While it's valid to question what an Uber driver says to a customer, it doesn't necessarily follow that because some Uber drivers have come out against it publi

While it's valid to question what an Uber driver says to a customer, it doesn't necessarily follow that because some Uber drivers have come out against it publicly that all of them are somehow in thrall to the company and hiding their disgust, or even that their issues are actually worse than the issues you might hear a taxi driver say about their company off the meter. Particularly since taxi companies are almost always local and local rules vary. To go back to a specific point in the OP, if an Uber driver says that when they were a taxi driver the company's cut was 40% instead of the 20% uber takes, I'd be inclined to think they're not lying about it. Merely not bringing it up would be more than sufficient to maintain the illusion. And to compare this to a personal experience conversing with a cab driver and an uber driver, I had a cabbie tell me that they wait a month to get money from debit or credit transactions in their cab from the company, and this is one of the reasons they resist customers paying that way. An uber driver told me it's a week for them. That's a huge difference in payment cycle. Also, if Uber drivers are trapped somehow from taking their labour elsewhere, it is entirely because of the regulatory capture created by the taxi industry's relationship with city administrations that imposes inflexible limits on the way the taxi industry can grow (often to the point of it being essentially a planned economy).