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It's not only about the comfort of the people trying to book a cheap taxi. When creating the kind of world we want to live in we also need to consider the worki

It's not only about the comfort of the people trying to book a cheap taxi. When creating the kind of world we want to live in we also need to consider the working conditions of the drivers and the regulations society wants to impose on cabs to make sure they operate safely and without nuisance.

ttjjtt 4y ago
I’m uncomfortable to see that this statement seems genuinely needed in all of HN’s threads on this topic. One could easily get the impression that the HN crowd find it hard to empathize with the service worker. There’s real truth in the terrible service flaws of the previous taxi system, but the employment flaws of Uber are being smothered with the service improvements they’ve introduced. That’s not the only issue worth caring about.
- Jensson 4y ago
  I don't see why this is bad for workers? Is it the 20% cut, then what if Uber took 5% cut instead of 20%? Could easily create such a regulation for rideshare services, and then you have a job anyone can start doing at any moment with no management layers or hassle or job interviews etc, just start earning money instantly. Having workers tie themselves to a company for 40 hours a week being the only valid way to make money is conservative thinking, be a bit progressive and see how much freedom this potentially opens up for workers.
  - cogman10 4y ago
    This is a strawman attack. The issue ttjjtt and others are pointing out about Uber are not around binding employees to one employer for a fixed 40 hour workweek. In fact, I'd bet ttjjtt would support labor laws which limit a businesses ability to punish employees for moonlighting. The issue is, like amazon's mechanical turk, that Uber is cutting corners, costs, and wages for their "employees" in ways that are both legal and illegal while secretly lobbying to make it easier for them to reduce benefits. This is a market leader using their position to harm their workers. "Conservative thinking" is that "why do we need all these labor rules and protections for employees? They signed up for it!" Progressive thinking is "Maybe we shouldn't let businesses set the rules for how they treat employees?"
    - Jensson 4y ago
      > Progressive thinking is "Maybe we shouldn't let businesses set the rules for how they treat employees?" Right, so make regulators get off their asses and start draft up some reasonable regulations where workers can work freely like they can with uber and mechanical turk? Just banning that sort of freedom entirely is conservative thinking, since it aims to preserve the shitty situation we have where everyone needs to have a "job". Today people can't even imagine a society where you don't have a job, you just go and do things that are useful and get rewarded the full fruit of your labour, that sort of thing is possible with Ubers offerings and a bit of regulations, why go all in on preventing that future from happening? Uber works great for users, we know that. Uber would also work great for drivers if the drivers got a larger cut. So what is the problem, just regulate it and everything gets better than under the old Taxi systems. Why is this so hard to imagine? And no, this is not over regulating at all, at least not more than for example limiting how many Taxi's are allowed to operate in the city etc which is already happening.
      - cogman10 4y ago
        > Right, so make regulators get off their asses and start draft up some reasonable regulations where workers can work freely like they can with uber and mechanical turk? Did you read the article? The issue is 2 fold. 1. Uber is lobbying heavily for regulators to NOT do that. 2. We have an entire political party in the US (Republicans) that are "anti-regulation" and fight tooth and nail against new regulations. If we want "regulators" to make things better, we need to put in regulators that want to regulate.
        Jensson 4y ago
