I 100% refute that story. After taxes I’m still making close to $30/hr. I get to write off mileage at $.58/mile so my taxes get lowered.
I can show anyone my weekly driver log that shows how many hours I drove and how much I was paid. It is at least $42/hr and on weekends it can be $50/hr.
The take away here is not that you are wrong or that Uber is a bad choice for everyone. It's that some number of people provide diving services to Uber at a rate lower than we generally allow.
So it's about if we want to let companies hire individuals to do contract work that would be below the level we would allow someone to hire an employee. And, if we do (which I think we should) how do we set the standards of such an arrangement? Being an app driver is clearly different from being a traditional independent contractor (handyman, etc), but it is also different from being an employee. What a fair and just version of this relationship looks like is, to me, obviously unsettled.
P.s. Uber lost ~$4.5B last year on ~$11B revenue. It does not seem reasonable to say that the payment rates you've been getting represent what Uber 'will be' in a long term way. The economic situation is not sustainable.
I can show anyone my weekly driver log that shows how many hours I drove and how much I was paid. It is at least $42/hr and on weekends it can be $50/hr.