MPPs are discussing the issue in committee. The study authors are pushing the city to consider reinstating its cap on drivers, on the grounds that fewer drivers could mean each driver gets a greater share of the rides.
For the love of god please don’t.
This is a supply and demand problem, an oversupply of drivers results in lower wages, and the market should sort itself out in the long term.
Uber and Lyft regulate the balance of supply and demand via price, which they alone determine. The ride sharing companies want enough capacity that riders don’t have to wait, and drivers want to be on the app where the users are, but clearly drivers are willing to put up with more than they should in the hope they get rides. Riders don’t care about this issue at all, and I’ll bet Uber take more of a driver’s pay than the taxi companies used to.
So the government has a few good options:
Class drivers as employees, since they effectively are, if you want them to earn minimum wage. Nobody cares that any other class of contractor gets below minimum wage, so why do we care about ride share drivers?
Set rules or establish a market maker for ride sharing, like financial markets have, which would let the demand and supply sides both negotiate and freely set prices. This could/should involve capping the amount of money the ride share companies take. Uber/Lyft effectively tax both riders and drivers and make the market strictly less efficient than it otherwise would be.
Just ban Uber and Lyft. Other countries have done it. If you go to Ireland their free taxi app is every bit as good as Uber with all the regulatory compliance of the taxi industry.
Lend money out for local companies to create their own local ride sharing apps. If drivers are contractors they can run the local ones too which will compete for price.
Build their own ride sharing app (except don’t because I don’t want to see some huge contract go to a company called “GovServiceWorks” with 4 employees to contract out an RFP, collect the cheque, and outsource the work to India, all while saying they misquoted the price and getting 10x what they quoted)
MPPs are discussing the issue in committee. The study authors are pushing the city to consider reinstating its cap on drivers, on the grounds that fewer drivers could mean each driver gets a greater share of the rides.
Uber was never meant to make drivers any profit to begin with. The model was to offset the cost of a commute that drivers were already going to make by ridesharing, with uber skimming some money off on each transaction. Uber realized that people were willing to work on incredibly small margins in exchange for 'flexibility" when people tried to turn driving into a full time job. Uber drivers are fucking themselves with Uber’s dick. The solution isn’t to force higher wages it’s to ban predatory “not a job” businesses from operation.
I’m a driver and you are mostly correct. This is however a legit industry and job and can be extremely profitable as well as having the flexibility and freedom to do what you want when you want as your cash flow allows. How do I make good money at this, you ask? The answer is to run your own service and cut out uber and lyft at every opportunity. I hand out business cards to everyone I would tolerate driving again. I’ve been focused on airport runs but recently I’ve shifted a bit towards older folks who need a ride to and from a doctors appointment or other errands.
I don’t know how this industry operates in Canada but in my current state all I need is a for-hire plate and commercial insurance. I am then free to basically do what I want with my business aside from the tighter regs in some cities. Where I currently live I could do street pickups if I wanted to. That’s because my city has no commission or regulation of this industry. And by industry I mean livery not rideshare. This hasn’t been rideshare since the first driver went full time with it.
You’re missing a crucial piece of the puzzle. Uber subsidized driver profits and fares for years in order to kill taxi companies. This undermines the idea that Uber discovered that people would work for small margins. I remember Uber operating mainly as a cab service at least as far back as 2015-16.
I couldn’t tell you how many heated arguments about it I’ve had with friends about this as far back as 2015. I had much lower understanding of the economy and capitalism at the time and yet the basic logic of what was happening predicted what we see today, if you just followed it.
Not only are they getting less than half of minimum wage, they’re destroying their cars at the same time. Cabs suffer the greatest wear and tear and poor maintenance means they’ll end up in junk yards years before vehicles for personal use.
Do actual taxi drivers get paid a minimum wage whether or not they are driving someone? I assumed that was how it worked. Like the meter thing is so the taxi company can make money, but the driver makes a flat rate. Is that not the case?
I read a biography by a US cab driver (Dharma Road) and from that my understanding is that taxi company drivers pay the company a set amount per shift - let’s say $100 - to use the cab license and get the perks of being part of a company (e.g., dispatcher, insurance perhaps). Whatever a driver makes in a day over $100 is their earnings. (All the money they collect, meter and tips, go into the total amount from which they have to pay the company $100.)
They don’t get an hourly minimum wage, like other workers (e.g., food and beverage servers) who are expected to make more than an hourly minimum wage anyway.
That sounds pretty similar to the Uber arrangement. Slightly different because it’s BYO car, but they tradeoff is that more people use Uber than taxis. It seems to me that bad economic conditions could easily create a situation where those taxi drivers are making starvation wages too.
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