position:uber driver

  • The Quiet Death of the Gig Economy – FutureSin – Medium
    https://medium.com/futuresin/the-quiet-death-of-the-gig-economy-126f62014a4d

    Michael K. SpencerFollow Jan 7

    Disruption, blissfully happy digital nomads, the sharing economy and oh yes — the “Gig Economy” sounded good on paper, but it seems to not be all it was thought it might become.

    As the U.S. economy finally and painfully slowly recovered from the great recession of 2008, the supposed unemployment rate fell to record low levels in 2018.

    Alan Krueger (Princeton University) and Larry Katz (Harvard University) have dialed down their estimates of the gig economy’s growth by 60%-80%.

    According to Guy Berger on LinkedIn, Krueger and Katz published the (at the time) most rigorous analysis of alternative work arrangements. Their conclusion was that such arrangements (of which a minority are online platform gig work) had grown significantly between 2005 and 2015. Their estimate was its share of the US workforce had grown by a whopping 5 percentage points. (7–8 million workers.). Well guess what, that trend now seems to have reversed as the economy recovered.

    With Lyft and Uber set to go public with IPOs this year, that to be part-time drivers with them is somehow desirable or helpful to “make ends meet” has all but dried up, right before supposed autonomous vehicles and self-driving cars start to hit the streets in various ways.

    Indeed there does not seem to be much sharing and caring in the ruthless world of Uber, amid legal battles and drivers who make less than minimum wage and are like grunt contract workers of the worst kind, totally unprotected.

    In a world where Amazon is miserably harsh to its bottom feeder workers, why the heck did we once think the ‘gig economy’ was some glorious alternative workforce? Why the ‘gig’ economy may not be the workforce of the future after all, with rising minimum wages and a small bump in wage growth in 2019. I personally think the American labor force is screwed with a skill-shortage coming the likes of which we’ve rarely seen, but that’s another story for another day.

    From Uber to TaskRabbit to YourMechanic, so-called gig work — task-oriented work offered by online apps — has been promoted as providing the flexibility and independence that traditional jobs don’t offer. But in 2019, if anything they seem like scams for the destitute, desperate and debt-ridden. I feel a bit nervous about how manipulative an Uber driver can be just to earn an extra buck. Maybe it’s not a Gig economy but kind of like another form of slavery given a pretty name.

    Horror stories of what it’s really like to do delivery work also give you a second guess that this Gig Economy isn’t just disruptive to make these companies rich, it’s a sham and harmful to these workers. I feel as if Silicon Valley has duped us, yet again.

    Nobody could have thought or imagined that doing a small gig in exchange for an hourly payment could become someone’s full-time job. It’s a bit like career-death, you get used to the work-lifestyle perks of the so called flexibility until you realize just how little you made the year you side-hustled in the Gig Economy, or became a freelancer or attempted to be self-employed. It’s risky folks, and I don’t recommend it for a minute.

    When you need to bring food to the table you are on the fringe of the labor force, the painful predicament of being a Gig Economy minion is your everyday, until it becomes your new normal. Until you lose hope to up-skill or change your career path. Labor is tiresome, but when the fat cats get rich on the backs of people who need the money, you know American capitalism has invented another scam to profit. That’s precisely why the Gig Economy has to die.

    Crypto and the Gig Economy seem hot in a recession, but the reality is that lovely expansion of alternative work seems a nice response to the weak US labor market, when job seekers didn’t have many options. But now with the labor market in a much healthier state for a few more months, more conventional jobs have rebounded. The implication may be that we’ll see these kinds of jobs proliferate again during the next downturn. Bitcoin and side-hustles, it doesn’t feel very sustainable.

    The “gig” economy was supposed to be an opportunity for entrepreneurs to be their own boss. But if you have to deal with companies like Uber, you might end up getting screwed royally. For the hundreds of people who use services like Uber, TaskRabbit or Turo to earn their livelihood, there’s no thing as benefits, paid leave or basic worker rights. That’s not an ethical solution for people living on the edge.

    Companies like TaskRabbit make a fortune by extracting commission in exchange for connecting consumers across the country with reliable people in their neighborhood who will happily take care of their burdensome chores. But is it even ethical? The app-economy is a feudal use of technology and downright as evil as any capitalistic scheme you might want to devise to imprison people in impossible situations.

    The Gig Economy was a myth and a scam, and Silicon Valley needs to be held more accountable with regulation. Alan Krueger of Princeton University and Larry Katz of Harvard should actually be apologizing, not revising their estimates. As of 2020, universal basic income sounds more reliable than an exploitative Gig Economy.

    The gig economy was supposed to be the future of work, but it ended up hurting more than it helped, and we left it. Just as we should kill Uber.

    #USA économie #droits_sociaux #platform_capitalism

  • Opinion | Do Not Trust That Stranger’s 5-Star Review - The New York Times
    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/25/opinion/sunday/five-star-customer-reviews.html

    Stars beget sales. According to an often mentioned Harvard Business School working paper that studied restaurant reviews on Yelp, each added star is associated with a 5 percent to 9 percent increase in revenue. Not surprisingly, then, new businesses have sprung up to exploit the rating system to the seller’s or the platform’s advantage.

