[devindotcom]

Good for them. These companies appear exploitative and rent-seeking far beyond what the infrastructure they provide suggests is reasonable.

If you're interested, next time you take a car, ask the driver what their end is - you may be surprised how little of the fare they actually take home. That share will only decrease unless they all get on one side of a table.

[anthonypasq]

if all these drivers are getting horribly exploited why are they doing it?

[AirMax98]

It's a bit like a payday loan — the drivers need money _today_ and effectively borrow against the depreciation of their vehicle.

[twoodfin]

https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/jle/vol59/iss1/8/

Banning payday loans tends to shift borrowers to worse forms of credit.

One imagines worsening the economics of ride share jobs will do the same.

[scottyah]

Not sure why you're being downvoted, this is what I've heard as well. It gets a person cash while they are in transitionary periods of time. There are not a lot of jobs you can get paid for almost immediately- most require startup time, training, applications, etc.

[s1artibartfast]

that sounds like a benefit, not abuse.

[chalupa-supreme]

All because you’re being exploited doesn’t mean you can’t voice your want to change things.

Some of these workers might find that the only gig that they can rely on is ride share for various reasons.

[twoodfin]

Various reasons necessarily include the successful business model of the ride share companies.

[tech_ken]

There's no better option on the table? Desperate people have low labor elasticity, kind of definitionally.

[mrtksn]

It’s the information disparity resulting in reduced bargaining power. The unions are supposed to solve that actually.

I wonder if Americans would have more positive opinions on this if unions were called platforms, and were for profit companies that you can trade the shares.

When they sign up enough people they can enough information and use financial instruments to force fair market value and eat into other companies margins and share that with their subscribers.

[macartain]

this is genius... and call shop stewards 'agents'... and call the act of unionising an org "agentifying a node flock"...

[pipo234]

You might ask the same about any exploitive relation.

Why is there prostitution?

Why are slaves doing work for their masters?

Why are children going through our garbage in some distant country, if they hardly earn enough to eat?

[anthonypasq]

i dont think the choice between driving Uber and working at Walmart is the same as being a slave or dying.

[pipo234]

True, they are not the same. But they probably feel similarly coerced into accepting an unfair deal.

So yeah, the comparisons are hyperboles, but I totally feel why they're upset and hope collective bargaining helps better their situation.

[philipallstar]

It's not unfair if it's entered voluntarily. Prostitution and slavery are not entered (or retained) voluntarily.

[pipo234]

I suppose this comes down to semantics. It's more grey than black and white. For instance, Russia doesn't send conscripts to fight in Ukraine. But it's hard to argue that soldiers fighting and dying in the front lines made a fair choice, while they weren't forced to sign a contract.

Similarly, there are Uber and Lyft drivers that don't have the economic freedom or level of education to work anywhere else.

[Henchman21]

Never a shortage of pedants on HN.

[hackeraccount]

"Why are slaves doing work for their masters?"

Maybe drop that one from the list.

[nickvec]

Because the alternative is being homeless.

[devindotcom]

what a revealing question. why don't you ask one next time you're in a car?

[anthonypasq]

I have, they mostly say they enjoy it, they can work when they want, scale up when they need more money, scale down when they dont, decent money etc.

flexible, supplemental income.

[harmmonica]

I'm asking this earnestly, do you ever follow up and ask if the added money/income offsets the additional wear and tear on their vehicles? Like do most of those folks you talk to understand the potential trade off? I would think the average rideshare driver understands that generally ("of course the added mileage decreases the value of the car!"), but I wonder how many folks take the time to quantify it, even roughly. Seems like a logical follow-up question when you're interviewing/making small talk with them.

[anthonypasq]

no i respect people's intelligence enough to assume they wouldn't be working all day for $0

[richwater]

white savior complex is rampant in these threads. Insisting they know better for someone else.

[techteach00]

Food and shelter?

[chimpanzee]

To pay for tomorrow perhaps.

[darth_avocado]

Why are children mining rare minerals in Africa? Why are workers handling toxic waste in the name of recycling in Bangladesh? Surely they can all work from home and leave their jobs if it’s that exploitative

[philipallstar]

Yes they can if those options are available. "Exploitative" doesn't mean "this is the best option for a free choosing individual".

[ishouldstayaway]

Surely this is a dark joke.

People need to eat, dude.

[hackable_sand]

Sorry... What?

What makes it okay to exploit them?

[onedognight]

I’d guess because most don’t correctly account for wear and tear and depreciation of their car when they do their mental profit calculation.

[emceestork]

It's definitely not because of this. They are not stupid.

[anthonypasq]

right, so the real answer is that all these poor immigrants are too stupid to realize they are losing money. lovely class solidarity there.

[czhu12]

it’s very confusing why uber makes so little profit given hire big their cut of every ride seemingly is.

[Ekaros]

I think truth is that tech companies are really bad at business unless they can scale with free unit economies. Even the unit costs with per seat subscriptions seem insane when you stop and think of the numbers in isolation. Ofc, compared to amount they pay their employees they are cheap, but in other places and industries it looks way overpriced.

[kshacker]

R&D is not cheap and similarly executive comp is not cheap. They appear to have made a net income of 1.5 B last year (2025), but if. you look at exec comp, the top 5 execs took in 100 M. If you check all their creamy layer, it is likely they spent a quarter billion in stuff that did not need to be paid if all you had were private taxies :) with an open source app // I exaggerate of course since you need some servers to coordinate this, just pointing out where money goes. If someone could run and popularize an open ride platform, that quarter billion would go somewhere else, maybe to the drivers, maybe to the riders.

