14 ms·

Meta - I am honestly surprised, and sightly appalled at the general attitude in these comments (and also in yesterday's thread). Uber has essentially not just

• colinmhayes 4y ago
  Every single time there’s an article about Uber exploiting workers/the law the top comments are always some Uber propaganda pieces that seem totally astroturfed. Yes, Uber is better than the old system, they can also treat their drivers like human beings.
  • 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
    I get a sense that many on this site never want the gravy train to stop and will overlook/downplay anything to keep it going. The slightest scrutiny leading to regulation of one tech giant could be the first domino in a series of regulation against all. I don't think that most are outright shills for Uber but I think that many are unwitting shills for big tech.
    • walleeee 4y ago
      We are peculiarly inclined to suppress whatever impugns the security of that to which we have given our allegiance. - Walter Lippman, The Basic Problem of Democracy, 1919 (https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1919/11/the-basic-problem-of-democracy/569095/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1919/11/the-bas...)
    • user_7832 4y ago
      Thank you for your comment. I also have a similar view - folks working at Facebook et al often might suspect/know what they're doing is misleading at best to illegal (dark patterns for eg), but the cognitive dissonance (esp regarding regulations) is a bit too much. I'm not trying to have a holier than thou approach - lots of people simply need a job, and humans are only human in their actions - but I would be curious to see how opinions of folks working at small startups differ from those working at GAAFA/FAANG etc. (To be clear, opinions are your personal subjective thought and I don't think they can just be "wrong", I'm just curious on if there's a difference in who thinks what how.)
  • daenz 4y ago
    >they can also treat their drivers like human beings. If this was the case, why didn't workers continue what they were doing before they worked for Uber? Did they have no job before Uber, or did they view Uber as an improvement to their previous situation?
    • deelowe 4y ago
      In my experience, gig workers are being exploited as they do not take into account their expenses. Most see uber as decent pay until their car starts having issues.
      • daenz 4y ago
        If that is the case, maybe there should be some regulation that compels employers to post full and transparent costs and actual incomes for its employees, all normal costs considered. Then workers would be more likely to make the decision that is best for them, without the possibility of being tricked by the numbers.
        • trs8080 4y ago
          Yes, perhaps more regulations would help the matter. Except Uber also (sometimes illegally) lobbies governments to prevent regulation, as this leak has shown.
      • whittingtonaaon 4y ago
        You can’t blame Uber for workers who make bad decisions, can you?
        • moe091 4y ago
          By that logic any employer could do anything because "working for a bad employer is a bad decision"
          • whittingtonaaon 4y ago
  • DoctorOetker 4y ago
    So not Uber propaganda, but ... Belgium Uber-ing out an F-16 to a Russian oligarch (Kerimov) is ok? While Belgian road traffic victims lay on the road, the ambulances and dispatching services colluded to assign more distant ambulances for maximizing the per km driven profits. That's not a victimless crime: lives, limbs (think infections) and livelihoods (both of the victims and the typical scapegoats who shall carry all the blame, round down all liabilities and round the remaining liability up). Hurray for "socialism", money must roll.
  • dang 4y ago
    Comments like this break the site guidelines. "Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, bots, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html That's because, overwhelmingly, cases like this where people are convinced that something seems "totally astroturfed" turn out to simply be people disagreeing with each other. The community is divided on divisive issues like this one. To a first approximation, it really is as simple as that. Of course there are also various kinds of manipulation, but because of what I said in the previous paragraph, the only legitimate way to address those is to look for evidence—that means something objective, which is not just based on people having opinions that seem obviously wrong or bad (i.e. sufficiently different from one's own). This phenomenon is extremely well established and you can find many years of past explanation about it here: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=true&page=0&query=by:dang%20astroturf https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme... . Edit: incidentally, perceptions like "Every single time there's an article about $topic..." are also hopelessly subject to cognitive bias. HN has had many, many threads about Uber which have been dominated by negative sentiment.