    Finally, it’s hard to know what the stars even mean. Often times, whether it’s a mattress or can opener or an Uber driver, a five-star rating means “nothing disastrous happened,” said Nikhil Garg, a doctoral candidate at Stanford University. A recent study he co-wrote reported that 80 percent of people gave freelancers hired from an online platform five stars. But when he asked people to choose from different words (“terrible,” “mediocre,” “best possible,” etc.), at least half of the freelancers earned the equivalent of a two-, three- or four-star review.

    In the case of hotels, said Dr. Cotte, five stars typically means “everything is what I expected.” I’m assuming this is how the Hampton Inn averaged a five-star rating on my recent search for a hotel in Maine, compared to several luxury resorts that rated only a four.

    The experts confirmed what I knew, but resisted, all along. If you really want to find the best product or service for your needs, you’ll need to exert some effort. But it’s also worth remembering that if you don’t, it’s no big deal.

    As Dr. Salganik explained, even if a system is gamed, the worst product probably won’t end up at the top of your screen for long; assuming there’s a considerable difference in quality among the options, it will eventually be knocked down. But if the products are pretty similar, then yes, it’s possible that the very best one will actually not float to the very top — though that’s no tragedy either. As Barry Schwartz, the author of “The Paradox of Choice,” argues, if everything is essentially the same, then there’s nothing wrong with ending up with a product that’s the second- or third-best of the heap.

  • Opinion | Do Not Trust That Stranger’s 5-Star Review - The New York Times
    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/25/opinion/sunday/five-star-customer-reviews.html

    Bon papier sur les évaluations en ligne.

    Stars beget sales. According to an often mentioned Harvard Business School working paper that studied restaurant reviews on Yelp, each added star is associated with a 5 percent to 9 percent increase in revenue. Not surprisingly, then, new businesses have sprung up to exploit the rating system to the seller’s or the platform’s advantage.

    Finally, it’s hard to know what the stars even mean. Often times, whether it’s a mattress or can opener or an Uber driver, a five-star rating means “nothing disastrous happened,” said Nikhil Garg, a doctoral candidate at Stanford University. A recent study he co-wrote reported that 80 percent of people gave freelancers hired from an online platform five stars. But when he asked people to choose from different words (“terrible,” “mediocre,” “best possible,” etc.), at least half of the freelancers earned the equivalent of a two-, three- or four-star review.

    In the case of hotels, said Dr. Cotte, five stars typically means “everything is what I expected.” I’m assuming this is how the Hampton Inn averaged a five-star rating on my recent search for a hotel in Maine, compared to several luxury resorts that rated only a four.

    The experts confirmed what I knew, but resisted, all along. If you really want to find the best product or service for your needs, you’ll need to exert some effort. But it’s also worth remembering that if you don’t, it’s no big deal.

    As Dr. Salganik explained, even if a system is gamed, the worst product probably won’t end up at the top of your screen for long; assuming there’s a considerable difference in quality among the options, it will eventually be knocked down. But if the products are pretty similar, then yes, it’s possible that the very best one will actually not float to the very top — though that’s no tragedy either. As Barry Schwartz, the author of “The Paradox of Choice,” argues, if everything is essentially the same, then there’s nothing wrong with ending up with a product that’s the second- or third-best of the heap.

    #E-commerce #Evaluation #Avis_utilisateurs

  • Opinion | Do Not Trust That Stranger’s 5-Star Review - The New York Times
    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/25/opinion/sunday/five-star-customer-reviews.html

    Stars beget sales. According to an often mentioned Harvard Business School working paper that studied restaurant reviews on Yelp, each added star is associated with a 5 percent to 9 percent increase in revenue. Not surprisingly, then, new businesses have sprung up to exploit the rating system to the seller’s or the platform’s advantage.

    Finally, it’s hard to know what the stars even mean. Often times, whether it’s a mattress or can opener or an Uber driver, a five-star rating means “nothing disastrous happened,” said Nikhil Garg, a doctoral candidate at Stanford University. A recent study he co-wrote reported that 80 percent of people gave freelancers hired from an online platform five stars. But when he asked people to choose from different words (“terrible,” “mediocre,” “best possible,” etc.), at least half of the freelancers earned the equivalent of a two-, three- or four-star review.

    In the case of hotels, said Dr. Cotte, five stars typically means “everything is what I expected.” I’m assuming this is how the Hampton Inn averaged a five-star rating on my recent search for a hotel in Maine, compared to several luxury resorts that rated only a four.

    The experts confirmed what I knew, but resisted, all along. If you really want to find the best product or service for your needs, you’ll need to exert some effort. But it’s also worth remembering that if you don’t, it’s no big deal.