        > We have an entire political party in the US (Republicans) that are "anti-regulation" and fight tooth and nail against new regulations. This doesn't matter on a state level, for example democrats could easily create such regulations in New York or California if they wanted to. > Uber is lobbying heavily for regulators to NOT do that. Yes, every corporation lobbies for laws that favors them, this is nothing new. Lobbying isn't corrupt, politicians making under the table deals with corporations is the bad part, lobbying is just corporations telling politicians what kind of laws the corporation would want.
- dfxm12 4y ago
  One could easily get the impression that the HN crowd find it hard to empathize with the service worker. HN is obviously not a hive mind, but in in general, for facets of the HN crowd, the investor class, those with conservative/libertarian views on labor, business owners, etc. the default view is simply to not empathize with the service worker.
  - throwaway894345 4y ago
    Just because people disagree with progressive policies doesn't mean they aren't empathizing with a particular demographic. This particular framing is lazy and frustratingly common. A pretty obvious counterpoint: one can believe that raising the minimum wage drives unemployment among lower class workers while also raising the cost of living--this is an eminently empathetic viewpoint with respect to service workers, etc. For whatever it's worth, I tend to err a bit toward the "more regulation" end of the spectrum, but I don't feel the need to believe that the world is simple and everyone who doesn't subscribe to my simplistic view is morally deficient.
    - cycomanic 4y ago
      > A pretty obvious counterpoint: one can believe that raising the minimum wage drives unemployment among lower class workers while also raising the cost of living--this is an eminently empathetic viewpoint with respect to service workers, etc. Except this counterpoint is not based on real evidence but largely based on purely theoretical arguments which have been shown numerous times to be way too simplistic.
      - throwaway894345 4y ago
        That's irrelevant (and anyway, I'm not sure economists collectively agree with you), the parent claimed that conservatives and libertarians don't empathize. Even if our hypothetical conservative/libertarian is incorrect about the dynamics of minimum wage regulations, the counterpoint still demonstrates empathy.
- SilasX 4y ago
  I'm more uncomfortable with how willing people are to sound insightful for caring about workers, and then end the thought there, without ever asking if they were treated any better as taxi drivers. (Usually no -- at least the in the US, they used the "independent contractor" trick and it was much harder to come on and off shifts.)
  - w-j-w 4y ago
  - ttjjtt 4y ago
    The problem with your response is it relies on several bad faith assumptions without evidence. Your inference that Uber is net neutral to net positive for workers rights is a statement I’ve never heard a taxi driver express or seen seriously or convincingly made in an online discussion. I’d like to hear more evidence. until then it seems like a comforting thought for a libertarian rather than a sober description of reality.
    - SilasX 4y ago
      I didn’t make such assumptions, it was a comment about evidentiary standards, calling out people like you who place an unequal burden on the two positions, and didn’t even realize something could be wrong in the status quo it was being compared to. You validate that charge when you immediately shift the burden (again) to whether I personally can make the case in that direction.
      - ttjjtt 4y ago
        > (you)didn’t even realize something could be wrong in the status quo it was being compared You’re on the internet arguing with imaginary strawmen for your amusement. It’s not time well spent.
        SilasX 4y ago
        Considering you just owned up to being one of them, it’s clearly not a strawman.
JumpCrisscross 4y ago
> we also need to consider the working conditions of the drivers and the regulations society wants to impose on cabs to make sure they operate safely and without nuisance I agree. But we also need to consider when well-intentioned measures are corrupted or fail entirely. That was the case with taxis before Uber. It remains the case with many of Uber's competitors. Uber is no paragon. But the neither is the status quo. This is far from a bimodal argument.
- emacsen 4y ago
