# Welcome to the 1099 Economy



## chi1cabby (May 28, 2014)

*Does Silicon Valley Have a Contract-Worker Problem?*

*http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/09/silicon-valleys-contract-worker-problem.html*


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## Walkersm (Apr 15, 2014)

Very good article. Good to see some companies are bucking the trend.


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## Russell (Sep 6, 2014)

924 Uber clients who have been happy to pay higher private rates and not book through Uber over a 10 month period 

2371 Uber clients and counting who have asked for information to be sent to them if another app is used by my cars instead of Uber 

Client education supports better driver conditions sometimes. Some are more ethical than you might think & those who are are usually the more regular users 

Uber-greed may yet cost them a bit here & there 
And may even be their undoing...


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## ontheroad (Aug 31, 2014)

chi1cabby said:


> *Does Silicon Valley Have a Contract-Worker Problem?*
> 
> *http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/09/silicon-valleys-contract-worker-problem.html*


You are so.well informed on current events and provide lots of useful info on this forum. Have u ever thought about leading a protest against your superiors?


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## Former Yellow Driver (Sep 5, 2014)

ontheroad said:


> Have u ever thought about leading a protest against your superiors?


His "superiors"? Seriously? I thought we were independent and working for ourselves? Perhaps chi1cabby has a wife (or partner) that he voluntarily lets be his "superior", but no one at Uber is any of our superiors. JMPO...


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## chi1cabby (May 28, 2014)

ontheroad said:


> You are so.well informed on current events and provide lots of useful info on this forum. Have u ever thought about leading a protest against your superiors?





Former Yellow Driver said:


> His "superiors"? Seriously? I thought we were independent and working for ourselves? Perhaps chi1cabby has a wife (or partner) that he voluntarily lets be his "superior", but no one at Uber is any of our superiors. JMPO...


My goal of being a part of UberPeople.net community is to help the drivers with relevant info. Another goal is to grow this community. 
I cannot be involved in organising or leading a protest because I don't do UberX, I do UberTaxi. But when I'm approached by drivers for help, I will support them.
I have made efforts towards getting the reporters who cover Uber, to pay attention to the drivers grievances. Many reporters now know of this forum, and are beginning to give coverage to the drivers side of the story as well. 
Drivers has the power to get their individual and collective voices heard. They just have to put in the effort to be heard. Here is a few suggestions that I've made before:

https://uberpeople.net/threads/please-take-some-action.2733/


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## chi1cabby (May 28, 2014)

Uber Drivers in the Sharing Economy

*Against Sharing*
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/09/against-sharing/


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## chi1cabby (May 28, 2014)

*To get a fair share, sharing-economy workers must unionize*
Uber's disruption of taxi industry is welcome but won't succeed without treating drivers more fairly

http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2014/6/uber-sharing-economyunionstaxis.html


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## chi1cabby (May 28, 2014)

*The Sharing Economy: 21st Century Technology, 19th Century Worker Protections*
BY AMANDA ARMSTRONG
http://inthesetimes.com/working/ent...ry_technology_19th_century_worker_protections


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## chi1cabby (May 28, 2014)

UberX, Spotify, and America's slow devaluation of work

http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/...-devaluation-of-work.html#bQ5ev4apqdhoTssD.99


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## ontheroad (Aug 31, 2014)

chi1cabby said:


> *The Sharing Economy: 21st Century Technology, 19th Century Worker Protections*
> BY AMANDA ARMSTRONG
> http://inthesetimes.com/working/ent...ry_technology_19th_century_worker_protections


 Great article and thanks for posting. This one really spells it out on the immense risk we are taking by driving for these guys. I was particularly interested in the paragraph where it gives us an insight into uber's efforts to challenge lawmakers when they try to pass -what it considers- unfavorable laws. Also interesting is how it lobbies hard to push all the risks and costs onto its "partners". Cheers!


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## chi1cabby (May 28, 2014)

*The Uber Economy*
DEREK THOMPSON 
([email protected])

*http://m.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/01/is-uber-a-middle-class-job-creator-or-not/384763/*


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## chi1cabby (May 28, 2014)

*The dark side of 'sharing economy' jobs*
By Catherine Rampell

*http://www.washingtonpost.com/opini...05daec-a59f-11e4-a7c2-03d37af98440_story.html*


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## chi1cabby (May 28, 2014)

*What the Sharing Economy Takes*
Doug Henwood http://m.thenation.com/article/196241-what-sharing-economy-takes

@uberpeople.net is referenced in this piece.


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## chi1cabby (May 28, 2014)

But in ride sharing, there's really only one victor: Uber, a company with a knack for breaking laws, because the march of disruption can't be bothered with legalities. Uber is the headline-grabber of the moment because, at a dinner party in New York last November, a company VP suggested to BuzzFeed's Ben Smith that it might be a good idea to spend $1 million hiring opposition researchers to dig up dirt on the lives of journalists who had been writing critically about them-especially Pando's Sarah Lacy.