    As Dr. Salganik explained, even if a system is gamed, the worst product probably won’t end up at the top of your screen for long; assuming there’s a considerable difference in quality among the options, it will eventually be knocked down. But if the products are pretty similar, then yes, it’s possible that the very best one will actually not float to the very top — though that’s no tragedy either. As Barry Schwartz, the author of “The Paradox of Choice,” argues, if everything is essentially the same, then there’s nothing wrong with ending up with a product that’s the second- or third-best of the heap.

  • The Shadow Workforce of Facebook’s Content Moderation
    http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/02/the-shadow-workforce-of-facebooks-content-moderation.html

    As in Omelas, however, the joyousness of Facebook’s hundreds of thousands of advertisers depends wholly on the misery of a small number of other people: its content moderators. For his article, Newton spoke with several current and former employees of Cognizant, a “professional services vendor” contracted by Facebook to moderate its platform, removing the content that violates Facebook’s terms of service. In practice, this can mean spending your days scrolling through post after post of graphic porn, hate speech, and videos of death and violence. “People develop severe anxiety while still in training,” Newton writes, “and continue to struggle with trauma symptoms long after they leave,” but are given minimal support and job stability — each employee gets nine “wellness time” minutes per day, to be used if they feel traumatized and need to stop moderating. Meanwhile, “the conspiracy videos and memes that they see each day gradually lead them to embrace fringe views.” For their trouble, they are paid $28,800 a year, around 12 percent of the average salaried Facebook employee’s total compensation of $240,000.
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    The moderators sign nondisclosure agreements that prevent them from talking about what they’d done for Facebook — or even, apparently, that they’d worked for Facebook at all. This theoretically protects private Facebook user data from leaking out. But it also has the effect of hiding the 1,500 content moderators from the outside world, preventing them from even describing the difficulty of their jobs, let alone agitating for better working conditions. Even full-time Facebook employees are apparently unaware of the extent to which Facebook contracts out its content moderation, and the conditions under which that moderation is taking place, despite its importance. “Why do we contract out work that’s obviously vital to the health of this company and the products we build?” one employee asked on an internal company message board.

    Rather than address its various mounting content issues with dedicated staff hires, the company farmed out moderation work to contractors, needing to maintain a cost structure that relied on low labor costs, and believing that eventually an “engineering solution” could be developed to keep the platform clean and safe. This bargain has worked out well for Facebook, which by 2016 was raking in an incredible $600,000 per full-time employee in net profit. It has worked out rather less well for the rest of us — particularly the contactor moderators with PTSD-like symptoms. (Facebook’s profit margins have been thinning over the last two years, naturally, as it expands its “security” team, which includes moderators.)

    The idea that you can keep your labor costs low by relying on software automation, creating the eye-popping profit margins that venture capitalists approvingly call “software margins,” is a foundational belief of 21st-century Silicon Valley. Albergotti quotes the mantra COO Sheryl Sandberg brought to Facebook from Google: “People don’t scale.” And it’s true that there are some tasks — like selling and placing digital ads — that are more efficiently and profitably done by software programs. But there aren’t that many tasks that programs can do as well as human beings, and not many programs that can be automated without the help and work of humans. Which means that any company bragging about automated solutions is likely hiding a much larger shadow workforce supporting those solutions, like the one Facebook employs through Cognizant.

    Such arrangements are endlessly common in Silicon Valley. Magically convenient services and devices are often subsidized not just by money-burning investors but also by exploitative labor arrangements. Amazon purchases arrive quickly in part because the company’s warehouse workers are relentlessly tracked and don’t take bathroom breaks; Uber rides are cheap in part because the median hourly wage of an Uber driver is $10. Obviously, being a paid Uber driver is no closer to being a chained-up child than riding in an Uber is to being in paradise, but you can begin to understand the bargain being struck by the citizens of Omelas in Le Guin’s story.

    The truth is that “software margins” (or what investors hope will eventually be software margins) are rarely achieved solely through automation and innovation. Most Silicon Valley titans, especially the software giants that have arisen over the last two decades, have become adept at externalizing their costs. Users contribute content for free. Contractors work for cheap. The burden of moderating content has for the last ten years been borne by someone — in some cases under-compensated contractors, in some cases users moderating content themselves for free, in some cases the victims of abuse or harassment, and, in some cases, the public sphere as as whole. Just rarely Facebook. If Facebook’s shadow-workforce practices — which have been widely reported by journalists and studied by academics well before the Verge’s story this week, and which are no different than content-moderation practices on many social networks — are being singled out now, it may be because the platform’s conveniences no longer seem worth the full social cost.

    #Digital_Labor #Facebook #Modération #Externalisation

  • Reputation inflation explains why Uber’s five-star driver ratings system became useless — Quartz
    https://qz.com/1244155/good-luck-leaving-your-uber-driver-less-than-five-stars


    Das Bewertungssystem von Uber und anderen Internet-Plattformen funktioniert nicht. Technisch betrachtet ist alles O.K. aber weder "gute"noch „schlechte“ oder „durchschnittliche“ Bewertung haben die nahe liegende Bedeutung. Auf der einen Seite vergeben Kunden systematisch ein Maximum an Punkten, weil sie auch miesen Fahrern nichts Böses antun wollen, auf der anderen Seit wird manipuliert und betrogen, was das Zeug hält, wie die bekannte Geschichte mit dem „besten Restaurant Londons“ zeigt, das in Wirklichkeit nicht existierte.

