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“Wage theft” what? It’s very transparent what you are getting paid and what the deal is when you drive for uber or lyft. Argue all you want for thinking that l

• kypro 3y ago
  If you think you're mad as a consumer, imagine all the Uber/Lyft drivers who no longer have any income because the government has made it uneconomical for their employer to do business in their city.
  • crooked-v 3y ago
    If they can't pay even minimum wage, it was already uneconomical and being subsidized by government welfare.
    • VirusNewbie 3y ago
      How is that true? Plenty of people work minimum wage jobs that aren't subsidized by government welfare. If someone has a roommate or a partner or a parent or a child that supports them? There are some jobs that are only economically viable at a certain wage, and anything beyond that makes it not economically viable. So those jobs won't exist.
      • thrownaway13371 3y ago
        Exactly, if you can't afford to pay a living wage you have a bad business model, which is exactly what the comment you responded to was pointing out.
        • VirusNewbie 3y ago
          Incorrect. McDonalds might calculate that for every hour someone sweeps in front of their store, they make $7 in profit. If someone is willing to do that for $6 an hour, they will pay. If minimum wage is $8 an hour, they will leave the dirt and leaves there. That has nothing to do with having an economically viable business model. Please do not engage on HN if you are unable to understand basic economics. This is not a place to argue something this trivial.
    • bogota 3y ago
      They offer a service and you can choose to drive for them. This in a lot of cases helps people make extra money or hold them over. But you think it’s better to let the government remove this option? I just can’t get onboard with this thinking. I understand it for W2 jobs but for freelance and pick your own hours it does not make sense.
      • IllIlIIllI 3y ago
        This would make more sense if people didn't need to work to continue living. As it stands, if people get into a dire enough situation they will be forced to take work on whatever terms the company wants to offer. The reason these laws exist is to protect workers from being forced into terrible situations for a company's benefit. Of course, the service is voluntary, but for many people the options are "work for pennies or live on the street" -- that's hardly an unforced choice. Why should the state subsidize Uber's profits, given that the state will be the one to support people who end up in poverty?
      • usr1106 3y ago
        Exploiting underpaid workers is not a service. Even if they are in tough situation with few better options.
        • bogota 3y ago
          Cool talking point.
    • goalonetwo 3y ago
      Tax labor correctly then, so that it reflects how much the government wellfare will need to subsidize. Simplistic feel-good minimum wage laws are creating unemployment. This is a perfect example.
      • thrownaway13371 3y ago
        Uber and Lyft can easily afford to pay their workers the minimum wage, it would however hurt their record profits and set a precedence that they would need to pay a living wage across all cities. Amazingly all other businesses in this city are already able to afford the minimum wage. This is a perfect example of a company tossing some of the lowest income members of society literally to the street rather than pay them a living wage. Thank god we have minimum wage laws.
        • CubsFan1060 3y ago
          Can you help me out with the money here? I was curious, so I went and looked. https://investor.uber.com/news-events/news/press-release-details/2024/Uber-Announces-Results-for-Fourth-Quarter-and-Full-Year-2023/default.aspx https://investor.uber.com/news-events/news/press-release-det... It looks like they made approximately 1.4 billion, with a gross bookings of around 37.5 billion. That would _seem_ to mean that drivers would get an increase of approximately 3% of the full booking price if Uber was a nonprofit? Best I could find is that there are about 5.4 million drivers worldwide. So if Uber's profit was distributed evenly, each would get about $264/quarter? Without knowing hours driven, I'm not sure what all that boils down to. I suspect it doesn't factor in idle time, without rides. Can you talk a little bit about how you came up with "easily afford to pay their workers minimum wage"?
          • Simulacra 3y ago
            A lot of people assume that just because a company has a lot of money that they can freely give away that money to their employees. We've seen this before, Starbucks for example, billion dollar company they have plenty of money to give their employees. No one really takes into account all of the expenses, and what that actually would look like.
