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Would love to see source data that Uber is referencing (I know it's not possible, as it's highly guarded secret) - I suspect they cherry pick it a lot. "In the

Would love to see source data that Uber is referencing (I know it's not possible, as it's highly guarded secret) - I suspect they cherry pick it a lot. "In the US, 92% of drivers drive less than 40 hours per week, and 45% of drivers drive less than 10 hours per week. [...] We will continue to defend the innovation that makes that kind of choice, flexibility, and independence a reality for over 200,000 drivers in California". 1. Does this distribution looks in California, not across whole US? Why talk about two different cases, unless you cherry pick? 2. How does this % look like, when we look at drivers that work for more than few months?

gibolt 7y ago
It doesn't clearly state if those durations are during an active ride, also including time to pickup, or including time active waiting for a pickup task. This subtlety could drastically change the data interpretation.
skybrian 7y ago
This is percentage of drivers, not percentage of hours worked. It would make sense that there are lot of drivers that don't drive very often. They might even have stopped driving altogether, but didn't cancel their account. It's like a website talking about total users that ever signed up, instead of 7-day active users.
dtrailin 7y ago
A very clever thing they're doing is conflating being an employee with not having flexible hours, as if part time jobs don't exist. Fast food chains don't hire independent contractors and yet lots of people have flexible shifts.
- darkwizard42 7y ago
  Not exactly...consider the following problem: Fast food chain is busy from 12 AM - 2 AM, 5 PM - 7 PM. These shifts may be desirable or undesirable because of the time they occur. To be able to get the "easy" shifts (slow ones) at 10 PM or something, they can make it so that you HAVE to take a part of the other shifts... If you can't, you don't meet their eligibility and you lose your job. If you are an employee in a shift based business, you definitely give up some rights to having completely flexible work hours.

gibolt 7y ago

It doesn't clearly state if those durations are during an active ride, also including time to pickup, or including time active waiting for a pickup task. This subtlety could drastically change the data interpretation.

skybrian 7y ago

This is percentage of drivers, not percentage of hours worked. It would make sense that there are lot of drivers that don't drive very often. They might even have stopped driving altogether, but didn't cancel their account. It's like a website talking about total users that ever signed up, instead of 7-day active users.

dtrailin 7y ago

A very clever thing they're doing is conflating being an employee with not having flexible hours, as if part time jobs don't exist. Fast food chains don't hire independent contractors and yet lots of people have flexible shifts.

darkwizard42 7y ago
Not exactly...consider the following problem: Fast food chain is busy from 12 AM - 2 AM, 5 PM - 7 PM. These shifts may be desirable or undesirable because of the time they occur. To be able to get the "easy" shifts (slow ones) at 10 PM or something, they can make it so that you HAVE to take a part of the other shifts... If you can't, you don't meet their eligibility and you lose your job. If you are an employee in a shift based business, you definitely give up some rights to having completely flexible work hours.