    In der Praxis ist es wie in einer Schule, wo nur Einsen vergeben werden und jede Zwei zum Nichtbestehen führt.

    Dieser Artikel und die unten verlinkte Studie zeigen genauer, was dahinter steckt und was man für Schlüssen aus den Beobachtungen ziehen kann.

    Have you ever given an Uber driver five stars who didn’t deserve it? If you’ve ever taken any ride-hailing service, the answer is probably yes.

    Uber asks riders to give their drivers a rating of one to five stars at the end of each trip. But very few people make use of this full scale. That’s because it’s common knowledge among Uber’s users that drivers need to maintain a certain minimum rating to work, and that leaving anything less than five stars could jeopardize their status.

    Drivers are so concerned about their ratings that one Lyft driver in California last year posted a translation of the five-star system in his car, to educate less savvy passengers. Next to four stars he wrote: “This driver sucks, fire him slowly; it does not mean ‘average’ or above ‘average.’” In a tacit acknowledgement of this, Uber said in July that it would make riders add an explanation when they awarded a driver less than five stars.

    How did Uber’s ratings become more inflated than grades at Harvard? That’s the topic of a new paper, “Reputation Inflation,” from NYU’s John Horton and Apostolos Filippas, and Collage.com CEO Joseph Golden. The paper argues that online platforms, especially peer-to-peer ones like Uber and Airbnb, are highly susceptible to ratings inflation because, well, it’s uncomfortable for one person to leave another a bad review.

    The somewhat more technical way to say this is that there’s a “cost” to leaving negative feedback. That cost can take different forms: It might be that the reviewer fears retaliation, or that he feels guilty doing something that might harm the underperforming worker. If this “cost” increases over time—i.e., the fear or guilt associated with leaving a bad review increases—then the platform is likely to experience ratings inflation.

    The paper focuses on an unnamed gig economy platform where people (“employers”) can hire other people (“workers”) to do specific tasks. After a job is completed, employers can leave two different kinds of feedback: “public” feedback that the worker sees, and “private” reviews and ratings that aren’t shown to the worker or other people on the platform. Over the history of the platform, 82% of people have chosen to leave reviews, including a numerical rating on a scale from one to five stars.

    In the early days of the platform in 2007, the average worker score was pretty, well, average at 3.74 stars. Over time that changed. The average score rose by 0.53 stars over the course 2007. By May 2016, it had climbed to 4.85 stars.

    People were more candid in private. The platform introduced its option to leave private feedback in April 2013. From June 2014 to May 2016, the period studied in the paper, about 15% of employers left “unambiguously bad private feedback” but only 4% gave a public rating of three stars or less. They were also more candid in written comments, possibly because written comments are less directly harmful to the worker than a low numerical score.

    Then, in March 2015, the platform decided to release private ratings in batches to workers. In other words, a private review wasn’t totally private anymore, and leaving a negative one could cause harm. The result was immediate: Bad feedback became scarce and imperfect scores were reserved for truly poor experiences. If the trend continued, the authors estimated that the average private rating would be the highest possible score in seven years.

    This, again, is similar to what has happened on Uber and other ride-hailing platforms. In the early days, riders left a range of reviews, but it didn’t take long for the default to become five stars, with anything else reserved for extreme cases of hostile conduct or reckless driving. “I took a ride in a car as grimy and musty-smelling as a typical yellow cab,” Jeff Bercovici recalled for Forbes in August 2014. “I only gave the driver three out of five stars. Just kidding. I gave him five stars, of course. What do you think I am, a psychopath?”

    Services are different from products. Someone who feels guilty leaving a bad review for another person probably won’t share those concerns about posting a negative review of a toaster. It’s the personal element that gives us pause. A separate, forthcoming study on online reputations found that the number of users leaving negative feedback on a travel review website decreased after hotels started replying to the critiques, despite no change in hotel quality.

    The problem is particularly acute on “sharing” economy platforms because companies like Uber, which regard their workers as independent contractors instead of employees, use ratings riders provide to manage their workforces at arm’s length. These ratings systems ask customers to make tough decisions about whether workers are fit to be on the platform, and live with the guilt if they’re not. Put another way: On-demand platforms are offloading their guilt onto you. Five stars for all!

    Hintergrund und Details
    http://john-joseph-horton.com/papers/longrun.pdf

    #Uber #ranking #gig_economy #Arbeit

  • Uber fined $8.9 million by Colorado for allowing drivers with felony convictions, other drivers license issues
    http://www.denverpost.com/2017/11/20/uber-colorado-fine

    Colorado regulators slapped Uber with an $8.9 million penalty for allowing 57 people with past criminal or motor vehicle offenses to drive for the company, the state’s Public Utilities Commission announced Monday.

