Uber's Augmented Workers - Uber Screeds - Medium - 0 views
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Uber has long claimed it’s a technology company, not a transportation company. Uber’s drivers are promoted as entrepreneurs and classified as independent contractors. The company claims to provide only a platform/app that enables drivers to be connected with passengers; as an intermediary, the company relies on the politics of platforms to elude responsibility as a traditional employer, as well as regulatory regimes designed to govern traditional taxi businesses.
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Drivers must submit to a system that molds their interactions, controls their behavior, sets and changes rates unilaterally, and is generally structured to minimize the power of driver (“partner”) voices. Drivers make inquiries to outsourced community support representatives that work on Uber’s behalf, but their responses are based on templates or FAQs.
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Uber uses surge pricing to lure drivers to work at a particular place at a particular time, without guaranteeing the validity of the surge incentive if they do follow it. Surge is produced through an algorithmic assessment of supply and demand and is subject to constant dynamism. The rate that drivers are paid is based on the passenger’s location, not their own. Even when they travel to an active surge zone, they risk receiving passengers at lower or higher surge than is initially advertised, or getting fares from outside the surge zone. Drivers will be locked out of the system for varying periods of time, like 10 minutes, 30 minutes, etc. for declining too many rides. They also get warnings for “manipulating” surge.
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Uber drivers are “free” to login or log-out to work at will, but their ability to make choices that benefit their own interests, such as accepting higher-fare passengers, is severely limited.
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To a significant degree, Uber has successfully automated many of the processes involved in managing a large workforce, comprised of at at least 400 000 active drivers in the U.S. alone, according to Uber’s last public estimate. However, automation is not to be confused with independence. Uber has built a system that leverages significant control over how workers do their jobs, even as that control is structured to be indirect and semi-automated, such as through nudges, algorithmic labor logistics, the rating system, etc.
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"Summary Uber has done a lot of things to language to communicate a strong message of distance between itself and its relationship to Uber drivers. Uber insists drivers should be classified as independent contractors, labelled driver-partners, and promoted as entrepreneurs, although the company faces legal challenges over issues of worker misclassification. Beyond its attempts to label work as a type of "sharing" in the so-called "sharing economy," Uber's protracted efforts to celebrate the independence and freedom of drivers have evolved into a sophisticated policy push to design a new classification of worker that would accommodate Uber's business model. The emergent classification, "independent worker," does not acknowledge the significant control Uber leverages over how drivers do their job."