Are Uber Drivers Figuring Out a Way to Fight Back?

[eridani]

http://www.commondreams.org/views/2015/12/02/are-uber-drivers-figuring-out-way-fight-back

But drivers have a bigger complaint with Uber than too many cars—Uber keeps unilaterally chopping their pay. How much Uber drivers actually earn is a matter of some controversy. Mr. Kalanick, in one of his many P.T. Barnum-like claims, crowed in 2013 to the Wall Street Journal that Uber drivers were pulling in $100,000 per year. An Uber ad I saw on Craigslist in August 2014 announced to prospective drivers “make over $1850 per week,” which works out to over $96,000 on an annual basis. Despite the “doesn’t pass the laugh test” quality of those figures, they were cited in the media for months. If true, those figures would have meant a full-time Uber driver was in the top 20 percent of income earners in the United States.

Mr. Kalanick challenged journalists to ride with Uber drivers and ask for their pay stubs, so some enterprising journalists did just that. Buzzfeed’s Johana Bhuiyan took rides with 11 randomly chosen Uber drivers in New York City, and found that after subtracting the usual costs of driving in New York, Uber drivers don’t earn much more than taxi drivers on an annual basis.

Mr. Kalanick’s exaggerations about drivers’ wages later was debunked by a report from his own company. In January 2015, Uber released a report, based on its own internal data, co-authored by renowned Princeton economist Alan Krueger. That report claimed that Uber had over 163,000 drivers (as of October 2014), which if true meant the company was an über job juggernaut, to be sure. But in fact 80 percent of the drivers were part-time, with over half of them driving fewer than 15 hours per week; indeed, only half the drivers remained active a year later.

With Uber’s own report showing that most of the “jobs” were temporary and extremely part-time, Mr. Kalanick’s boast of being a champion job creator was severely tarnished.