year later when I got changed to a full Spanish contact I started checking numbers (to make sure they were equivalent) that it occurred to me that I would only have been getting 1/4 of the pension payments before then, which in Spain is a significant amount. I doubt most Uber employees are seeing noticing anything like that (though to be fair I have no idea how those extra are paid in the US).