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As someone who loves Uber and who spends thousands of dollars a year on their app, and as someone who dislikes Hillary, I cannot be happier with Hillary's stanc
by interesting_att 11y ago
As someone who loves Uber and who spends thousands of dollars a year on their app, and as someone who dislikes Hillary, I cannot be happier with Hillary's stance.
Uber will remain here and their rides will stay cheap. I am, however, very concerned about their drivers. Many of them are making huge investments purchasing new cars with the implicit (and sometimes borderline explicit, depending on the marketing rep you talk to at Uber) that they can have guaranteed work and a guaranteed wage. If über decides to cut driver wages in half and pocket the profits, drivers will be out of luck. This can be catastrophic for poor families, which will be basically be forced into wage slavery. This will have huge effects on the community as Uber gets bigger.
We can all point to how Taxi unions and their lobbyists are evil (as a colored man, it's difficult for me to get picked up by one), how awesome Uber is w/ their investments in autonomous cars, and the free markets are great...but we need real employee protections in this country.
We need real protection for drivers who are making a huge investment. This doesn't have to hurt consumers either, as über can still remain insanely profitable while maintaining lower prices.
Edit: Removed the umlauts
- camillomiller 11y agoFirst, it's Uber, not Über. Then we should all have a reality check. All this sharing economy thing has gone a little bit too far now... It's masquerading as a revolutionary way to earn money for everybody except some greedy unions and lobbies that need to be "disrupted", and we don't see that it's just undercutting by spreading costs in an anticompetitive way. But much more important than that: the jobs they "create" are extremely weak, unprotected and they contribute to erode the middle class even more, all while centralizing wealth toward the top 1% that actually funds this sort of ventures. I really don't get what's so revolutionary in all the services where "sharing" actually means "exploiting lower middle class people's free time or temporary unemployment to provide a service without giving any warranty for the workers, providing cheaper services for the upper middle class". I understand and support those services where "sharing" keeps its real meaning. Like in car sharing or bike sharing, where you actually SHARE a car or a bike, and not someone else's cheap time.
- danieltillett 11y agoI am not sure if uber has the umlauts. While I am not great supporter of the taxi industry, I do think that you should not be too hard on the taxi drivers for not picking you up although I do understand your personal frustration. I am not sure how many uber drivers would be happy to pick up random people without knowing they had been pre-screened.
- interesting_att 11y agoYeah, I stopped caring about how taxi drivers treat me. Ironically, it is because I can use uber now :)
- danieltillett 11y agoAs a good passenger you want a way of being able to tell the driver this. Uber lets you in effect do this, but there is nothing stopping the taxi industry copying the same process. If they did they would give uber a real run for its money.