a thoughtful web.
Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking.   Login or Take a Tour!
comment by user-inactivated
user-inactivated  ·  2405 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Inside the gig economy: the 'vulnerable human underbelly' of UK's labour market

I've read this a few times now and I like your math for the most part. I'd just want to point out that United States minimum wage is currently set at $7.25, so $14 an hour would be doing pretty good. I think also though, at least from the way it sounds, your drivers would have to get steady work for that math to work out. That might be possible in traffic heavy cities like New York and L.A., but for smaller cities and especially small towns and low population counties, the demand is probably much thinner.

My buddy once asked why I didn't try to get a job at Uber. My answer was two-fold then. My car is a two door and you're required to have a four door and I love my car too much to drive it into the ground more than I already am. Now? I have a third reason, I don't have a smart phone. Crazy as it sounds, cause you can get them cheap these days, there are still a handful of people that don't have smart phones (let alone can afford reliable service for minutes/data) and that'd be another barrier to entry right there.





kleinbl00  ·  2405 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Ain't my math, squier. That's the closest I can get to understanding the economics of a system that comes in at roughly 20% the cab ecosystem.

I think Uber/Lyft sets prices at living wage, rather than minimum wage because who the hell is going to drive 800 miles a day for an actualized rate of $7.25. That's just awful. And yeah - in a major metro area, they get steady work. And yeah - in a small town, it ain't a living. It's the sort of thing where you park and do something else with your time and then sally forth when you have a fare.

Thing about a job at Uber - it's money, yeah. But there's no advancement. It doesn't look impressive on a resume - it's not like you were selected for that gig. It mostly demonstrates that you had nothing better to do for however long you were doing Uber/Lyft.

I wouldn't get in that pipeline for hell or high water. I read in that awful David Wong book that as soon as you become a prostitute, your odds of dying violently go up by a factor of 500. The actual numbers are terrible:

    The study showed that the general population had a mortality rate of 1.9 per every 100,000 people, but the mortality for prostitutes was 391 per 100,000 people and active prostitutes have a mortality rate of 459 per 100,000 people.

It's not like driving Lyft or Uber is the same as prostitution... but it's definitely a pipeline apart.