Have you driven a cab before? Do you know for north america at least, the standard model is drivers are independent contractors and rent out the cars or the medallion license from medallion owners? Many medallion owners are not drivers themselves. Taxi companies are generally a collection of licenses, car rental, some branding and advertising and dispatch services. The angry taxi people you see protesting Uber or equivalents are more like the Canadian trucker convoy people who own their trucks than the actual typical poor long haul truck driver who doesn't own their truck.
Also whats worse about the taxi model is you often are paying on a monthly basis to rent the car, so every month you are something like $3000 in the hole and you have to keep on grinding hard before you could break even and then start making money for yourself. It's hard to take a vacation unless you want to take a month long one with no pay, which for most people who are doing the taxi gig, is not financially tenable.
Being a taxi driver SUCKS. At least Uber is an improvement because the fee system is done as you make money and you have way more flexibility as a result.
Everyone is upset that low end relatively unskilled labor pay & life sucks in general, and being upset with Uber is just one facet of it. Amazon warehouse workers & some restaurant workers are another group. In the past the media obsession was walmart workers and immigrant farm workers, which you don't hear about that much anymore but life still sucks for them.
Activists try to shove the responsibility of making the low-end labor life better onto the company that hires them, while ignoring what the real problem is the low-end labor life sucks in general, and if you made amazon and walmart and everyone else that is visible disappear, it's still gonna suck, because the problem isn't those companies per say, it's the entire global situation of being a low end laborer, and it's a situation that is properly covered by government than any specific company.
Governments don't want to pay for it although, especially in America, which is why you see this kind of focus especially in the USA, where they make employers create something approximating universal healthcare, benefits, etc vs collecting it through an equivalent tax and making it a universally provided benefit set. If it was truly a government responsibility, it could go multiple ways, such as reducing the cost of living by not making housing an investment asset and more a consumer good / capital business cost like in Japan and changing food regulations to heavily tax obesogenic & carcinogenic products, so the total national healthcare expenditure of the nation goes down and so on.
> Being a taxi driver SUCKS. At least Uber is an improvement
I would be curious to hear stories of former cab drivers who chose to drive for Uber instead because they found it an improvement. I don't feel like I've heard any stories like that, but it must be a thing a lot of people have done if you are right it's an improvement, right? I feel like I've only heard stories of cab drivers complaining that Uber has destroyed their business, which is nevertheless still preferable to driving for uber.
Yes, I know some people are locked into driving a cab because of previous locked in investment etc. But some people aren't, if uber is really an improvement we should be able to find lots of people who chose to move from driving a cab to driving for uber?
Yes, I think we're actually on the same side of the argument here. TL;DR of what I was trying to say is that Uber may be exploiting drivers, but it's still meaningfully better for them than the alternatives.
Also whats worse about the taxi model is you often are paying on a monthly basis to rent the car, so every month you are something like $3000 in the hole and you have to keep on grinding hard before you could break even and then start making money for yourself. It's hard to take a vacation unless you want to take a month long one with no pay, which for most people who are doing the taxi gig, is not financially tenable.
Being a taxi driver SUCKS. At least Uber is an improvement because the fee system is done as you make money and you have way more flexibility as a result.
Everyone is upset that low end relatively unskilled labor pay & life sucks in general, and being upset with Uber is just one facet of it. Amazon warehouse workers & some restaurant workers are another group. In the past the media obsession was walmart workers and immigrant farm workers, which you don't hear about that much anymore but life still sucks for them.
Activists try to shove the responsibility of making the low-end labor life better onto the company that hires them, while ignoring what the real problem is the low-end labor life sucks in general, and if you made amazon and walmart and everyone else that is visible disappear, it's still gonna suck, because the problem isn't those companies per say, it's the entire global situation of being a low end laborer, and it's a situation that is properly covered by government than any specific company.
Governments don't want to pay for it although, especially in America, which is why you see this kind of focus especially in the USA, where they make employers create something approximating universal healthcare, benefits, etc vs collecting it through an equivalent tax and making it a universally provided benefit set. If it was truly a government responsibility, it could go multiple ways, such as reducing the cost of living by not making housing an investment asset and more a consumer good / capital business cost like in Japan and changing food regulations to heavily tax obesogenic & carcinogenic products, so the total national healthcare expenditure of the nation goes down and so on.