What If Uber Were a Unionized, Worker-Owned Co-Op? These Denver Cabbies Are Making It Happen by Mary Hansen Wolde Gebremariam is one of more than 160,000 people nationwide who drive their own cars for Uber. Based in Denver, Gebremariam, age 28, drives his Chevy SUV for the company and occasionally works as a private limo driver. “The labor movement has to bring ownership and equity into the picture.” Uber built its $40 billion business around a mobile-based application that connects drivers with riders. Hailed by some for shaking up a stagnant taxi industry, others criticize the company for how it treats drivers, who pay for their own cars, gas, and maintenance. It’s also been criticized for dictating rates and for deactivating drivers’ accounts, essentially firing them, without warning. The ride-hailing app company may be innovative from the perspective of its customers—and its owners—but for the driver the experience is very similar to that of a traditional taxi driver, as Gebremariam can attest. That’s how he thought it would work, anyway. Gebremariam isn’t just complaining about it.
Banking on it: Taking your money off the high street 5 March 2015Last updated at 19:01 ET By Padraig Belton Business reporter Decided that retail banking is the devil? You could opt for a piggybank. Or you could try the new online only services claiming to have changed the humble bank account forever In Durham, Atom Bank is poised to launch shortly as a bank with no branches, living solely on the internet. The US has Ally Bank, an internet-only bank focused on its smartphone interface. China recently has launched an internet-only bank of its own, WeBank, led by gaming and social network group Tencent Holdings. With British and US retail banks in low repute since the credit crunch, the field is ripe for nimble new entrants, unencumbered by physical branches, bad loans, and ageing infrastructure. Meanwhile, many British banks continue to operate back-end systems in pounds, shillings, and pence. And a botched 2012 attempt at an IT upgrade by the RBS group left 6.5 million people unable to make payments for up to three weeks. Banks losing interest
Uber Drivers Say They're Making Less Than Minimum Wage Pablo Blazquez Dominguez/Stringer/Getty Images Uber likes to tell the world that the median salary for UberX drivers is ~$90,000 per year in New York. Turns out that number might be a bit of an exaggeration. We spoke with more than a dozen Uber drivers to see how much money they were making, and none of the numbers they gave were even close to $90,000. In fact, a few drivers said they were struggling to even earn the minimum wage. The drivers we spoke with say they're making anywhere from $5 an hour to $20 an hour, meaning that in a year's time, if they're working 40-hour weeks, they could be making anywhere between $10,000 to $41,000. A big part of the reason drivers are struggling to hit $90,000 is that this summer Uber cut the price of an UberX ride by 20% across the country. UberX is Uber's cheapest option. For consumers, the discount was great news. The 20% discount was introduced as a short-term plan to boost demand and awareness.
REconomy This is Uber's playbook for sabotaging Lyft Uber is arming teams of independent contractors with burner phones and credit cards as part of its sophisticated effort to undermine Lyft and other competitors. Interviews with current and former contractors, along with internal documents obtained by The Verge, outline the company’s evolving methods. Using contractors it calls "brand ambassadors," Uber requests rides from Lyft and other competitors, recruits their drivers, and takes multiple precautions to avoid detection. Together, the interviews and documents show the lengths to which Uber will go to halt its rivals’ momentum. After The Verge asked Uber for comment on its report, the company stalled for time until they could write this blog post introducing Operation SLOG to the world. ‘A special ongoing project’ Earlier this month, CNN reported that Uber employees around the country ordered and then canceled 5,560 Lyft rides, according to an analysis by Lyft. "Uber is flat-out lying to their customers." Organizing a street team
Joseph Stiglitz proposes co-op models as an alternative to trickle-down economics - Co-operative News A changing political landscape and economic challenges mean we are witnessing “interesting” but “unsettling” times, warned economist Joseph Stiglitz at the International Summit of Cooperatives in Quebec. The Nobel Prize laureate was a keynote speaker at the three-day conference, which brings together over 3,000 delegates from across the world to discuss the future of the co-operative economy. A world-renowned academic, Prof Stiglitz teaches at Columbia University and has written extensively about inequality, trade agreements and the main issues affecting the world economy. At the Summit he looked at the key challenges facing the global economy and the role of co-ops in addressing them. He said that alongside changes in the political landscape, such as Brexit and the upcoming elections in the USA, the world faced economic issues which are beyond the control of individuals and even national governments. Trickle-down economics isn’t working (Downtown Detroit, Michigan)
At the Uber for home cleaning, workers pay a price for convenience Anthony Walker travels an hour and a half for a two-and-a-half-hour job for Homejoy, a cleaning services Web start-up. (Lydia DePillis/The Washington Post) It’s 7:45 a.m., and 4-year-old Cheyenne skips out the door of her squat apartment complex in Southeast Washington, D.C., stamping her feet to make the lights in her sneakers twinkle. It’s just a two-and-a-half-hour shift: Some busy professional on the other side of the city had requested housecleaning from an online start-up called Homejoy. “These are all ‘ifs.’ The bus chugs into downtown, slowing to a crawl as it hits the morning rush hour. At the end of a five-hour trip back and forth, averaged out, he has made $10 an hour, without any taxes being withheld, as they would be if he were an employee. That’s the tradeoff in moving toward independent contracting in the service economy, where people order services online just as they would order batteries or a pair of shoes. Every start-up has an origin story, and Homejoy’s is classic.