    The PUC said the drivers should have been disqualified. They had issues ranging from felony convictions to driving under the influence and reckless driving. In some cases, drivers were working with revoked, suspended or canceled licenses, the state said. A similar investigation of smaller competitor Lyft found no violations.

    “We have determined that Uber had background-check information that should have disqualified these drivers under the law, but they were allowed to drive anyway,” PUC director Doug Dean said in a statement. “These actions put the safety of passengers in extreme jeopardy.”

    Uber spokeswoman Stephanie Sedlak provided this statement on Monday:

    “We recently discovered a process error that was inconsistent with Colorado’s ridesharing regulations and proactively notified the Colorado Public Utilities Commission (CPUC). This error affected a small number of drivers and we immediately took corrective action. Per Uber safety policies and Colorado state regulations, drivers with access to the Uber app must undergo a nationally accredited third-party background screening. We will continue to work closely with the CPUC to enable access to safe, reliable transportation options for all Coloradans.”

    The PUC’s investigation began after Vail police referred a case to the agency. In that case, which occurred in March, an Uber driver dragged a passenger out of the car and kicked him in the face, according the Vail police report.

    In August, the PUC asked Uber and Lyft for records of all drivers who were accused, arrested or convicted of crimes that would disqualify them from driving for a transportation network company, the term given to ridesharing services under state law.

    “Lyft gave us 15 to 20 (records), but we didn’t find any problems with Lyft,” Dean said.

    Uber handed over 107 records and told the PUC that it had removed those people from its system.

    The PUC cross-checked the Uber drivers with state crime and court databases, finding that many had aliases and other violations. While 63 were found to have issues with their driver’s licenses, the PUC focused on 57 who had additional violations, because of the impact on public safety.

    “What they (Uber) calls proactively reaching out to us was after we had to threaten them with daily civil penalties to get them to provide us with the (records),” said Dean, adding that his prime investigator just told him that some penalized drivers were still on the Uber system. “This is not a data processing error. This is a public safety issue.”

    Uber was welcomed to Colorado in June 2014, when Gov. John Hickenlooper signed Senate Bill 125 to authorize ridesharing services such as Uber and Lyft. The PUC was then charged with creating rules to regulate the services, which went into effect on Jan. 30, 2016.

    The rules gave the companies the choice of either fingerprinting drivers or running a private background check on the potential driver’s criminal history and driving history. Drivers also must have a valid driver’s license.

    Drivers are disqualified if they’ve been convicted of a felony in the past five years. But they can never be a driver if they’ve been convicted of serious felonies including felony assault, fraud, unlawful sexual behavior and violent crimes, according to the statute.

    Taxi drivers, by comparison, are subject to fingerprint background checks by the FBI and Colorado Bureau of Investigation.

    Elsewhere in the U.S., Uber and Lyft have threatened to leave places that force them to fingerprint drivers — including in Chicago, Maryland and Houston.

    Both companies pulled out of Austin last year after the city added rules to fingerprint drivers. But the Texas house passed a bill in April removing such requirements, and Uber and Lyft returned to the city.

    While Maryland caved in its requirements after Uber threatened to leave, the state banned 4,000 ridesharing drivers in April who did not meet state screening requirements despite passing Uber or Lyft’s background checks.That also happened in Massachusetts, which kicked out 8,200 drivers who had passed company checks. Among them were 51 registered sex offenders.

    Uber and Lyft have pushed for private background checks because they say that fingerprints don’t provide the complete source of criminal history that some expect. In a post about its security process, Uber said that when it comes to fingerprints, there are gaps between FBI and state arrest records, which can result in an incomplete background check. Uber, instead, uses state and local criminal history checks plus court records and the U.S. Dept. of Justice’s National Sex Offender site.

    Last month, California regulators nixed any fingerprinting requirement as long as Uber and Lyft conduct their own background checks.

    But the Colorado PUC says that by fingerprinting drivers, the ride service would be able to identify drivers with aliases and other identities with felony convictions. The lack of fingerprinting never sat well with Dean, who mentioned his concern in 2014 before Colorado passed the law.

    “They said their private background checks were superior to anything out there,” Dean said. “We can tell you their private background checks were not superior. In some cases, we could not say they even provided a background check.”

    Vail police said that altercations between passengers and drivers are not uncommon. They’re not limited to Uber drivers but include taxi and limo drivers and passengers, said Vail police Detective Sgt. Luke Causey.

    “We’ve had more than one,” Causey said. “Unfortunately, in our winter environment with guests and around bar closing times, we’ve had the driver go after passengers who don’t pay their tab. Sometimes it can go both ways.”

    Uber drivers have made local headlines for bad behavior. In July, a Denver Uber driver pleaded guilty to disturbing the peace after rolling his car on the leg of a city parking attendant at Denver International Airport. Two years ago, a Denver UberX driver was arrested for trying to break into the home of a passenger he’d just dropped off at the airport.