    • hn_3456789 3y ago
      So maybe stop subsidizing wages with government welfare, and labor will automatically gravitate away and uber/lyft won't find enough drivers and be forced to hike wages to find drivers.
  • bradleyankrom 3y ago
    Or maybe it's a splash of reality for those businesses that have relied on undercompensated labor and VC money to acquire market share.
    • bogota 3y ago
      Not really. They haven’t been doing that for a few years now. They are just going to leave the market if it becomes unprofitable. I see people complaining all the time about ride prices so the consumer doesn’t want this and im sure the people driving aren’t happy to lose the income as well. Who is winning here?
      • thrownaway13371 3y ago
        It's not unprofitable, it's them posturing that they will refuse to lower their profit margins. Do you honestly think they can't afford to pay their employees the bare minimum that literally every other business in the city is paying? No they can easily afford it but if they do pay their workers fairly it sets a precedent that would slightly lower profits the "growth at the expense of everything" mindset.
        • ndriscoll 3y ago
          Presumably those other businesses are able to generate more revenue per employee. Otherwise, they'd go out of business (which happens all the time), as Uber and Lyft are doing here. What do you believe their profit margins are? Uber's latest investor update says theirs was ~2.9% last year, though that number probably requires a decent amount of familiarity with the business to interpret. I can't imagine investors would be very happy about them choosing to posture instead of making money with their investment if that's what they were doing. Obviously investors want better margins. Treasuries are paying 4-5% guaranteed, so why invest in Uber to make 3%?
  • goalonetwo 3y ago
    that is the dirty truth. All of those feel-good minimum wage laws are in fact stealing wages from those workers. Those workers were OK to work for those wages before the law. Now they have nothing. The result is now higher unemployment and use of tax-dollar to subsidize those people.
    • zthrowaway 3y ago
      Yes. More people should take note that there's always unintended consequences with price controls. It usually makes things much worse. Reminds me of: https://www.lenconnect.com/story/opinion/columns/2013/09/23/thomas-sowell-minimum-wage-hike/44213594007/ https://www.lenconnect.com/story/opinion/columns/2013/09/23/...
    • add-sub-mul-div 3y ago
      Or, since the overall demand for transportation hasn't changed, jobs shift over time to ones with less exploitative terms.
    • egh 3y ago
      this is the traditional belief, but all the empirical research on this shows that it is not true. https://www.umass.edu/news/article/umass-amherst-economists-and-colleagues https://www.umass.edu/news/article/umass-amherst-economists-... https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2021/01/30/what-would-a-15-minimum-wage-mean-for-americas-economy https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2021/01/30/w...
      • goostavos 3y ago
        _All_ of it? Damn. That's wild.
    • thrownaway13371 3y ago
      Those workers often had no other choice other than to get exploited to scrape by, and now businesses who will refuse to pay a living wage have thrown them to the street. It's clearly economically viable for them to pay the bare minimum, but they will literally cease business than accept slightly lower profit margins.
  • bluefirebrand 3y ago
    I think I'm more angry about employers feeling so entitled to labor that they would rather close their doors and fire everyone than pay them even remotely fairly
  • lostlogin 3y ago
    Do you have a view on child labour laws?
    • bogota 3y ago
      I was working at 14 in Florida. What do you consider to be child labor? I have lots of views they likely don’t line up with yours because most people don’t see how the low end of the economy actually works.
      • lostlogin 3y ago
        I’m sure you’d agree - the devil is in the detail. A kid working for some pocket money after school or at the weekend is one thing. A kid dropping out of school at a young age or being pressured to work is another, and symptomatic of other problems.
• tbwriting 3y ago
  They were literally caught red-handed doing this in New York. https://ny1.com/nyc/manhattan/traffic_and_transit/2024/01/19/uber--lyft-drivers-to-receive-big-payouts-from-historic-ag-settlement https://ny1.com/nyc/manhattan/traffic_and_transit/2024/01/19...