    • colinmhayes 4y ago
      Thank you Dang. I actually did not mean to insinuate that the posts are astroturfed, in fact them being legitimately held opinions is the most upsetting aspect to me. I feel we’ve got a community of strong critical thinkers here, and I’ve observed a pattern (anecdotal as you point out) of sidestepping on threads about Uber’s legal/moral obligations to their drivers. It pains me to see us selectively using our critical thinking skills when it suits us, and then hunkering down with “so what it’s better for me now” when it doesn’t.
  • jhgb 4y ago
    > Uber is better than the old system You forgot to add "in some places".
• georgex7 4y ago
  > That does not justify using political influence to enter/gain markets Which companies do not do this?
  • ghostDancer 4y ago
    At those levels? Not many. And we're talking a company the is not profitable, what Uber is doing in any other market would be called dumping and it's illegal in most of them, and that without beginning with the semi slavery that promotes Uber.
  • user_7832 4y ago
    Sorry, but how does that matter? Just because everyone (theoretically) does it doesn't excuse the behavior.
  • mike00632 4y ago
    $224 million was paid for California prop 22. It wasn't all Uber but not many companies at all drop cash like that.
• gwinsyth 4y ago
  I've never used Uber by myself (I think I've used it twice when someone else was organizing transport) as I've heard a lot about exploitation of workers in the beginning so I decided to just not use it. However, as I dreaded calling a taxi service - I never knew, which taxi service is good/had good prices, it was frequent, that taxi driver would take you long way just so you would pay more, and of course old mercedes which smelled awful was a norm here where I live. Some people talked about how taxis are awful but nothing could be changed. Just then Uber was introduced here, few months later we have multiple Taxi application, where you see how much you will pay in advance, you can call taxi with ease for exact time. Thanks Uber, you can go now ;)
  • nebula8804 4y ago
    If the main driving force leaves(Uber), its just a matter of time until all the companies revert back to the old standard. It will be a slow boiling frog but it will happen.
• wintermutestwin 4y ago
  The old school taxi business has built up a massive reserve of consumer dissatisfaction to the point of blind hatred. Uber/etc disruption generated so much consumer goodwill because they demonstrated clearly superior features/advantages/benefits. When someone pops your bully in the nose, you don't care if it was a cheap shot. Of course that is short sighted and today's hero can easily become tomorrow's bully.
  • _the_inflator 4y ago
    Uber USA != Uber Germany. Taxi business here is quite different.
    • ivanstojic 4y ago
      We easily claim the opposite for other companies (Apple, Facebook, Google) and other countries (mostly Asian fabrication centers). Why do we have such a strong belief that Uber USA != Uber Germany? (Edit: I'm Croatian and fairly well aware of how taxis work in Europe)
      • tomgp 4y ago
        Taxi services in Germany pre-Uber weren't perfect but they weren't the disfunctional rackets you see in the States. Uber "succeded" in Europe by undercutting existing farily decent service providers with subsidised fares. Those subsidise seem to have dissapeared and at least in London Uber is now in my experience no cheaper and significantly less reliable that the older firms which have survived.
        • creato 4y ago
          I didn’t ride in cabs that much (US) but I never had the dysfunctional racket experiences described in this thread. They didn’t show up once, but that has happened with Uber too. edit: And Uber charged me a fee to cancel the no-show ride and I had to call and argue with them to take the charge off.
      • 4y ago
• randomdata 4y ago
  > but outright exploited workers/drivers Out of curiosity, what coercive power does Uber wield that allows them to exploit workers all while non-exploitative employers have struggled to find anyone to hire? We've been living through what has been possibly the best job market in history for most of Uber's existence. Locally, we've been at full employment for nearly a decade now (less a few months during the height of COVID). It's certainly not a matter of "They have no other choice".