    Monday’s fine is a civil penalty assessment and based on a citation of $2,500 per day for each disqualified driver found to have worked. Among the findings, 12 drivers had felony convictions, 17 had major moving violations, 63 had driver’s license issues and three had interlock driver’s licenses, which is required after a recent drunken driving conviction.

    Uber has 10 days to pay 50 percent of the $8.9 million penalty or request a hearing to contest the violation before an administrative law judge. Afterwards, the PUC will continue making audits to check for compliance. If more violations are found, Uber’s penalty could rise.

    “Uber can fix this tomorrow. The law allows them to have fingerprint background checks. We had found a number of a.k.a.’s and aliases that these drivers were using. That’s the problem with name-based background checks,” Dean said. “We’re very concerned and we hope the company will take steps to correct this.”

    #Uber #USA #Recht

  • ’The world is a horrible place to be a woman’: Brazilian writer launches sexual violence campaign | Global development | The Guardian
    https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2017/aug/30/world-horrible-place-to-be-a-woman-brazilian-writer-clara-averbuck-laun

    Brazilian feminist writer and activist who says she was sexually assaulted by an Uber driver in São Paulo has launched an online campaign after writing and posting about the attack.

    Clara Averbuck’s Twitter drive is the latest in a series of digital protests that Brazilian feminists have used to denounce violence against women.

    #brésil #violence #viol #culture_du_viol #droit_des_femmes

  • Woman raped by Uber driver in India sues company for privacy breaches
    https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jun/15/uber-india-woman-rape-lawsuit

    An Indian woman who was raped by an Uber driver sued the ride-hailing company on Thursday, alleging that Uber executives had “violated her a second time” when they obtained her medical records and used them to cast doubt on her credibility. The woman, a resident of Texas who is bringing the case as a Jane Doe, filed suit against the company, CEO Travis Kalanick, and former executives Eric Alexander and Emil Michael for violating her privacy and defaming her character. The case stems from a (...)

    #Uber #domination #procès #discrimination #santé

    ##santé

  • Uber president Jeff Jones quits, deepening turmoil
    https://www.yahoo.com/tech/uber-president-jeff-jones-quits-deepening-turmoil-003436110--sector.html
    Zunächst bekam man den Eindruck, ein Anführer der Uber-Bande hätte ein schlechtes Gewissen bekommen.

    “It is now clear, however, that the beliefs and approach to leadership that have guided my career are inconsistent with what I saw and experienced at Uber, and I can no longer continue as president of the ride sharing business,” he added. Jones wished the “thousands of amazing people at the company” well.

    Aber dann ging es wohl doch mehr um Differenzen bei der Frage, welche Ausbeutungsmethoden am besten funktionieren.

    The Independent Drivers Guild, an organization that advocates for Uber drivers, on Sunday was critical that Jones “has left the company without making a single improvement to help drivers struggling to make a living,” said Ryan Price, executive director of the guild.

    Das liest sich dann so:

    “I joined Uber because of its mission, and the challenge to build global capabilities that would help the company mature and thrive long term,” Jones said.

    Und das hat sich dann nicht so entwickelt wie der Herr es sich vorstellte. Man hört auch, dass der Big Boss ein ganz schöner Kotzbrocken sein soll.

    Bloomberg released a video that showed Kalanick berating an Uber driver who had complained about cuts to rates paid to drivers, resulting in Kalanick making a public apology.

    Oder will der Mann einfach nicht riskieren, wegen Bildung einer kriminellen vereinigung im Knast zulanden?

    And earlier this month Uber confirmed it had used a secret technology program dubbed “Greyball,” which effectively changes the app view for specific riders, to evade authorities in cities where the service has been banned. Uber has since prohibited the use of Greyball to target local regulators.

    Noch mehr kriminelle Machenschaften bei Uber?

    Uber is also facing a lawsuit from Alphabet Inc’s self-driving car division that accuses it of stealing designs for autonomous car technology known as Lidar. Uber has said the claims are false.

    Jeff Jones ist nicht der einzige Abgang aus der Chefetage von Uber. Der Chefkartograph will lieber in der Politik etwas werden, ein Wochenendpicknick im Vergleich zum Überlebenskampf in der Konzernzentrale des weltgrößten selbsterklärten Gesetzesbrechers.

    Uber’s vice president of maps and business platform, Brian McClendon, said separately he plans to leave the company at the end of the month to explore politics.

    “I’ll be staying on as an adviser,” McClendon said in a statement to Reuters. “This fall’s election and the current fiscal crisis in Kansas is driving me to more fully participate in our democracy.”

    Könnte es sein, dass die Ratten das sinkende Schiff verlassen?

    Jones and McClendon are the latest in a string of high-level executives to leave the company.

    Last month, engineering executive Amit Singhal was asked to resign due to a sexual harassment allegation stemming from his previous job at Alphabet Inc’s Google. Earlier this month, Ed Baker, Uber’s vice president of product and growth, and Charlie Miller, Uber’s famed security researcher, departed.