[energy123]

Intermediation and Uber style network effects aren't long for this world.

Personal agents will search every app for the lowest fare, when in the past the apps had a moat due to the economic frictions involved in sampling more than one app. Uber is also ripe for vibe coding.

Won't be much consolation to drivers as they'll get automated soon after probably.

I don't think all software companies are in imminent danger but Uber does seem particularly vulnerable.

[s1artibartfast]

100M on 52 billion revenue is 0.2%. Net income of 1.5 billion is about 3% of revenue.

> If someone could run and popularize an open ride platform, that quarter billion would go somewhere else, maybe to the drivers, maybe to the riders.

So if you found an equally effective management team that worked for free, you would save the customer about 1% at checkout. That is a tiny benefit, even granting the massive assumption.

Those numbers suggest a competitive environment with small profits, not an abusive monoply exploiting it's position.

[kshacker]

100M is only 5 people. You add to the entire corporate paraphernalia, we will be looking at a lot of money.

There was this story I was reading yesterday, here or reddit, where a driver got $27 for a $65 (or so) ride. That is a horrible markup. The driver is not happy, but if the driver can survive for $27, we (the people) should be able to figure out how to charge $40 for the ride. Not saying it will be easy with the entrenched interests and the for-profit goal of our country, but still ... the markup seemed obscene when I read it.

[colechristensen]

They would make plenty of money if they went in to maintenance mode and just kept the lights on development-wise instead of pouring billions into R&D each year.

There's probably a big opportunity in the startup world for building businesses that have an end goal. Like a TV show that has a whole story to tell and then stops... a business that has an entire development plan which finishes and at the end you have a stable business that stops adding features, cuts development costs to maintenance, and just exists.

Like I don't need my taxi app to change, we're good, you can just be done making new stuff.

[mlsu]

There's even more money to be made selling a false promise of infinite growth, dumping your bags, and riding off into the sunset.

[flohofwoe]

Uber is a frigging service for calling a taxi, how much "R&D" does a mobile app connected to a database need?

[dghlsakjg]

Brainstorming new fees to add on to their services that the drivers don’t get a cut of takes up a few billion a year I would imagine.

[Marsymars]

Your local taxi company probably has a white-labelled app - that’s the obvious point of comparison.

For the companies in my areas, their apps feel kinda clunky, but are generally fully-functional, and don’t contain ads like the Uber app.

[linuxftw]

They spent billions and billions on trying to make self-driving a thing.

[shimman]

So they burnt money and have nothing to show for it? Why do we let these companies play around with billions of dollars while we lack universal childcare or medicare for all?

Complete looney toons over here if you think this is at all acceptable. I bet the workers would figure out a better use of the budget than the executives at this rate too.

[xp84]

It hurts so much that our system makes that concept as impossible at scale as landing a ship on Venus with 10,000 people and starting a space colony complete with all the amenities of home.

Yours is a pretty normal idea for nearly any business before 100 years ago, plus still the way all small businesses with 1 owner generally work (they call it a “Lifestyle business” today). But any public company that just said “Yeah we basically just print $400 million in profit every year, and have no plans to grow that, nor to change anything besides doing maintenance” gets the kind of treatment Southwest just did: taken over by the enshittification engineers and destroyed. Everything must have infinite growth!!

[justaman123]

I think it's going to take a act of Congress to make this happen. We could literally legislate our way out of enshitification but where's the huge amount of money in that?

[bee_rider]

Some forms of enshitification already feel a lot like dumping to me. I wonder why existing consumer protection laws don’t cover it already in some cases.

[slibhb]

These companies seem great to me. Far better than what preceded them anyway. I'm skeptical that they're "rent-seeking" in any meaningful way, or that unions will meaingfully improve the situation.

[nickvec]

I suggest reading into rideshare wages some. https://inequality.org/article/exposing-the-rideshare-indust...

[slibhb]

I don't find this convincing.

It doesn't seem to me that ride share drivers should be paid while idling or repositioning. Nor am I in favor of California forcing a minimum wage on ride share drivers. In general, I don't understand how this qualifies as "rent seeking".

I think a lot of people just don't like big tech companies. They're entitled to their opinions but I think they're wrong.

[gopher_space]

Less "rent seeking", more "your business model only makes sense without investors attached."

[AlexandrB]

We replaced small, local businesses (taxi companies) with a large multinational duopoly. Another example of tech "democratizing" something.

[ishouldstayaway]

Far be it from me to defend Uber of all things, but pre-rideshares, the taxi companies were - and still are - much, much worse.

I've begun to realize we now live in a time where there are a lot of adults who are too young to remember the bad old days. Are you one of those people? Because the taxi companies absolutely made their bed. Be careful of rose-colored glasses.

[aksss]

Taxi companies in most cities were exploitive oligarchies - it was textbook regulatory capture. Often their workers weren't any better off in terms of lopsided deals. And the customer experience sucked sooo bad. The smells, the illegal "cash only" bait and switch, the runarounds. I remember. I was there, Gandalf. And I'll take Uber any day over going back to the old system.

[matchbok3]

I'm sorry, but those "small local" taxi companies were rife with discrimination and horrible user experiences. "Small" is not inherently better.

[IAmBroom]

Indeed. My worst Uber experience is still better than 90% of the taxi rides I've had.