#Uber#RideHailing#GigEconomy#BigTech#Lobbying#SiliconValley: "Meanwhile, Uber has a long record of using deceptive actions to avoid regulatory oversight, most notably through a program called Greyball. In Boston, Las Vegas, and a host of European cities, it deployed a mock version of its app on the phones of unfriendly city officials to make it falsely appear that the service was not available. In some cities, it investigated passengers’ credit card accounts to help determine if they were government officials.
Where state legislatures or courts do not deliver for Uber, it turns to the ballot box. In 2019 California passed a law making companies responsible for proving that their workers were independent contractors, which opened the door to reclassifying them as employees. Uber and other gig economy companies responded by pouring $220 million into a ballot initiative, Proposition 22, which it billed as a defense of drivers’ rights. “Protecting the ability of Californians to work as independent contractors throughout the state using app-based rideshare and delivery platforms,” it stressed, “is necessary so people can continue to choose which jobs they take, to work as often or as little as they like, and to work with multiple platforms or companies.” In fact the proposition would exempt app-based workers from nearly all labor protections, including paid sick leave, retirement benefits, and workers compensation. It passed, though a group of drivers have contested its legality in the California Supreme Court. Its success is still a troubling sign of Uber’s political clout. In Massachusetts, Uber, Instacart, and Lyft raised $43 million in 2022—and $7 million so far this year—for copycat ballot initiatives."
#GigEconomy#RideHailing: "Whether they’re ferrying passengers or delivering food orders, gig workers often work 10 to 12 hours a day to make ends meet. As they traverse their cities, these workers scramble to find facilities to meet their basic needs — restrooms, clean places to eat meals, and safe spots to rest. Through trial and error, many gig workers have crafted their own invisible city maps, identifying places where they can stop for a breather.
Rest of World spoke to 104 ride-hailing drivers, delivery workers, and cleaners who find gigs via apps across 10 cities — Dhaka, Hanoi, Hong Kong, Jakarta, Johannesburg, Karachi, Lagos, Mexico City, Nairobi, and São Paulo — to better understand how often they take breaks, and where they go to use the bathroom and eat meals." https://restofworld.org/2024/gig-worker-rest-breaks/?mc_cid=abefe81351
There's a new ride hailing app in the PH called Peek Up. I hope it, together with InDrive, Maxim and Owto, can compete with monopolistic Grab in the 4-wheeled vehicle category. Initially, "the service is available in Metro Manila, Laguna, Cavite, Rizal, and Bulacan."
#Canada#Toronto#Uber#RideHailing#Cities#Urbanism#GigEconomy: "Anything that can't go on forever eventually stops. After years of bumbling-to-sinister municipal rule, Toronto finally reclaimed its political power and voted in a new mayor, Olivia Chow, a progressive of long tenure and great standing (I used to ring doorbells for her when she was campaigning for her city council seat). Mayor Chow announced that she was going to reclaim the city's prerogative to limit the number of Ubers on the road, ending the period of Uber's "self-regulation."
Uber, naturally, lost its shit. The company claims to be more than a (geometrically impossible) provider of convenient transportation for Torontonians, but also a provider of good jobs for working people. And to prove it, the company has promised to pay its drivers "120% of minimum wage." As I write for Ricochet, that's a whopper, even by Uber's standards:"
#Uber#GigEconomy#RideHailing#Cities#Urbanism#Neoliberalism#Transportation: "Uber and fellow rideshare companies like Lyft are now ubiquitous in US cities, a symbol of the success of Silicon Valley capitalism and the growth of precarious, low-wage gig work in the twenty-first century. Uber’s rise was far from peaceful; under the banner of “disruption,” the company has displaced traditional taxicabs and conquered markets by violating labor law and other regulations with impunity.
In their book, Disrupting D.C.: The Rise of Uber and the Fall of the City, Katie J. Wells, Kafui Attoh, and Declan Cullen chart how Uber overcame early resistance to its operations in Washington, DC, a victory that provided a model for the company’s conquest of other cities around the globe. The authors argue that failed neoliberal policies by city governments in DC and elsewhere helped lay the groundwork for Uber’s rise — in large part by undermining citizens’ confidence that government could solve long-standing problems like broken public transit and underemployment. Jacobin contributor Sara Wexler recently interviewed Wells, Attoh, and Cullen about the conditions that allowed Uber to flourish, the false “solutions” it has offered to policymakers, and how we might restore faith in the public sphere."
#Uber#GigEconomy#RideHailing: "Uber’s reluctance to explain how it improved margins and established a P&L advantage versus Lyft is because the explanation directly contradicts these corporate narratives, and because the explanation would help investors see that the recent rate of margin gains is not sustainable.
Uber has abandoned everything that got the market to enthusiastically support them 10 years ago. Uber is now just a much higher cost version of the traditional operators they vilified as an “evil taxi cartel”. Their fares are now higher than traditional taxis used to charge, they no longer offer a lot more cars in peak periods and they no longer serve neighborhoods throughout each city. Uber has completely abandoned its original “megagrowth driven by much more service at much lower prices” strategy but still tells investors that robust growth will drive future equity appreciation. Every Uber attempt to mimic Amazon’s expansion beyond its core market has also failed.
From a narrow P&L perspective Uber’s recent moves to cut service and raise prices are sensible, but if openly discussed investors could realize that the entire corporate growth narrative was always a sham. Investors would stop seeing Uber as a dynamic fast-growing “tech” company and would realize it was simply a player in the economically difficult and slowly growing urban car service industry. Investors applauded Uber for introducing innovative technology that “disrupted” a backward industry and brought huge benefits to consumers and cities.
It does not want those investors to see that the Uber’s “innovative technology” is focused on the algorithmic exploitation of both customers and drivers. It does not want investors to see that none of its recent P&L gains were due to true productivity improvements and thus these gains cannot be extrapolated into the future."