Except then you can't eat? It's not that it's not profitable, it's that the earnings drivers make are meager compared to what people need to sustain themselves. You make it sound like anybody who's on minimum wage just doesn't realise that they could go elsewhere for higher wages!

> Except then you can't eat?

In an era of record low unemployment (in the US at least), claiming that it's "Uber at low wages or you don't eat" is kind of a ridiculous hyperbole.

Unemployment numbers aren't relevant when you're saying that people can ignore an entire class of jobs though. What percentage of those employed people are driving for Uber or equivalent and would love to get another job themselves? That's your employee competition pool.

Always fascinated by the idea that paying someone $8/h is a crime, but paying them $0/h is perfectly fine.

Such enormous cognitive dissonance. We humans are so good at that.

Unemployed people have various forms of legal protection in place that "underemployed" people don't. You can claim unemployment because you were fired, but not because your hours were cut.

The idea that minimum wages kills jobs is not as well supported as you might think. People commonly take overly-simplified econ 101 labor market theories as gospel when the empirical evidence about the effects of minimum wage increases is decidedly mixed: https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/11/20/20952151/shoul...

I'm not talking about that.

I just find it crazy that in the scenario where Uber pays someone poor $8/h while I pay them 0$/h, Uber is the bad guy, while I am completely blameless.

The only actor actually paying the poor person is somehow the problem!

It's hard for me to come up with a logical framework that supports that conclusion. So I think it's not actually a matter of logic.

Paying someone $0 to work for you would be illegal too.

What they're saying is that the worker either gets 8/hour with a job or 0/hour with no job. I'd rather have the job.

And before it was illegal, people preferred for their five year olds to have the job too.

It's baiting people who don't understand the costs associated, eg change in insurance premium if they were to correctly register & insure themselves.

Uber outsources all the risk and fees that taxi companies would have to cover.

No indeed there's no gun, and luckily if you can't afford a car to drive, Uber would love to sell you a subprime auto loan as see on FTC TV: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/blogs/business-blog/2017/01/...

I wonder if we would all feel the same about some other ponzi scheme.

Since drivers can't set their own rates, I've always felt the government should regulate the split. Uber's portion should be capped at something like 5%. The marginal cost for them to connect a driver to a rider is close to 0 so even 5% feels very generous.

That's not the job of the government to regulate margins of businesses. If you go by that way, then you might as well regulate every margin of every app store?

At least in the US, they do it all the time. The job of the government is mostly to do what we tell it to do because the government is just people from the community.

The government should (and does) regulate the margins of natural monopolies like utilities where a free market can't operate effectively.

That is the governments job.

They aren't regulating an app on the store, they would be in this hypothetical scenario regulating the labor practices of a multinational corporation, which is for sure the job of any government.

A great idea.

Thats what taxation does anyway

Say we implemented this scenario, can we walk though what would happen next:

- What do you expect would happen to Uber prices?

- How do you expect that change would affect overall demand for the service?

- From there, how do you expect this change of demand (if any) would affect the take-home pay of the drivers?

> What do you expect would happen to Uber prices?

That would depend on how much money Softbank has left to invest. Prices might go up.

> How do you expect that change would affect overall demand for the service?

Uber's great advantage is that the quality of service is better than the alternatives. If drivers can make more money, more drivers might sign up and wait times would drop. A better experience means the service will be used even more.

> From there, how do you expect this change of demand (if any) would affect the take-home pay of the drivers?

There are two parts to this. First Uber should have to make sure no driver ever makes less than minimum wage. If a driver starts the app to announce their availability and has the app running for four hours, they are entitled to a minimum of four hours of pay.

The second part is that I think getting 95% of the fare would mean drivers take-home pay is generally higher than it is today. If Uber wants to make more money by raising the rate, then drivers automatically get a pay increase as well and that seems fair.

Drivers can set their own rates, or at least to the success a bidding process would work. If the rate is to low, don't work. If there was a bidding process I wouldn't be surprised if you saw rates actually drop.

I doubt that their margin is much higher than that after factoring in discounts.

I may be wrong, but I don't think the driver keeps 95% of the fare.

Keep in mind that Uber's revenue was $3.6 billion in the last quarter, but they lost $1.2 billion. I wouldn't be surprised if their margin was negative.

Really the problem is not that Uber gets paid too much, but that drivers are underpaid. I think a minimum wage for drivers is a better solution. In California such a law is currently underway.

I mentioned minimum wage in another comment. If a driver has the app open for four hours, they need to be paid a minimum of four hours of minimum wage.

> Uber is not putting a gun to anyone's head.

But their platform has a near-monopoly in many markets, which they use to set prices while simultaneously classifying drivers as independent contractors.

>while simultaneously classifying drivers as independent contractors.

They are independent contractors. There's no time you have to be at work. There's no amount of time you have to work a given day of the week, or during the whole week. If they were forced to turn them into employees, that would all go away.

I understand, but in certain jurisdictions your viewpoint is being challenged. See: AB 5 in California or an announcement from the state of New Jersey that Uber owes $640 million in back taxes and fines for misclassifying employees.

I personally have a moral problem with drivers not being allowed to charge their own rate while simultaneously being labeled independent contractors.

There are many countries where free speech is regularly challenged, that doesn't make it right.

Especially in New Jersey's case trying to retroactively tax them. California at least is just changing a law.