  • kennywinker 4y ago
    Uber was founded in the wake of a global financial meltdown. The same crisis that begat amazon’s mobile retiree workforce (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/dec/02/nomadland-living-in-cars-working-amazon https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/dec/02/nomadl...) and in general the concept of the “gig economy”. The recession created a backlog of job-seekers, so competition for the good jobs was tight - the end result was having to settle for lower paying jobs with less prospects - i.e. gig economy work (https://www.npr.org/2022/07/08/1110610504/jobs-friday-gen-z-and-the-scars-of-recessions-past https://www.npr.org/2022/07/08/1110610504/jobs-friday-gen-z-...) “Full employment” doesn’t accurately describe the last decade. Worker power was maybe never lower than it was between 2008 and 2020.
    • menzoic 4y ago
      Uber started out as a black cab service for high end customers with high end workers. UberX came out in 2012 well into the recovery of the global financial meltdown, at a time when Facebook IPO'd for $100 Billion
    • randomdata 4y ago
      > Worker power was maybe never lower than it was between 2008 and 2020. Wages blew inflation out of the water through the later half of that period, so I'm not sure that tracks. Wages struggle to keep up with inflation, let alone beat it, when workers don't have much power. The reality is that the job market was very strong from the mid-2010s onward, save the COVID shutdown period. Although, obviously, not uniformly so. It is true that the job market was difficult at the beginning of Uber's existence, which is why I said "most of" not "all of". I suppose what you're saying is that the exploitation was short-lived during their early days or limited to certain local markets?
• golergka 4y ago
  > exploited That's a completely subjective term that just describes that one part of the transaction does not like the deal that they entered voluntarily. That's why many people, including myself, consider the usage of this term an attempt at manipulation. In almost any country where it operated or operates, Uber was not and is not a monopoly, neither on taxi clients, nor on labour. There are multiple taxi apps a driver can work for, and many shift between them in a span of one shift. And traditional taxi parks, although lost a significant market share, have not disappeared. Therefore, a price of a driver's labour is still dictated by an open market and not by Uber. What changed, though, almost everywhere, is taxi apps made the market more fluid and effective, and turned over a lot of mechanisms which taxi drivers used to "exploit" clients. You just have to travel to a city that still mandates government-backed monopoly, like Istanbul, and compare the level of prices, service and reliability to what the ordinary Uber experience is like. > Uber has essentially not just broken laws Laws can be, and often are, immoral. And any laws that limit the ability of parties on the free market to transact with each other however they wish, including taxi medallions or similar systems, undoubtedly are.
  • kennywinker 4y ago
    > that one part of the transaction does not like the deal that they entered voluntarily The choice between homelessness, starvation, and working an underpaid job is not a choice made voluntarily. And equating the “exploitation” of slightly higher taxi rates compared with a coercive job… that’s way off the mark. An extra $20 to get from the airport or home from the bar once and a while (talk about transactions entered voluntarily), vs a grueling work environment that pays terrible that you have to do EVERY day to not starve.
    • golergka 4y ago
      > The choice between homelessness, starvation, and working an underpaid job is not a choice made voluntarily. Homelessness and starvation (even if we accept this argument at face value for drivers in first-world countries) are natural human condition, and Uber, or any other employer, does not become magically responsible for it just because they enter the picture with their job offer. > An extra $20 to get from the airport or home from the bar once and a while (talk about transactions entered voluntarily), vs a grueling work environment that pays terrible that you have to do EVERY day to not starve. I believe that everyone should feel sympathy for the poor and contribute to charity. However, this moral choice should be a free choice made by the person herself and not through coercion by government or similar entities.
