| It's not, and the rest of this thread dives into it a bunch. Gas and tire wear implies a ~$2/hour hit, roughly. Tickets are presumably negligible for long-term drivers? Most people get <1 ticket per year, even with long commutes, and I assume that if you're getting ticketed very often with passengers Uber will drop you as a driver, the cutoff is low for that. Accidents are hard to call - their 'cost' is basically whatever you pay in insurance (plus some adjustment for future insurance hikes if you file a claim). I don't know how the Uber-insurance thing shook out, so I can't speak to that at all. The $16/hour wage is now at something like $12/hour (very roughly), but that's neglecting the benefits of having a car (I'm assuming most drivers with Xchange wouldn't have cars if they worked elsewhere, otherwise raise the effective wage by $5/hour). But of course, that's part-time work. It's voluntarily part-time, but you can't scale up Uber driving arbitrarily - presumably you're already working the highest cash-flow hours and will see decreased hourly wages as you add less-profitable driving time. So I'll stand by a claim that the money is pretty good, at least in <$10/hour minimum wage markets, but it's locked into a no-benefits, part-time status that prevents it from being an especially good living. |
But the whole calculation of the money was based on the earnings of one driver in LA, which isn't a < $10/hour minimum wage market (California has a $10/hr minimum wage).
(And, after taking the employer-equivalent share of self-employment taxes into account, the pay is barely above the equivalent of a $10/hour employee wage.)