    Lokaler Widerstand gegen die Plattformkapitalisten lohnt sich, und zwar besonders dann wenn sie sich intern selbst zerlegen.

    #Taxi #Uber #disruption

  • Uber wants to disrupt the car loan and leasing industry
    http://www.cnbc.com/2016/06/07/uber-wants-to-disrupt-the-auto-leasing-industry.html

    To many observers, the endgame of Uber’s auto market disruption is a world where you never own a car again.

    But there’s an irony in how Uber, (2016 CNBC Disruptor No.1), plans to get there: It’s making a big push into the hundred-plus billion-dollar auto financing market.

    Think about all the money that goes into leases and loans from captive financing units at Toyota, Honda and Ford, luring consumers into shiny new vehicles.

    Automobile financing amounts to $116 billion a year just in the United States, according to IBISWorld, all for the sake of car ownership — or something resembling it.

    Uber’s mission is very different than that of a car company. It wants more Ubers on the road by any means necessary, and the newer the car, the better. After all, it’s setting out to create the anti-taxi experience.
    The company created Xchange Leasing last year as a wholly-owned Uber subsidiary. For a $250 deposit, an Uber driver can lease a new midsize or economy car, be it a Chevrolet Malibu, Honda Accord or Toyota Prius.
    […]
    At a Chicago-area Nissan dealership, Xchange accounted for 41 percent of sales in May. In each of the first three months of the year, sales more than doubled from the same time in 2015, mostly because of Xchange deals, said a store executive, who asked that we not use his or her company’s name.
    […]
    Financing cars by the thousands is hugely expensive. Xchange secured a $1 billion credit facility led by Goldman Sachs, according to a person familiar with the matter. The facility was put in place last week and includes capital from Citigroup, Deutsche Bank AG (New York Branch), JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley and SunTrust, the person said.

    The credit facility was previously reported by Bloomberg News.

    By the end of 2016, Uber expects that 100,000 cars will have been provided globally through the vehicle solutions programs, with $2 billion going toward car sales.

  • NYC’s Taxis Finally Launch an App to Compete With Uber
    http://www.wired.com/2015/08/arrow-ny-taxis-app

    New York is launching the Uber of taxis.

    Insiders of the city’s taxi industry are finally launching an app that lets users hail cabs and pay for rides using a smartphone. It’s such a great idea you have to wonder what took so long.

    The app is called Arro and, as first reported by Crain’s, it’s in beta testing with 7,000 New York City cabs and could launch within weeks. Here’s how it works: A user launches the app, which gives a nearby cabbie the passenger’s name, pickup address, and cross street. The user, meanwhile, gets the driver’s name and ID number. The app saves credit card info, letting passengers pay the metered fare and tip automatically. Another advantage is no surge pricing; the app developers told Crain’s that fares always will be meter-based.

    Once a sure bet, taxi medallions becoming unsellable
    http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2015/05/17/taxi-medallion-values-decline-uber-rideshare/27314735

    Until recently in America’s big cities, purchasing a taxi medallion—the city-issued license to operate cabs —was about as sound of an investment as they come.

    But with the rise of Uber and other ridesharing services, the value of taxi medallions are plummeting, leading cabbies and fleet owners throughout the USA worried that their industry will be decimated if local and state government doesn’t intervene.

    “I have had a pretty successful thing,” said Gary Karczewski, 65, a Chicago cabbie who inherited his medallion from his father 28 years ago and earned enough to purchase two homes and help send his two daughters to college by driving the equivalent of 80 times around the world. “My hope was to wind down soon and give whatever I could sell the medallion for to my mother. But I am not confident there’s a market now.”

    In Chicago, which has the country’s second biggest fleet with roughly 7,000 taxis, the median sale price for a medallion hovered around $70,000 in 2007 before reaching a median sales peak of $357,000 in late 2013.

    Since reaching that high point more than a year ago, the value of medallions in the Windy City have sharply declined and sales have ground to a near halt—with the city recording only seven medallion transfers in the first quarter of 2015—as the median sale price fell to about $270,000.

    The steady slide, which also is on display in New York, Philadelphia, Boston and elsewhere, has left many owner-operators and big fleet managers pessimistic about their once prized assets.

    Cabbies around the country complain that drivers for services like Uber, which use a smartphone app to connect riders with freelancers using their own vehicles, are disrupting the market and playing with an unfair advantage.

    Medallion owners also grumble that rideshare services in many markets aren’t subject to the same rules of the road. Uber’s contract drivers don’t face as stringent vehicle inspections, their drivers aren’t required to obtain a chauffeurs license, and they can adjust their fares based on demand.
    Taxi medallion values are plummeting in big U.S. cities

    The changing landscape has been put into stark relief by the diminishing value of the taxi medallion in once plum markets like New York, where in recent years they proved to offer a better return on investment than gold, oil and real estate.

    As a result of the booming value, the vast majority of medallions in big metros like New York and Chicago were gobbled up over the last several decades by investors and companies that rent the medallions to drivers.

