What do you think about Uber?

Chilli Sauce

I'm resurrecting this thread because I took an uber today and my driver complained to me about how "these middle class people" don't like to talk to their drivers.

So, there you have, a cab driver has officially endorsed me as working class. If there's anything prolier than that, I'd love to hear it.

Devrim

Most cab drivers are owner operators. You can't get much more middle class than that. Devrim

Chilli Sauce

Well, I think there's a pretty strong argument that uber drivers in particular - many of whom make little more than minimum wage after costs - are victims of serious misclassfication as "independent contractors". In fact, there's a massive class action lawsuit in California right now seeking reclassification as employees.

Fun little video from the middle class liberals at the Daily Show about it:

http://www.cc.com/video-clips/q53gas/the-daily-show-with-trevor-noah-an-uber-problematic-business-model

But way to play along with the fun, Devrim ;-).

jef costello

Uber is taking us back to the times when you just pulled a poor person off the street when you had something needing doing. Mind you anyone who's been to any kind of building supplies shop knows that that is getting more and more common.

Steven.

Devrim

Most cab drivers are owner operators. You can't get much more middle class than that.

Devrim

it depends how you define it. Of course by the standard UK cultural definition it wouldn't. And even in Marxist terminology they could be defined as petit bourgeois, but as Chilli Sauce says, this is not really accurate.

People like black cab drivers are one thing, but minicab drivers and Uber drivers (who basically just minicab drivers) are really employees for firms, who just don't get a wage. So the risk of the ups and downs in the business are borne solely by the employees: much like wage less restaurant work in US (where payment is by tips), or the nominally "self-employed" call centre workers who have to rent their workstation.

jef costello

Uber is taking us back to the times when you just pulled a poor person off the street when you had something needing doing. Mind you anyone who's been to any kind of building supplies shop knows that that is getting more and more common.

I hear this sentiment a lot, but I don't agree with it. Massively exploitative minicab firms have been around for decades. My dad was a minicab driver for about 25 years, and the conditions are awful. It's dangerous, as you have a high risk of both robbery, assault and traffic accidents. There are no benefits, and there is no security, as you are dependent on there being customers.

On top of that, you have to pay rent to your firm, for the privilege of working for them, as well as pay them a commission on each job. And often you have to bribe the controller who allocates jobs as well (they may also be discriminatory). And your expenses are huge: petrol, insurance, new cars, repairs, etc, so you have to work ridiculous hours to make ends meet (my dad did 12 hours a day, 350 days a year)

Now Uber is no different, it's just a massive minicab firm: whereas before they were all mostly very small competing firms (although a couple of big ones like Addison Lee have now emerged). And if anything, conditions at Uber are better in a lot of ways: they just take a commission, there is no rent, you can choose your own hours, you don't have to bribe controllers, you get more work (as minicab drivers have to do a job, then often drive back to the base before doing another job, leaving a lot of dead time), customers can't run off without paying, and they are less likely to rob you as it's not cash-based. For some people the flexible hours in particular can be really important. One Uber driver I spoke to for example said he got sacked from his job for having a bad back and. Basically it leaves him unable to do much for more than two hours at a time. So he can drive the cab for a couple of hours, then go home for a lie down, then get back out again. Of course the work isn't great but there aren't many jobs which can be that flexible, which is really important for people with some disabilities.

Of course they are a bad multinational company, like all, but there is no qualitative difference between them and any minicab firm.

fingers malone

Uber take 20% of the fare. Minicab companies charge a fixed weekly fee and also perhaps a training fee', charge for use of the equipment and so on.

Both Unite and the RMT organise black taxis in London. However most drivers work outside that sector in minicab firms.

yeah, that's right. Very sorry for forgetting to quote your post here by the way, did it in a bit of a rush late last night.

In terms of London black cabs, the biggest union seems to be the London Taxi Drivers Association. You can tell who are members of this because they usually have an LTDA sign in their front window. It seems to be more of a professional association, advertising their benefits like legal support, accident cover and sickness benefits, however they did organise a go slow protest against Uber in London a year or two ago (although they did move it to a non-disruptive time in the middle of the day following a legal challenge).

In terms of how black cabs work, I believe some drivers lease cars from bigger companies, but the majority just buy their own and work independently (although some of these of course also use apps like Hailo, which take some of the fee, although I don't know how their pricing structure works).

I'm not aware of any taxi unions negotiating with employers as such, although I'm sure that some do, however you often get in negotiating with agencies like Transport for London around regulation, and with railway authorities, to get taxi access to railway stations etc, so they can act like lobby groups and take legal action on behalf of cab drivers.

Interestingly, one of my dad's colleagues was a former printer at Wapping who was sacked by Murdoch and involved in the year-long dispute. He used to speak about wanting to start a union for minicab drivers, however unfortunately didn't get anywhere.

Devrim

So I think what people are saying is that London (black) cab drivers tend to be self employed and tends to own their own taxis. I think that this makes them petit bourgeois, i.e. middle class. Yes, of course they fit into the English cultural idea of work King class, but if we have a communist analysis of their lives relationship to the means of production, they aren't working class.