But that's only one of Uber's problems. As Lacy noted, singling her out was just the latest in the company's string of offenses against women. In June, an Uber driver kidnapped an inebriated woman in Los Angeles and drove her to a motel with the presumed intent of raping her, according to the charges. Driver screening seems minimal, and in Lacy's words, the Uber PR team has a habit of "discrediting female passengers who accuse drivers of attacking them by whispering that they were 'drunk' or 'dressed provocatively.'" Founder Travis Kalanick-whom colleagues call a "******" and an "asshole"-bragged to a_GQ_ reporter that his success had made him such a magnet for women that he should rename the company "Boob-er." In France, Uber ran an ad promoting drivers who were also "_avions de chasse_," which translates literally as "fighter planes" but colloquially as "hot chicks."

According to legend, Kalanick founded Uber in 2009 one snowy evening in Paris after a brainstorming session with co-founder Garrett Camp. It launched in San Francisco-a city where it's notoriously difficult to get a cab because of strict limits on their numbers-in 2010. It was far from Kalanick's first venture. A youthful coder, he founded Scour.com, a Napsterish file-sharing site, in 1999, while still a student at UCLA; it was quickly sued out of business by the entertainment industry for copyright violations. (Apparently, he has a thing for sharing other people's stuff.) A second venture, Red Swoosh, moved media files around legally for pay; it was sold in 2007 and made Kalanick a small-time millionaire. He's a big-time billionaire now.

After its San Francisco launch, Uber was immediately slapped with a cease-and-desist order by city authorities for running an unlicensed cab service. Kalanick found this opposition energizing: the company quickly expanded to other cities, sometimes with official blessings and sometimes without. At first, Uber featured high-end cars for a little taste of luxury, booked via a smartphone app. As Kalanick told an early Uber gathering, the experience was: "I pushed a button, and a car showed up, and now I'm a pimp." Uber soon faced competition at the low end from the now-second-banana ride-sharing service Lyft, however, and began recruiting regular people with regular cars as drivers. Its growth has been explosive: it now has hundreds of thousands of drivers in over 200 cities.

*But there's a lot of discontent among drivers, both those who work for Uber and those who work for what are derisively called "incumbent" companies. Traditional drivers have staged protests against Uber and its rivals in Los Angeles, Washington and across Europe, although none have gone to the same lengths as Parisian cabbies, who have attacked the cars, smashing windows and slashing tires. And while Kalanick et al. have a point about the restricted taxi availability in major cities, it's the fleet owners who are profiting, not the drivers facing a low-cost rival.

Uber drivers often complain about the low (and declining) pay and miserable conditions. S., a driver in Chicago (who, like everyone I spoke with, wanted to remain anonymous for fear of reprisals), says that full-timers put in sixty hours a week for an hourly rate that comes to $12 or $13 after expenses. He says the company is constantly scheming to cut pay. A., a driver in Los Angeles (and one of the few women in the trade), says she gets $11 to $12 an hour after expenses (daily expenses like gas, not depreciation of the car), which is around the twenty-fifth percentile of the city's hourly earnings, though about in line with typical taxi-driver pay. That's a sharp contrast with the $35-an-hour rate that was dangled in front of her when she signed up. A. describes Uber as "a port in the storm," a way to pick up some cash while, Angeleno that she is, she works on some movie and web projects. Uber's a different story in New York, where all drivers have to be certified by the Taxi and Limousine Commission, and the cars are all regular cabs or car-service vehicles. Every Uber-hailed driver I've spoken with in New York likes the service, because it delivers more paying riders than they'd otherwise have.

Drivers are rated by their passengers, and if your rating isn't high enough, the company will "deactivate" you-which is how they say "fire," since you're just another node in the app to them. J., another LA driver whose name was passed along to me by an organizer with the California App-Based Drivers Association (a project of the Teamsters Union), says passengers love to wield this power over drivers: one insisted that he run a red light or lose his five-star rating. And J. says there's no appeal process for a bad rating or deactivation.

You need a newish car to drive for Uber; if your car gets too old, that's grounds for deactivation. But the company is ready to help: it's entered into a partnership with Santander, a Spanish bank, to offer car loans to drivers, with the payments conveniently deducted from their paycheck. According to the terms posted on Uberpeople.net, a chat board for drivers, the payments work out to an interest rate of around 21 percent. They get you coming and going.

Earlier this year, Uber hired former Obama campaign manager David Plouffe to handle its PR, strategy and lobbying. Kalanick describes a politico like Plouffe as a perfect fit with Uber, because there are daily "primaries going on with folks in the ride-sharing space." Well-capitalized revolutions need such high-end strategists.*


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## chi1cabby (May 28, 2014)

*The Sharing Economy Is Propaganda*

Avi Asher-Schapiro 
(@Avi Asher-Schapiro on the forum)
http://www.cato-unbound.org/2015/02/13/avi-asher-schapiro/sharing-economy-propaganda


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## Avi Asher-Schapiro (Sep 30, 2014)

Thanks for sharing the piece! 

--Avi


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## Salthedriver (Jun 28, 2014)

Sharing is caring


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## chi1cabby (May 28, 2014)

*Google Cabs And Uber Bots Will Challenge Jobs 'Below The API'*
*http://www.forbes.com/sites/anthony...-uber-bots-will-challenge-jobs-below-the-api/*


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## chi1cabby (May 28, 2014)

*The on-demand economy doesn't have to imitate Uber to win*
*http://qz.com/448846/the-on-demand-...al&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer*


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