A significant drop in wages can be considered constructive dismissal, but it's generally difficult to prove without explicit evidence of the intention behind it. And in this case, it's pretty hard to make the argument that it constitutes constructive dismissal, since there is zero evidence that Uber acted in a way to target the driver by intentionally cutting their earnings specifically, whether or not those actions were intended to target or retaliate against the driver.
You'd have to demonstrate intent/targeting for something like "they made me shovel elephant poop instead of my usual tasks".
A significant wage drop is inherently constructive dismissal as wage/salary tends to be most people's single most important criteria for accepting the job.
For a job in which pay directly correlates to job performance (such as tipped labor, or number of passengers driven, as in this case), you would have to demonstrate a number of things, including:
(a) the low pay represented a change (if the pay was consistently and comparably low since the beginning, nothing was constructed)
(b) the change in pay did not stem from a change in performance or the drivers' choice of hours worked
In this case, it's not clear that (a) applies, and it's almost certain that (b) does not, because there's no evidence that Uber made decisions that changed the take-home pay of the driver directly (such as reducing the driver's share, except insofar as any initial signup promotions expired, which would not constitute constructive dismissal).
> A crowd of 600 drivers gathered outside the Uber office in Long Island City, Queens, to protest a 15 percent reduction in fares last month, which also means 15 percent lower wages. That pay cut is on top of Uber’s 20 percent slashing of fares in 2014. All things being equal, drivers who began less than two years ago have seen their pay tumble a whopping 35 percent.
It's not so cut-and-dry, and in fact, there's already case law in New York holding that pay cuts of about one-third are not inherently constructive dismissal, and that it depends on the particulars of the individual's case.
With that on top of everything else, it's a really far stretch to read the one-line description from the article that the driver quit because of "low pay" and infer that constructive dismissal is applicable here.
If you want unemployment benefits, the question is "will the state labor department accept it?" There's going to be a lower threshold there.