  This is the most reasonable statement on the topic I've seen. The fact is that Uber/Lyft created a new market even when the product existed a long time. In NYC, you could always get a car service to come and pick you up, but you had to know them, have a pre-existing relationship, etc. If you do, even today, it's cheaper than Uber, but it's a hassle. Also in NYC, taxis are terrible in comparison to Uber. They're usually dirty/unkept, the drivers are sometimes "off". Taxi owners weren't focused on the service- they were focused on the medallion, the right to have a taxi. That's where the real value was. The taxis were/are essentially anonymous, so there's no incentive to do anything more than the bare minimum in terms of cleanliness, repair or customer service. Uber, for all its extreme faults, flipped that on its head, with driver and rider visibility, and that changed everything. Uber has many problems- handicap inaccessibility, driver treatment, a ton of evidence against them regarding deliberate manipulation and probable lying to regulators, but "bring back the old ways" clearly weren't working either.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- BurningFrog 4y ago
  Calling the corrupt Taxi monopolies "well-intentioned" is not the right starting point.
badestrand 4y ago
In Germany at least it's less about safety and more about keeping competition at bay. Operating a taxi requires you to buy a "token" on the black market for around USD 50.000 and by law only token owners are allowed to pick up and drive around people. Rates are set by the municipality as well. The market needs to break up and become more free. Similarly, until a few years ago it was forbidden to operate busses between cities. Uber has some negative aspects but opening up the market and allowing healthy competition is certainly a huge positive.
- Ekaros 4y ago
  Were the rates set by the municipality the minimum or maximum? If not the minimum why didn't free market compete with cheaper rates? And was there any other requirements? Like required training or mandating mandatory supply at all times?
  - DocTomoe 4y ago
    It's neither a minimum or a maximum, it's the rate. X amount of Euros for Y amount of kilometers (as calculated by the meter while actually driving, which leads to taxi drivers often chosing the 'scenic route'). Maybe extra fees for night drives, or for driving to the airport, or for coming to the pickup place at all (which makes taxis prohibitively expensive in nonurban settings).
- kuschku 4y ago
  That only applies if you’re running a taxi – a transport service (not actually a taxi) can be run by anyone with a Personenbeförderungsschein (just a special driving license) and proper insurance. There’s a lot of competition on the German market for taxi-alternatives, many of which started long before Uber (and are often cheaper as well).
woevdbz 4y ago
Agreed, but it's a balance, and in many parts of the world, transportation user needs had been disregarded for so long that there was wide popular support for breaking with the status quo and rebalancing power in favor of the user. Everyone who was an adult city dweller pre-Uber has taxi horror stories at the ready, of not getting picked up, of being overcharged, of unsafe driving, of dirty cars, of feeling threatened or disrespected by the driver — and not feeling like they had any effective recourse. This is what caused the market to be ripe for disruption, the users' sense of powerlessness in the face of a bunch of local players set in their ways and gripped by local worker politics, in the way that most industries are thankfully not. In the process, Uber clearly behaved illegally and unethically towards its workers and government regulators. That's been known for a while. Could it have been different? Maybe, maybe not. Sometimes governments don't listen until they're forced to. Now about the working conditions of cab drivers, honestly in many places they were already being screwed over by local oligopolies (for a prime example of this, see for example the NYC medallion auction scams which defrauded individual drivers of hundreds of thousands of dollars). In the Uber story, drivers got shuttled from one shitty situation to another probably just about as shitty. Hopefully the new set of players in that space now abide by the local rules, and also the regulators learn from their failures and get on top of the industry without forgetting about their users too much.
AlgorithmicTime 4y ago

