Uber has gone to great and often-unsavory lengths to try to promote itself as a savior of Labor–that is, when CEO Travis Kalanick isn’t having a wet dream about firing all the drivers.
Some live in a Libertarian fantasy in which the typical rideshare employee is just spinning the wheel until seed money comes in for his or her Silicon Valley startup, but any closer inspection tells you that solid, regulated taxi jobs are being replaced by sketchy, unstable ones. That doesn’t mean that Uber and Lyft haven’t offered improvements over traditional car services or that they should be unduly restrained, but let’s be honest about what’s happening here: The Gig Economy is bad for working-class people, who are already besieged by a variety of woes.
An excellent BuzzFeed investigation by Caroline O’Donovan and Jeremy Singer-Vine has uncovered leaked documents that lay waste to the longstanding ridiculous contention that Uber drivers can make close to six figures if they keep their feet on the gas. An excerpt:
Detroit
“I like the job. But financially, it’s not doing it for me.”
This according to Steve Rogers, a 61-year-old driver who told BuzzFeed News that he’s been on the platform about a year. His experience jibes roughly with the data Uber gathered on Detroit, where the typical full-time driver barely earned more than Michigan’s current minimum wage of $8.50 per hour.
Of course, because Uber drivers are not employees of the company, Uber is not legally obligated to pay them the minimum wage.
Uber’s data represents all trips taken in Detroit between Dec. 7 and Dec. 21, 2015. During that period, Detroit drivers earned approximately $13.70 an hour before expenses and — given the assumptions above — about $8.77 an hour after expenses, according to BuzzFeed News estimates that were supplemented by additional data from Uber. That’s less than the $10 an hour Walmart promised to pay its employees in 2015.
Contract and wage work are not perfectly comparable. Uber argues that retail employees at companies like Walmart don’t enjoy the same independence and flexibility as Uber drivers. But as employees, Walmart workers are often entitled to benefits that contract Uber drivers don’t receive.•