• fallingknife 4y ago
  I don't believe that deciding whether Uber behaved ethically or not is really a useful question (they clearly didn't) in a market where no one does. I look at alternatives. And when the alternative is a corrupt and massively inconvenient government backed cartel, then I will favor Uber. If they had acted like saints, we would be stuck with the cab cartel. I also don't consider the law as the decider of morality, or I would have to judge myself as immoral for a lot of things that aren't. And when the current law is a government cartel, I don't care when someone breaks it. I also don't buy that Uber is any worse to its workers than the cab cartel was. And "exploit" is a nebulous term. If you want to say that Uber "exploits" its workers, you have to say how. I don't see providing a platform where drivers can choose when they want to drive as exploitative. I don't see the pricing system as exploitative, as they can quit at any time. I don't see employment systems where you are paid for the amount of work you do, rather than time spent, as exploitative.
  • carapace 4y ago
    > I don't believe that deciding whether Uber behaved ethically or not is really a useful question (they clearly didn't) in a market where no one does. I look at alternatives. And when the alternative is a corrupt and massively inconvenient government backed cartel, then I will favor Uber. You're making the point well, that they're not necessarily worse than the system(s) they disrupted. - - - - > If you want to say that Uber "exploits" its workers, you have to say how. Here is one answer from "The Market Fairy Will Not Solve the Problems of Uber and Lyft" (2016): > They don’t pay the cost of their capital. > The wages they pay to their drivers are less than the depreciation of the cars and the expense of keeping the drivers fed, housed, and healthy. They pay less than minimum wage in most markets, and, in most markets, that is not enough to pay the costs of a car plus a human. > These [sharing economy] business models are ways of draining capital from the economy and putting them into the hands of a few investors and executives. They prey on desperate people who need money now, even if the money is insufficient to pay their total costs. Drivers are draining their own reserves to get cash now, but, hey, they gotta eat and pay the bills. https://www.ianwelsh.net/the-market-fairy-will-not-solve-the-problems-of-uber-and-lyft/ https://www.ianwelsh.net/the-market-fairy-will-not-solve-the...
• potemkin_buster 4y ago
  The worst thing the taxi mafia did to me was force me to use cash instead of card a lot of the time... but that was due to the credit card transacion fee mafia hah
  • JamesBarney 4y ago
    About a third of my female friends had an unsafe experience with a taxi driver.
  • philipkglass 4y ago
    In my location (West Coast, USA) local tradespeople will give me a 10% discount for paying with cash. That's more than they'd pay in check or credit card processing fees. I assumed that taxi drivers' preference for cash was for basically the same reason: under-reporting income to tax authorities.
• mchusma 4y ago
  I think I'm not surprised, and I share the sentiment, largely for 2 reasons: (A) I see Uber as significantly less "exploitive" than most or all other work relationships, and I think the term is quite frankly confusing, and (B) I think overall that if laws are bad/unjust it is good to defy them. Re: (A) If you really zoom out to the history of labor, it is a huge stretch to say Uber drivers are "exploited". They have almost perfect clarity on what they are being paid to do, they do it and it matches VERY closely the expectations, and they get paid in a timely fashion on the agreed-upon timeline. They have no lock-in, and can quit on a moment's notice. There are so many drivers globally who use Uber and vote with their labor. Frankly, it's generally very easy work too, compared to almost every other job (I'm sure it has its moments). If I were to try and make the Steelman argument for why workers are "exploited", I can come up with basically 2 things: 1) Workers are incapable of deciding what is the right work for their situation. 2) No worker should earn below $x for any reason, and it is better that they be unemployed. In my experience, I have found that people are very savvy about money when it comes to earnings. Where people have issues is long term planning, but short-term, I have found people are very good at "this hack makes my job easier/make me earn more". So I don't buy either of these arguments, I believe it is generally a pessimistic and paternalistic view of workers. I don't believe using the term "exploited" is generally helpful here, as it is an emotional term and not specific enough to address. If you were to break it down, we could have a real discussion. Re: (B) You can't really look at the laws for moral guidance, There are many bad laws out there, that many many people disregard (e.g. the average US commits 3 felonies a day https://www.amazon.com/Three-Felonies-Day-Target-Innocent/dp/1594032556/ https://www.amazon.com/Three-Felonies-Day-Target-Innocent/dp...). It is totally possible in many cases to break laws justly and comply with laws unjustly. You can look at the "illegal" actions of Rosa Parks and Gandhi for extreme examples of just lawbreaking. There are laws that are absurd, for example in New York during COVID, it was both illegal to wear a mask and illegal to not wear a mask. But there are many other smaller examples in people's lives where they think breaking the law is the right moral thing. And the reason most people support Uber's "law breaking" is that it was NET better for everyone than the old system, both drivers AND passengers. This passes a moral "smell test" for me. If one action is illegal, and the other legal, but everyone is better off doing the illegal thing, then the law is the problem. The legalization of Marijuana is another example of trying to reconcile this type of thing. Everyone is better off if it is just legal.