ttjjtt 4y ago

I’m uncomfortable to see that this statement seems genuinely needed in all of HN’s threads on this topic. One could easily get the impression that the HN crowd find it hard to empathize with the service worker. There’s real truth in the terrible service flaws of the previous taxi system, but the employment flaws of Uber are being smothered with the service improvements they’ve introduced. That’s not the only issue worth caring about.

Jensson 4y ago
I don't see why this is bad for workers? Is it the 20% cut, then what if Uber took 5% cut instead of 20%? Could easily create such a regulation for rideshare services, and then you have a job anyone can start doing at any moment with no management layers or hassle or job interviews etc, just start earning money instantly. Having workers tie themselves to a company for 40 hours a week being the only valid way to make money is conservative thinking, be a bit progressive and see how much freedom this potentially opens up for workers.
- cogman10 4y ago
  This is a strawman attack. The issue ttjjtt and others are pointing out about Uber are not around binding employees to one employer for a fixed 40 hour workweek. In fact, I'd bet ttjjtt would support labor laws which limit a businesses ability to punish employees for moonlighting. The issue is, like amazon's mechanical turk, that Uber is cutting corners, costs, and wages for their "employees" in ways that are both legal and illegal while secretly lobbying to make it easier for them to reduce benefits. This is a market leader using their position to harm their workers. "Conservative thinking" is that "why do we need all these labor rules and protections for employees? They signed up for it!" Progressive thinking is "Maybe we shouldn't let businesses set the rules for how they treat employees?"
  - Jensson 4y ago
    > Progressive thinking is "Maybe we shouldn't let businesses set the rules for how they treat employees?" Right, so make regulators get off their asses and start draft up some reasonable regulations where workers can work freely like they can with uber and mechanical turk? Just banning that sort of freedom entirely is conservative thinking, since it aims to preserve the shitty situation we have where everyone needs to have a "job". Today people can't even imagine a society where you don't have a job, you just go and do things that are useful and get rewarded the full fruit of your labour, that sort of thing is possible with Ubers offerings and a bit of regulations, why go all in on preventing that future from happening? Uber works great for users, we know that. Uber would also work great for drivers if the drivers got a larger cut. So what is the problem, just regulate it and everything gets better than under the old Taxi systems. Why is this so hard to imagine? And no, this is not over regulating at all, at least not more than for example limiting how many Taxi's are allowed to operate in the city etc which is already happening.
    - cogman10 4y ago
      > Right, so make regulators get off their asses and start draft up some reasonable regulations where workers can work freely like they can with uber and mechanical turk? Did you read the article? The issue is 2 fold. 1. Uber is lobbying heavily for regulators to NOT do that. 2. We have an entire political party in the US (Republicans) that are "anti-regulation" and fight tooth and nail against new regulations. If we want "regulators" to make things better, we need to put in regulators that want to regulate.
      - Jensson 4y ago
        > We have an entire political party in the US (Republicans) that are "anti-regulation" and fight tooth and nail against new regulations. This doesn't matter on a state level, for example democrats could easily create such regulations in New York or California if they wanted to. > Uber is lobbying heavily for regulators to NOT do that. Yes, every corporation lobbies for laws that favors them, this is nothing new. Lobbying isn't corrupt, politicians making under the table deals with corporations is the bad part, lobbying is just corporations telling politicians what kind of laws the corporation would want.
dfxm12 4y ago
One could easily get the impression that the HN crowd find it hard to empathize with the service worker. HN is obviously not a hive mind, but in in general, for facets of the HN crowd, the investor class, those with conservative/libertarian views on labor, business owners, etc. the default view is simply to not empathize with the service worker.
- throwaway894345 4y ago
  Just because people disagree with progressive policies doesn't mean they aren't empathizing with a particular demographic. This particular framing is lazy and frustratingly common. A pretty obvious counterpoint: one can believe that raising the minimum wage drives unemployment among lower class workers while also raising the cost of living--this is an eminently empathetic viewpoint with respect to service workers, etc. For whatever it's worth, I tend to err a bit toward the "more regulation" end of the spectrum, but I don't feel the need to believe that the world is simple and everyone who doesn't subscribe to my simplistic view is morally deficient.
  - cycomanic 4y ago
    > A pretty obvious counterpoint: one can believe that raising the minimum wage drives unemployment among lower class workers while also raising the cost of living--this is an eminently empathetic viewpoint with respect to service workers, etc. Except this counterpoint is not based on real evidence but largely based on purely theoretical arguments which have been shown numerous times to be way too simplistic.
    - throwaway894345 4y ago
      That's irrelevant (and anyway, I'm not sure economists collectively agree with you), the parent claimed that conservatives and libertarians don't empathize. Even if our hypothetical conservative/libertarian is incorrect about the dynamics of minimum wage regulations, the counterpoint still demonstrates empathy.
SilasX 4y ago
I'm more uncomfortable with how willing people are to sound insightful for caring about workers, and then end the thought there, without ever asking if they were treated any better as taxi drivers. (Usually no -- at least the in the US, they used the "independent contractor" trick and it was much harder to come on and off shifts.)
- w-j-w 4y ago
- ttjjtt 4y ago
  The problem with your response is it relies on several bad faith assumptions without evidence. Your inference that Uber is net neutral to net positive for workers rights is a statement I’ve never heard a taxi driver express or seen seriously or convincingly made in an online discussion. I’d like to hear more evidence. until then it seems like a comforting thought for a libertarian rather than a sober description of reality.
  - SilasX 4y ago
    I didn’t make such assumptions, it was a comment about evidentiary standards, calling out people like you who place an unequal burden on the two positions, and didn’t even realize something could be wrong in the status quo it was being compared to. You validate that charge when you immediately shift the burden (again) to whether I personally can make the case in that direction.
    - ttjjtt 4y ago
      > (you)didn’t even realize something could be wrong in the status quo it was being compared You’re on the internet arguing with imaginary strawmen for your amusement. It’s not time well spent.
      - SilasX 4y ago
        Considering you just owned up to being one of them, it’s clearly not a strawman.