Como o Carro Autônomo do Uber Vai Destruir 10 Milhões de Empregos e Redefinir a Economia em 2025 Passei um tempinho ultimamente pensando em carros autônomos e queria resumir minhas ideias e predições. A maioria das pessoas — inclusive os especialistas — parece pensar que a transição para os veículos sem motorista virá lentamente ao longo das próximas décadas, e que existem grandes obstáculos para sua adoção generalizada. Acredito que isso é significativamente subestimado. Carros autônomos serão comuns em 2025 e quase um monopólio em 2030; e a mudança radical que trarão vai eclipsar todas as outras inovações que nossa sociedade tem experimentado. Vão causar desemprego sem precedente e uma reestruturação fundamental na nossa economia, economizar milhões de horas de aumento de produtividade e criar novas indústrias inteiras que não podemos sequer imaginar com base no nosso atual ponto de vista. A transição já está começando. Como isso vai acontecer Uma pesquisa atual confirma que todos estariam ansiosos para usar carros autônomos se eles já estivessem disponíveis. A queda
Ubernomics In trying to push its case with the public, Uber decided to share its internal data with Alan Krueger, a prominent Princeton economist and former head of President Obama's Council of Economic Advisers. (Could this be part of Uber's dividend from hiring former Obama political adviser David Plouffe?) Anyhow, Kreuger finds that Uber drivers on average earn a gross premium of $6.00 an hour over the pay of drivers of traditional cabs. (He also had some rather unsurprising findings, for example that more people are now working for Uber after it expanded the number of cities in which it operates.) The key issue here is the use of the gross premium rather than a direct earnings comparison. A useful piece of information is the cost of driving a car, which Badger's colleague, Andrea Peterson tells us is 57 cents per mile, according to the Internal Revenue Service. This second assumption is of course obviously wrong. There is one other item in this mix worth noting.
Who are the Uber Drivers? What kind of workers are driving for Uber? Jonathan V. Hall and Alan B. Krueger offer the first set of systematic answers to this question in "An Analysis of the Labor Market for Uber’s Driver-Partners in the United States," published as Working Paper #587 for the Industrial Relations Section at Princeton University (January 22, 2015). (Full disclosure: Hall is the Head of Policy Research at Uber Technologies, and Krueger was paid by Uber for his work on this study. However, Krueger's contract also specified that he had “full discretion over the content of the report.” Here is some basic background. Here's a picture of Uber's growth by city. Most Uber drivers are part-timers: in most cities other than New York, a majority work less than 15 hours per week as Uber drivers, and only about 13-16% work more than 35 hours per week. Hall and Krueger also provide some evidence to put the ongoing battles between current cab drivers and Uber drivers in context.
Now we know how many drivers Uber has — and have a better idea of what they’re making A woman leaves the headquarters of Uber in San Francisco. (Eric Risberg/Associated Press) The rapidly growing technology company Uber released internal data on Thursday arguing that drivers who use the app to give rides-for-hire in their personal cars are making more money as chauffeurs than professional taxi drivers do — as much as $17 an hour in the District and Los Angeles, $23 in San Francisco and $30 in New York. Those numbers, released as part of the most extensive peek yet into its business model, have only inflamed debate about what companies like Uber mean for the economy and whether the kind of work they offer is sustainable for the tens of thousands of people who have signed up. Uber and its boosters say those earnings — and the breakneck pace at which drivers are joining its ranks — offer proof that the company is creating new kinds of opportunity for workers who want neither a 9-to-5 job nor a boss. Uber He predicts that drivers will become more organized. Read more:
Meet the Lawyer Fighting Uber’s Business Model -- NYMag One of the perks of being a top Uber driver is the company’s employee-of-the-week award. It’s called the Sixth Star prize, and it comes with a swag bag and a $1,000 American Express gift card. It’s the sort of thing that all sorts of big companies do to encourage their workers to go that proverbial, or actual, extra mile. But with Uber, there’s a hitch. The taxi behemoth does not employ any of its drivers. They are all independent contractors, paid by the gig. Working for Uber might come with its perks, then, but it also comes without the benefits and protections many businesses provide for their employees. The lawyer is Shannon Liss-Riordan, who has in the past fought for the workplace rights of baristas, janitors, delivery drivers, skycaps, call-center employees, and exotic dancers. Right now, the legal distinctions between employees and contractors are fine ones. Since Uber drivers are contractors, they receive few of the perks that employees do. That need not be so.
The Difference Between Uber and Airbnb Uber and Airbnb have a lot in common: They are the tech startup darlings of the moment, they are valued in the tens of billions of dollars and make significant revenue, they connect the convenience of the Internet to the online world, they are unpopular all over the world with incumbents and regulators and they exist by virtue of the non-employees who do the real work of renting their homes and driving their cars. But where Uber is increasingly seen as an untrustworthy company due to its cutthroat handling of pricing, drivers, passengers and critical press — Airbnb is working to cultivate a very different image. This weekend, Airbnb invited 1,500 of its hosts to San Francisco for a summit called Airbnb Open to celebrate them, ask for feedback and connect them to one another. On Friday, I dropped in to the hangar-like space at Fort Mason. Attendees came from 40 countries, the company said, and had an average age of 44. The scene felt like a new-agey life-coaching conference.