• kristofferR 4y ago
  I think Uber totally flipped the power balance between drivers and customers. Before Uber etc., taxi drivers usually had a good experiences driving while customers usually had horrible experiences being passengers. Now the situation has flipped. When most people think back to taxis before Uber existed, they'll unfortunately rather accept poor working conditions for the drivers than going back to the taxi hellhole they still remember.
  • aperson_hello 4y ago
    This is a very local take. Some places, cab drivers were being taken advantage of even more than Uber does (by the medallion holder). In other places, the driver had a lot better gig pre-uber.
    • kristofferR 4y ago
      Agree, I should have phrased it a little differently. My main point was that customers aren't being treated badly like with taxis anymore, and they'll accept a lot of exploitation due to that.
• Anderkent 4y ago
  Obviously taxi drivers will not be happy talking about uber, they were beneficiaries of an insane and unjust guild system that Uber finally broke down. Unless you can show me someone forced to drive for uber, any claims of worker exploitation are incredibly suspect.
• marcosdumay 4y ago
  Oh, you will find one comment of mine about the taxi mafia on yesterday thread. Of course, it does not justify exploiting workers. Protecting people from those practices is one of the reasons we have governments composed of independent powers, and entire structures with the only purpose of keeping those honest. People aren't complaining about Uber because it looks like that on their case, those safeguards are working. (As an example, this article could only be written because the safeguards are working.) And yeah, they were some courageous people that insisted on breaking some really immoral laws and destroying a really bad local actor. If it wasn't for them, city transportation would probably be the same it was at the 2000's. Of course, they did it for their own immoral motives, using bad practices that should be punished. It just looks like they will be punished, so why bother hating them? Just use a lower priced competitors that probably treats their drivers better, and forget them.
  • na85 4y ago
    >courageous Yes I'm certain the folks at Uber were feeling the pressure every day at their Bay Area office with its foosball tables. Good grief.
  • toss1 4y ago
    >>so why bother hating them? Perhaps because "the ends justify the means" is not a sound code of morality. Lying, cheating, stealing, exploiting, lawbreaking, hiding rapes & assaults, and more are rarely justified for any ends, perhaps only fighting literal authoritarianism. These immoral behaviors are certainly not justified to merely open a stagnant market because you want to exploit the workers even more than the entrenched entities (e.g., at least in the old system there was a path to earn a medallion worth 6-7 $figures and get a retirement, w/uber, it's only 'what are your stats last week') and steal some of the gains for yourself. And now, after over a decade of lying, cheating, stealing, exploiting, lawbreaking, hiding rapes & assaults, and squandering $billions of investor funds, they still aren't profitable, and are shedding drivers & customers as they attempt to raise prices to anything sustainable. We were promised flying cars and all we get is a new form of exploitation, except now driven by a smartphone app? If they put all that funds and effort into an actual honest non-exploitative effort for a flying car...
• whittingtonaaon 4y ago
  Call me naive, but if Uber exploits workers, why don’t they choose some other employer? If it’s the workers’ best choice, then thank goodness for Uber, right?