JumpCrisscross 4y ago

> we also need to consider the working conditions of the drivers and the regulations society wants to impose on cabs to make sure they operate safely and without nuisance I agree. But we also need to consider when well-intentioned measures are corrupted or fail entirely. That was the case with taxis before Uber. It remains the case with many of Uber's competitors. Uber is no paragon. But the neither is the status quo. This is far from a bimodal argument.

emacsen 4y ago
This is the most reasonable statement on the topic I've seen. The fact is that Uber/Lyft created a new market even when the product existed a long time. In NYC, you could always get a car service to come and pick you up, but you had to know them, have a pre-existing relationship, etc. If you do, even today, it's cheaper than Uber, but it's a hassle. Also in NYC, taxis are terrible in comparison to Uber. They're usually dirty/unkept, the drivers are sometimes "off". Taxi owners weren't focused on the service- they were focused on the medallion, the right to have a taxi. That's where the real value was. The taxis were/are essentially anonymous, so there's no incentive to do anything more than the bare minimum in terms of cleanliness, repair or customer service. Uber, for all its extreme faults, flipped that on its head, with driver and rider visibility, and that changed everything. Uber has many problems- handicap inaccessibility, driver treatment, a ton of evidence against them regarding deliberate manipulation and probable lying to regulators, but "bring back the old ways" clearly weren't working either.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
BurningFrog 4y ago
Calling the corrupt Taxi monopolies "well-intentioned" is not the right starting point.

badestrand 4y ago

In Germany at least it's less about safety and more about keeping competition at bay. Operating a taxi requires you to buy a "token" on the black market for around USD 50.000 and by law only token owners are allowed to pick up and drive around people. Rates are set by the municipality as well. The market needs to break up and become more free. Similarly, until a few years ago it was forbidden to operate busses between cities. Uber has some negative aspects but opening up the market and allowing healthy competition is certainly a huge positive.

Ekaros 4y ago
Were the rates set by the municipality the minimum or maximum? If not the minimum why didn't free market compete with cheaper rates? And was there any other requirements? Like required training or mandating mandatory supply at all times?
- DocTomoe 4y ago
  It's neither a minimum or a maximum, it's the rate. X amount of Euros for Y amount of kilometers (as calculated by the meter while actually driving, which leads to taxi drivers often chosing the 'scenic route'). Maybe extra fees for night drives, or for driving to the airport, or for coming to the pickup place at all (which makes taxis prohibitively expensive in nonurban settings).
kuschku 4y ago
That only applies if you’re running a taxi – a transport service (not actually a taxi) can be run by anyone with a Personenbeförderungsschein (just a special driving license) and proper insurance. There’s a lot of competition on the German market for taxi-alternatives, many of which started long before Uber (and are often cheaper as well).

woevdbz 4y ago

Agreed, but it's a balance, and in many parts of the world, transportation user needs had been disregarded for so long that there was wide popular support for breaking with the status quo and rebalancing power in favor of the user. Everyone who was an adult city dweller pre-Uber has taxi horror stories at the ready, of not getting picked up, of being overcharged, of unsafe driving, of dirty cars, of feeling threatened or disrespected by the driver — and not feeling like they had any effective recourse. This is what caused the market to be ripe for disruption, the users' sense of powerlessness in the face of a bunch of local players set in their ways and gripped by local worker politics, in the way that most industries are thankfully not. In the process, Uber clearly behaved illegally and unethically towards its workers and government regulators. That's been known for a while. Could it have been different? Maybe, maybe not. Sometimes governments don't listen until they're forced to. Now about the working conditions of cab drivers, honestly in many places they were already being screwed over by local oligopolies (for a prime example of this, see for example the NYC medallion auction scams which defrauded individual drivers of hundreds of thousands of dollars). In the Uber story, drivers got shuttled from one shitty situation to another probably just about as shitty. Hopefully the new set of players in that space now abide by the local rules, and also the regulators learn from their failures and get on top of the industry without forgetting about their users too much.

AlgorithmicTime 4y ago