    But times are changing. The upstart Uber, which has a reported valuation of $50 billion, collected more than $750 million in just New York City during its first four years of business there. Investor Carl Icahn announced on Friday that he was making a $100 million investment in Uber rival Lyft, calling the company a “tremendous bargain.”

    “What I think has happened is that competition for consumers has not caused a drop in medallion prices, because medallion values in no way are tied to the riding public,” said Uber global policy director Corey Owens. “What’s happened is that drivers have found they have better opportunities.”

    Earlier this month, the Philadelphia Parking Authority, which regulates the city’s taxi industry, had sold newly-created medallions for wheel-chair accessible taxis for $80,000 each. The bargain price came after the authority put the medallions on the market last fall, with an initial asking price of $475,000, but received no bids.

    In New York, taxi mogul Evgeny Friedman is locked in a court battle with Citibank, to whom he owes some $31 million after some medallion loans matured.

    Citibank is looking to seize 87 of Freidman’s 900 medallions in New York, which has seen medallion prices drop to about $870,000 last fall from a peak of about $1.2 million last spring. Freidman, the biggest medallion owner in the USA, also owns fleets in Boston, Chicago, New Orleans, and Philadelphia.

    In an April letter to creditors, New York taxi commission officials and other stakeholders, Freidman’s attorney, Brett Berman, called on industry regulators and medallion lenders to restructure and extend loans for his client and reform the industry.

    “If you want to ensure that medallion industry nationwide continues to operate, if you want to have services available to riders that don’t have iPhones, if you want to have drivers that are vetted, then there’s going to have to be a major change nationwide and city-by-city in terms of how they’re going about enforcing the rules,” said Ronn Torossian, a spokesman for Freidman.

    Even in Nevada, where the taxi industry has successfully fought off attempts by Uber to establish a beachhead in recent years, there are signs that government resistance to rideshare services is softening. Last week, the Nevada Senate approved legislation that would create regulations that would allow people to hail a ride using a smartphone.

    There are other signs that medallion industry’s vitality is on unsteady footing.

    Earlier this month, Medallion Financial Group—one of the country’s largest creditors to medallion owners—reported in its financial disclosures that nearly 4.1% of its loans were late 31 days or more in the first three months of 2015, up from 2.2% in the previous quarter.

    Charles Goodbar, a Chicago attorney who helps secure loans for medallion owners, said that financing has all but dried up. At the same time, new regulations, as well competition from ridesharing services, has reduced how much fleet owners in Chicago and elsewhere can lease their vehicles to cabbies.

    “There’s zero market,” said Goodbar, who also owns 59 medallions. “In my case, a buyer would have to come to the table with about $220,000 in cash per medallion, because there isn’t any financing available.”
    An UBER application is shown as cars drive by in Washington,

    An UBER application is shown as cars drive by in Washington, DC on March 25, 2015. (Photo: ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS, AFP/Getty Images)

    Ancillary industries are also feeling the pain.

    Carriage News, a New England industry newsletter closed shop in March, as medallion financing agencies slowed issuing loans, making advertising unnecessary.

    “The demise of Carriage News can be laid directly at the feet of the TNCs [transportation network companies] and the do-nothing politicians who allow these ... operations to continue to erode the taxi industry,” publisher Bob Keeley wrote in a front-page editorial announcing the 45-year-old publication’s demise.

    The taxi industry isn’t going out without a fight.

    In New York and Chicago, the industry has backed efforts for a universal hailing app in a bid to compete with rideshare outfits for riders that prefer the convenience of finding a ride with a couple of taps on their smartphone.

    And the trade association Taxicab, Limousine and Paratransit Association (TLPA) has launched a vigorous media nationwide campaign called “Who’s Driving You?” in an attempt to raise questions about Uber and other ridesharing companies safety record. The TLPA maintains a long list of alleged crimes and other embarrassing incidents by Uber drivers and drivers for other ridesharing outfits.

    After the latest high-profile incident last month in Houston, an alleged sexual assault by an Uber driver, the company faced an ultimatum from Mayor Annise Parker to tighten its oversight of drivers or face expulsion from the city. The company quickly responded to the city with a memo detailing how it would it planned to bolster vetting and dismiss drivers that aren’t registered

    In New York, the Taxi and Limousine Commission is weighing a proposal that would create an agency that oversee the implementation of smartphone apps used in the taxi industry.

    Under the proposal, the smartphone app operators would be required to approval before modifying their apps or face fines—a regulation that a powerful coalition of Silicon Valley companies told New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio would stifle innovation.

    “While we do not develop software for transportation providers, we are gravely concerned by the unprecedented decision to subject software available around the world to pre-release review by a city agency,” wrote the Internet Association, the tech coalition that includes Facebook, Google and Twitter.

    While more regulation on ridesharing companies may be inevitable, many medallion owners say that their best days are now in the rearview mirror.

    “It’s now become a race to the bottom,” said Karczewski, the Chicago medallion owner. “I’m at the end of my career, but guys who have a lot of skin in the game...What are they going to do?”

    #taxi #usa #uber #disruption