  • shswkna 4y ago
    Can’t speak for the rest of the world, but in South Africa the Uber drivers I spoke to have very few, if any, other opportunities.
    • whittingtonaaon 4y ago
      But that argument portrays Uber as a godsend for such people. It sounds like without Uber, they might go hungry.
      • tclancy 4y ago
        But that argument suggests Uber could exploit them if Uber were morally bankrupt.
      • shswkna 4y ago
        Even then, some drivers were not happy with their margins. I would say that they are aware that they are being exploited.
• kodah 4y ago
  I think people can have healthy cognitive dissonance that says, "Uber showed how much unfair power companies are willing to build and exploit" as well as, "I don't think anyone could've taken on the taxi mafia without doing similar things." To me, those statements don't eschew accountability, it just acknowledges sometimes we send companies/people to the gallows that did both good and bad things. Gallows here being a metaphor, I doubt the political elite that were recruited to Uber (and other companies) will be held accountable or mentioned any more than in passing in the press. That said, I do expect to see policy changes and regulations in the future regarding mixing lobbying, recruiting highly connected staffers, etc To be clear, I don't think there's some conspiratorial undercurrent of former Uber engineers here acting in coordinated fashion to cover up the story of what they're affiliated with on a place as relatively small as HN. For as popular as this forum is with nerds, the only thing we're really reknown for is the contrarian nature of the forum and how that contrarian nature sometimes (most of the time?) picks big winners. HN doesn't decide the future of hacker culture, it's just a voice in observing and dissecting it.
• pj_mukh 4y ago
  Two things can be true: a) Uber was a crappy business model that required the exploitation of the labor force to raise money. If this fact can't be fixed for the company to be profitable, the company can shutdown or become a co-op for all I care. b) Toronto and SF have banned sidewalk robots (until they "study" the situation i.e. until only monopoly transport companies can afford to wait around). NYC had banned scooters and e-bikes till last year, and in fact spent precious police time chasing down delivery workers who motorized their bikes to reduce the physical drudgery of their work. So when the Guardian says "Uber broke municipal law", my question is always "How stupid were these laws?". Most of these city laws consistently over-index for the opinions of the wealthy retirees who can show up at 10am on a Tuesday to yell at their council meetings. So, if VC's want to fund lobby arms to move the needle in breaking through to these councillors, I'm here for it.
  • mike00632 4y ago
    We need "Uber for housing".
    • krysp 4y ago
      That would be Airbnb, and it seems to be turning out about as well for the market
      • pj_mukh 4y ago
        I think they mean Uber for “building” housing. Not just using it.
        • hunter2_ 4y ago
          So instead of workers hanging out at the big box home improvement store wondering if a contractor will scoop them up that day for a few bucks and a sandwich (and said contractor wondering if the work will be any good), these matches will be made by an "Uber for x" app? On the one hand, why not.
• noplsbecivil 4y ago
  wrote this below but worth posting here - A lot of the conversation here is based on anecdata (interactions with uber drivers or cabs) or people projecting what its like to be a driver on uber and they are unwittingly being exploited. I worked at a company that provided products to uber, lyft and doordash drivers, and personally interviewed well over 200 drivers, (along with having access to detailed data on a much larger dataset). The vast majority of drivers we talked to did not feel like they were being 'exploited' and generally liked the flexibility of the gig economy. Most workers were part time, working to supplement income from other jobs or in between other gigs, in fact when i was there, most drivers worked less than 6 months before stopping. I would say these people have a much better sense of whether they are being exploited than people who are not in their shoes. There was a small but important minority (we called them 'professionals') for whom driving had become their full time profession (most were not cab drivers before) who were perpetually annoyed by uber and their main gripes tended to be the changing promotions systems, and algorithmic changes that reduced/limited profitable rides (like airport pickups) and just general loss of control.