• waveBidder 3y ago
  If it weren't an oligopoly I'd be less inclined to endorse government interference in wage setting. I'd frankly rather the twin cities just spin up their own rideshare marketplace, they have a great carshare system[0], would love to see them expand into rideshare too. [0]: https://eviecarshare.com/ https://eviecarshare.com/
  • bogota 3y ago
    I saw what it took to build both Uber and Lyft. I know that the government will bot be able to reproduce it in any way unless you are fine with a terrible user experience and times where no rides are available
    • Simulacra 3y ago
      In other words, the corrupt and awful taxi and medallion scam, all over again. I wonder how much the incumbent taxi industry had to do with this. If you want to push up competition, convince the government to force your competition, to pay their employees more than you do.
    • waveBidder 3y ago
      I'm specifically comparing with a very successful carshare program in Minneapolis, not getting the federal government to do it. Knee-jerk assumptions that governments are always incompetent is a great way to make them that way.
• goalonetwo 3y ago
  I would be even more mad if I was driving for Uber in those cities and overnight the government made the decision for me to remove that as an income option.
  • jakelazaroff 3y ago
    According to the article, Uber and Lyft made the decision to stop operating, not the government.
    • bogota 3y ago
      It now costs you 100k a year in taxes for your property. You then move and everyone say its your fault because you don’t want to take a loss every year. Do i have this correct?
      • kstrauser 3y ago
        No, because the actual issue is that Uber’s profit model in Minneapolis required them to pay below the legal minimum wage.
      • cma 3y ago
        They were just asking for something like minimum wage after expenses and employers portion social security equivalent.
      • jakelazaroff 3y ago
        Kind of! In this analogy I’m cheating on my taxes, and everyone tells me it’s my fault when the government makes me pay what I actually owe. I’d also go to prison, whereas Uber and Lyft just get to say “whoops!” and leave town.
        • tick_tock_tick 3y ago
          ex post facto laws are illegal just like Uber and Lyft you wouldn't be punished for what happened before they changed the laws.
• olliej 3y ago
  It's wage theft, because the law says you owe employees minimum wages by law, and if you aren't paying them that amount, you're stealing the excess from your employees. The fact that you think you should be allowed to pay people less than the legal requirement is not relevant, the law says you owe people $X, so if you pay them less than X, it is theft. The problem Lyft and Uber have is the same AirBnB is starting to run into: if your business model is misclassifying things (employees in the lyft/uber case, and hotels in the airbnb case, etc), eventually either (as in NY) court cases will force you to pay what you owe, or as here legislation will be passed to make it so that whatever the company is misclassifying things as, will be covered by the regulations the apply to what they actually are. Seriously, if your business model is pretending that your specific implementation of X is not the same X covered by existing laws, your implementation will eventually have to comply with the regulations that apply to X.
  • bogota 3y ago
    Its pretty hard to apply min wage intended for w2 to gig work when the laws are treating you as both. So they have to let the drivers have complete freedom over what they do and what rides they take and when they do it. But also you have to follow min wage laws which apply when? Im sure Uber and Lyft can redesign the system to work with this model and im sure the consumer will hate the new prices.
• sunshowers 3y ago
  Look up "monopsony". Also, it's not at all transparent what cut Uber and Lyft are taking from a ride.
• erehweb 3y ago
  They have taxis in Minneapolis, no? And ones that have apps available as well, as far as I can tell. Couldn't they just pick up the slack?
  • bogota 3y ago
    Good luck!
• ProxCoques 3y ago
  > man i would be mad as someone living in the city that these services are no longer available. Before Uber, we had these things cal... oh never mind.
  • bogota 3y ago
    Oo yeah im familiar. They suck. Thanks for the history lesson though! It’s been shown drunk driving drops with uber because cabs will ignore you outside of a select few cities. As a college student i had multiple cabs try to scam me or overcharge and this was if they would even show up at all leaving me to walk miles and in one case getting robbed at gun point because of it. But yeah lol its the same as uber.