This doesn't mean than they are bad people, but it does mean that they have no antagonistic relationship with their employers. It's no surprise that the demonstration that their association organised wasn't a workers' demonstration against their employers, but one against the competition. It's like McDonald's workers in the US striking not for $15 an hour, but against Burger King.

Well, it would be more like independent burger van sellers demonstrating against Burger King… But yeah in general I would agree with this partially. Although black cab drivers are not the same as being fully self-employed, as they are tightly regulated by the government. They can't set their own prices, numbers or many of their own working practices, which are set ultimately by a government agency. So I think in many ways the state transport agency acts as an employer type body, to which there will often be antagonism from drivers.

fingers malone

The differences between minicabs and black taxis are actually quite crucial to discussing the implications of uber, as one of the reasons the black taxis are protesting is that they say uber is non-black-taxi drivers operating in ways that only black taxi drivers are allowed to.

Yeah, basically they think that the way Uber charge is akin to meters. Because minicabs are only allowed to pick people up if you book in advance, and you pay based purely on mileage. Whereas Uber charges based on a combination of mileage and time, like black cabs. And the app effectively means you are also hailing cabs almost instantly, rather than pre-booking like minicabs.

The LTDA has taken this to court and appealed, but lost.

I understand why black cab drivers are upset about it, as it means more competition for them. However I don't believe it's an issue for communist/libcoms to have a view on one way or another as it's not a "working class" issue. Which is I think what Devrim is ultimately getting at.

fingers malone

Ok some questions
What kind of means of production make a difference here? Presumably if I owned a bucket and a cloth that wouldn't be much of a big deal in terms of owning the means of production, I suppose they need to be means of production complex or expensive enough that most workers don't have access to them.

No, in a technical sense it makes no difference. Many self-employed people don't need any tools or materials: look at consultants for example.

What's the difference between an employer and a customer?

Apart from the relationship to the means of production, this is a key issue. An employer is someone who basically profits from your labour, and extracts the surplus value (or does essentially the same thing but maybe nominally a non-profit or public sector organisation).

A customer pays self-employed people for their work, like someone getting a taxi, but they don't profit from it.

I think this is one of the ways you can identify bogus "self-employment". Like minicab or Uber drivers. In these cases the employers, minicab firms and Uber, profit from the labour of drivers. Whereas of course the customers just get driven around.

With black cab drivers who are independent, for example, no one is profiting from their labour.

I can see the difference between someone who works in a place with hundreds of people and there is a collectivity in opposition to the management, and someone self employed, but I don't see as much difference between a self employed person and a worker who is alone and isolated, say a domestic cleaner. In this case it's not so much a difference of material interest, but an issue of isolation.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you're saying here. But I think there is a difference between being truly self-employed and being a wage labourer, even in the same sector like cleaning. For example my mum was a self-employed cleaner, as is my sister. My sister sets her rate of pay then competes on the market for customers. Customers pay her directly, they get a clean house and no one else makes any profit from the work.

This is quite different to a worker at a cleaning company, like ISS. There customers hire the company, and the company pays the workers based on a number of factors like minimum wage laws, scarcity of labour, balance of class forces etc. The customers get their property cleaned, but ISS makes the profit. And the employee cleaners therefore have a shared economic interest in fighting the employer for better pay and conditions (and similarly have that shared interest with all workers for better labour laws, more mandatory paid annual leave etc). Which isn't necessarily the same as for the self-employed.

Although of course in many areas poor self-employed people have a shared interest with working class people for other elements of the "social wage" like decent health services, good free education etc. So I don't think it's super helpful to go into the minutiae of who fits what class exactly, I think class is a spectrum, where we all fall somewhere along. So it's not like the working class are all great, and self-employed people are somehow bad or anything like that (of course many self-employed people are also wage workers as well, doing things part-time).

Cleaning is a good example of where wage workers can organise alongside the self-employed as well. By workers or a union for example agreeing a minimum pay rate below which no one should work. The Domestic Workers Union in the US was a good example of attempting to do this (on this it would be good to have something in the libcom history section about. I was doing some research but couldn't find any decent history articles so would like to try to put something together in the future).

Just to reiterate I'm not sure I quite understood what you were saying in your post so this isn't me necessarily disagreeing with you (I'm also quite hungover from NYE… so some of this is just me getting out jumbled thoughts)

orkhis

Stephen.

Cleaning is a good example of where wage workers can organise alongside the self-employed as well. By workers or a union for example agreeing a minimum pay rate below which no one should work. The Domestic Workers Union in the US was a good example of attempting to do this (on this it would be good to have something in the libcom history section about. I was doing some research but couldn't find any decent history articles so would like to try to put something together in the future).

Seem to recall reading about the CNT organising street vendors in Barcelona during the 20s and 30s too. What wretches for collaborating with those petit bourgeois!

just to say I don't think this is what Devrim would mean, but of course he can speak for himself.

Another reasonably common area of worker organising along these lines is amongst musicians. Particularly in US "union towns" like San Francisco in the early 20th century. Here for example workers would break the teeth of non-union clarinettists who they saw playing at non-union rates (see Louis Adamic's Dynamite)