A Rebuttal to the CEO of Uber from One of His “Contractors”

Dara (The CEO of Uber, Inc.) sent me an email the other day, and I’m sure many of you received it as well.

The email is self-congratulatory, mentioning “changes” and other words that were a vague promise of a better gig-conomy for all of us.

In an additional and brazen act of self-promotion, Dara linked an op/ed he wrote for the New York Times.

So, I read through his article, and I’m less impressed with you than I was before, Dara.

I know you’re the head of a billion-dollar company, but I didn’t think anyone on Earth could be as tone-deaf as you appear to be.

Let’s break it down, Dear Reader!

To start with, you didn’t ask an existential question. An existential question literally questions our existence in some way. You asked a rhetorical question, in that you’re trying to be provocative but not looking for an answer.

And yes, our employment system is unfair. It’s always been unfair. Show me a time when it wasn’t unfair.

That’s how you do rhetoric, Dara.

“We could give our contractors benefits. We can do it right now! But it’s the fault of the legal system!” What in the hell kind of pass-the- buck statement is this? If you want to give us benefits, Dara, we’re not stopping you!

Here, let me use an analogy. Picture yourself with a gun trained on me and my hands in the air. You then yell to me, “I don’t want to shoot you, James! You’re too pretty! But it’s this damn gun! I don’t have a choice!”

Also, you made me buy the bullets you’re about to shoot me with.

I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt, though. Maybe you meant to write that the gigconomy itself needs to be better regulated.

That would be a contradictory stance of course, seeing as your op/ed is a red herring and you don’t want the gigconomy regulated any moreso. But I’ll address this thought process anyway.

Yes, the gigconomy needs better regulation. All employment needs better regulation. Laws such as The Right to Work have decimated the workforce and left this ridiculous economy in the state that it’s in. And this is an issue that goes back decades.

All your company did was take advantage of laws such as these. You ever notice how capitalism and capitalize are only a few letters off, Dear Reader?

You’re playing pretty fast and loose with the word freedom, Dara.

If I had freedom, I’d wake up every day, not have to worry about my rent, not have to worry about my van braking down, and I could eat better and healthier than the $3 dollars I invest daily into the McDonald’s dollar menu.

You don’t have to worry about any of those things, Dara. You have freedom. Uber paid you $200 million to take over (source: Bloomberg https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-08-28/uber-s-new-ceo-may-need-at-least-200-million-to-leave-expedia). I’ll never see that much money.

I have the freedom to turn the app on and off whenever I want. That is all the freedom I have. But if I turn on at 1:30 a.m. and by 2:30 a.m. I haven’t taken a trip, I didn’t work, did I?

Because you certainly didn’t pay me for it.

By and large, my schedule revolves around Lyft’s consecutive bonuses and your surge pricing.

You know, that thing.

I was handed a speeding ticket on Sunday while racing to one of these, all for the sake of turning a $3 dollar ride into an $8 dollar ride.

I can’t wait to see how many surge trips I have to take to pay that $135 ticket.

A benefit fund? Would that be like, an Uber Pool?

I swear, that’s my first and last pun, Dear Reader.

Pools don’t really work, Dara. It’s why the US can’t figure out universal health insurance on a state-level. They proposed doing it with pools in Colorado.

The problem with the Colorado initiative was that it wasn’t regulated health insurance, it was just a tax pool designed to cover individual costs when necessary. But the pool never factored in rising premiums and deductibles due to lack of regulation and profit ceilings.

This means taxes would have increased perpetually, just like college tuition does.

(Source: New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/29/us/colorado-weighs-replacing-obamas-health-policy-with-universal-coverage.html)

Why thank you for giving me $1,350 that I earned for you anyway! But if I save up for a vacation, it’s not two weeks paid vacation, is it?

Paid vacation is a benefit that employers give to employees in the form of monetary compensation during mutually agreed upon time off. It’s not a rebate I get from a salary pool. That would be money that I earned that’s being redistributed back to me.

$1,350 a year is a nice, round number, though. It might cover a blown transmission or a hospital stay for the stress colitis I have to deal with in trying to pay bills making $4 dollars a trip.

Maybe you could actually pay us the 80% of each ride that you keep telling Congress that you give us, because I’ve been a rider myself. The numbers add up to about 50–65% of what the rider parts going into my pocket.

That’s not a scientific data analysis, Dear Reader, so please don’t take that as the norm. It’s just a personal anecdote.

Again, you’re free to start doing any of the bullshit you’re writing about at any time. What’s stopping you, the share holders or the other people on the board?

If you’re waiting around for Congress to tell you how to empathize with me, we’re both going to wait for a while. But you’re being sued because you want to keep us as contractors.

You keep writing about freedom, but as I already pointed out in my above paragraph, that’s largely a misnomer. Hell, in the analogy that you wrote, your hypothetical driver works a 35 hour week, which is conveniently an hour under defined full-time in the US by many employers.

Didn’t Uber sell itself as a “side hustle”, in order to help with the bills? Why are we using all this freedom to work what’s tantamount to a second full-time job?

I’ll answer that for you, Dara. Uber, Lyft, Doordash, and any other gig startup did what any business does; you created a dependence.

Drivers are dependent on the side gig now. The wealth gap is so bad in the United States we need to work 70–80 hour weeks to get by, and you’re the only companies that allow us to do that, at the cost of foregoing overtime pay.

This is especially true if my average ride is $5–7 dollars. Things are so slow today, I’m writing this piece on my cellphone, waiting for a price surge.

Meanwhile, with American public transportation as underfunded as it is, working commuters have to use ride share to avoid transit breakdowns or strikes. Their employers don’t care if a bus breakdown made them late. According to the workforce, it’s the employee’s fault for being late.

Many, many times during this pandemic, I took scientists to medical facilities, doctors and nurses to hospitals, and parents to see their children. If I’m not there taking those riders, if we aren’t driving these trips, it isn’t just the gig startups that go down.

Because of you and the dependence that Uber created, the country goes down.

But you knew that.

I’ll end my response to your song and dance by cluing you into the lawsuits you’re dealing with.

The reason you’re being sued isn’t because you’re offering too much freedom.

You’re being sued because some of us are making $9 dollars an hour and have to deal with the costs of providing our own vehicles and maintaining them, among many other issues. And if we fail to provide and maintain these vehicles you can replace any of us in seconds.

If you’re so eager to prove that Uber drivers should remain contractors and not employees because the overall benefit to us is greater, you have the burden of proof.

Independent Contractor has a very negative stigma attached to it, as it should. By and large the term is placed on workers to keep from giving them benefits, keep from raising their pay, and to terminate their contracted employment at will as the company sees fit.

Your op/ed did nothing to prove the contrary.

So, be that trailblazer that the industry needs and you seem to want to be seen as, Dara. Help us find housing, help us with gas and car maintenance.

You’re worth at least $200 million dollars. Help me with my taxes or radiator. That $1350 rebate that you pitched earlier isn’t a drop in the bucket to my bottom line. My 2019 federal income taxes were almost triple that.

Give us a daily meal voucher that isn’t just a free medium soda from Subway!

Do anything other then writing garbage op/eds with a clear company agenda behind them.

Us drivers all knew that the company was full of shit from the beginning. Don’t pretend that it isn’t now that you’re facing mild consequences. And don’t pretend to have my best interests at heart.

Until again, Dear Reader,

Vic.