If the goal was a desperate work force then we succeeded decades ago.

By measuring sufficiency of pay against the population of drivers you're not measuring anything useful. Intellectually indolent comments like this are overtly harmful to the people desperate enough to work for nearly half their cities minimum wage.

How many of the drivers are desperate? What would you prefer to measure?

Is it fair to assume that anyone working for less than a cities livable wage is desperate until proven otherwise?*

I'd prefer to interview everyone and get hard data about what people need and want. What they're sacrificing, what they have too much of, how their talents are being wasted etc. That's impossible though, so I took a shortcut*.

If you have to pay rent to keep social services from taking your child from you, any money towards that is better than nothing at all.

You have to have realistic choice to be able to deny such things. Desperate and hungry people don't have realistic choices.

Sure, that's pretty bad and certainly one extreme. What percentage of drivers are in this situation?

A sizable percentage of Americans live 1-2 paychecks away from being homeless. AS in, I've seen numbers of up to 59%.

I have no clue where to find that information about drivers in particular - if you do, you could look it up. But if you assume that they represent at least the general population, you could count on a sizable portion of drivers needing it.

It might not even be housing: If you can't pay your water bill, the water company will shut you off and threaten to report you to social services if it isn't on very quickly (and then take longer than that to turn it on). Kids can get taken for electricity or a number of things.

Yeah i'm not understanding why thousands and thousands of people in these cities are doing it for $9.73 when they could get a job at starbucks and instantly make much more.

But they are doing it. So things like flexibility must be important. If it was a small number of people we could expect that they might be making some kind of irrational decision. If it's thousands and thousands of people then it's likely an indication that it's the best possible option for people in that situation.

This is my assumption as well.

Because their manager at starbucks cuts their hours to 38 a week to keep from paying full time benefits. Plus who has been hiring in the past 3 months?