• s1artibartfast 4y ago
  You're going to need a decent definition of exploitation or better word if you want to make any Headway with people. Some people claim that every employer is exploiting their workers It is a separate but related issue then the law-breaking. They need to be discussed separately. Most people recognize that there are bad laws that should be broken, and bad laws that should be changed. If Uber broke a bad law, the most important solution is to fix the law. If Uber broke a good law, the most important solution is to stop them.
  • mike00632 4y ago
    We have some good employment laws that Uber is skirting by classifying their employees as "independent contractors".
    • s1artibartfast 4y ago
      As someone who always wanted to be an independent contractor but can't, I especially don't like those laws. I think the most charitable interpretation of them is legal duct tape over other bad laws. The most obvious examples are tax laws and incentives that tie Healthcare to employers.
• guenthert 4y ago
  Uh, what's wrong with Taxis? I didn't use them often and perhaps I got lucky, but they always showed up on time and I always arrived in time (although, at least on two occasions, I wondered whether I would arrive alive -- the ride on Crete from the airport still haunts me twenty years later). With Uber I would face the same risks, plus drivers not trained for commercial transport of persons. And boy, did I observe some utterly clueless Uber drivers.
• stjohnswarts 4y ago
  Eggs get broken. I've been both on the giving and receiving end of that. It's part of existence and I don't think anyone is surprised by this or justifying it, it's just hilarious how shocked people are by revealations like these. I suspect most corps are just as crooked as Uber but Uber just got caught. Uber shaking up the taxi market was good, but it had bad consequences for -some- drivers, both things can exist you know? I think HN has some trouble feeling bad when people were -never- forced to drive for uber.
• jdasdf 4y ago
  > Meta - I am honestly surprised, and sightly appalled at the general attitude in these comments (and also in yesterday's thread). >Uber has essentially not just broken laws, but outright exploited workers/drivers... and people comment "Aah but the local taxi mafia was bad"...??!? I'm sorry but that does not justify exploiting workers. That does not justify using political influence to enter/gain markets. This isn't some messiah coming to save us all from the "horridness of local transport". Except this isn't a david against goliath story like you're implying. The fact is that those laws are not just practically wrong, but they are also morally wrong, and serve primarily to protect entrenched interests, both from the taxi companies, and of the workers who you claim incorrectly are being "exploited". The fact is, if anyone is "using political influence to enter/gain markets" it's the established interests. The taxi companies, the workers, etc... Those very regulations that you are complaining are being broken by Uber, are the the problem! I don't like Uber. I think it's a bad business. But its effects on muscling in on the taxi industry, and its blatant breaking of these immoral and economically ruinous laws are quite frankly commendable. Would that we had more companies like this in other areas of the economy with entrenched interests.
  • runarberg 4y ago
    I’m not sure those are the same laws your parent is referring to. Uber was caught engaging in illegal lobbying (which in my vocabulary is simply called bribing officials) and labor violations. In addition to those they also frequently broke traffic laws and transport laws. The former two are the more worrying and what most people are angry about. The latter two are also a concern given the total disregard and emphasis on private profit over public good. Where I come from there are pretty restrictive drug laws which public health officials have frequently pointed out are harmful for people with a substance abuse disorder. In response a non profit organization took a direct action and illegally provided safe use shelters for harm reduction with on-site medical professionals to observe safety. This is an example of somebody braking the laws for a public good. What Uber did was for their own profit, and profit alone, irregardless of any public benefits. In fact there are examples of cities divesting in their public transit systems using ride hailing as an excuse. This is an example of Uber resulting in net harm, regardless of the effect they had on the traditional taxi companies.
• goofook 4y ago
  maybe the government regulation was the unfair business competition and abuse of workers in the first place because i mean this has been a slow moving avalanche that nobody did anything about again because all the rich people have rocks to hide behind.. goofook
  • goofook 4y ago
    im a ex pro gamer who broke into fort knox with no intentions