Ultimately there is no such thing as driver protections. Either they bring in more money than they are paid or they are going to be out of work (either by being fired, or the company going under).
A company isn't going to let people just do whatever if the company is assuming risks. For example, say demand peaks at 7-9am and 4-6pm. The company could simply dictate that that's the only times you can work (because the full time old-timer high earners already took all other time slots). But maybe you're a stay-at-home parent and only have free time during school hours, so for you, that's objectively a worse deal, since you get to take home $0 as opposed to whatever you could make under a work-at-any-time model.
Or maybe the company tells you that you can't work on-and-off around your town like you used to, due to existing driver saturation, and they tell you that you have to drive to the downtown of the nearby metropolitan city for a shift (many full time drivers I've talked to actually do this today to get better on-the-clock volume).
Or maybe you just can't work at all because there's enough drivers on the road today already.
There's a million scenarios like these.
As a thought exercise, you could go out and drive an Uber casually for a couple of hours, and simultaneously pay yourself whatever amount you think is fair, out of your own pocket. The gist is to track your on-the-clock time and mileage (which is fairly easy w/ the app), and then work out the math to figure out how much the rides should've cost to pay the amount you decided. If the exercise comes out to charging $40 for 10 min rides to account for suboptimal downtime, or you're finding that you need to work a 12 hour day to hit a similar income threshold as a full timer elsewhere, you can be sure that you've neglected some important aspect of the unit economics math and you would've failed at being Uber.
> Ultimately there is no such thing as driver protections. Either they bring in more money than they are paid or they are going to be out of work (either by being fired, or the company going under).
If we’re starting off with that as a belief why have any regulations at all?
> A company isn't going to let people just do whatever if the company is assuming risks.
Companies routinely do that. Hell sometimes that is the entire reason for employing a specific person, is to let them do what they want and then reap the economic benefit from owning the outcome.
Regulations or no regulations, that's just a fact. You can't have a company paying out more than it intakes, that's just basic math.
People are so quick to say "oh just raise wages" as if Uber/etc never contemplated the idea (recall we're talking about the company that popularized the idea of surge pricing for rides), but I don't think many of the armchair analysts have put an ounce of thought into what actually happens when you dictate monetary factors (let alone the gradient of effects relative to different degrees of change). Uber/Lyft were fairly clear about potential impact of employment mandates on service reliability when prop 22 was making the rounds, and I find it curious that there's simultaneously a sentiment that pre-uber service availability was crap and a sentiment that one just ought to raise prices and somehow people will get to eat their cake and have it too.
> Companies routinely do that
You're giving an apples-to-oranges example and you know it. Hiring Rob Pike vs letting unskilled drivers sit idly on company dime are completely different scenarios. The latter group doesn't even generate leads (unlike cabs being hailed off the street).
A company isn't going to let people just do whatever if the company is assuming risks. For example, say demand peaks at 7-9am and 4-6pm. The company could simply dictate that that's the only times you can work (because the full time old-timer high earners already took all other time slots). But maybe you're a stay-at-home parent and only have free time during school hours, so for you, that's objectively a worse deal, since you get to take home $0 as opposed to whatever you could make under a work-at-any-time model.
Or maybe the company tells you that you can't work on-and-off around your town like you used to, due to existing driver saturation, and they tell you that you have to drive to the downtown of the nearby metropolitan city for a shift (many full time drivers I've talked to actually do this today to get better on-the-clock volume).
Or maybe you just can't work at all because there's enough drivers on the road today already.
There's a million scenarios like these.
As a thought exercise, you could go out and drive an Uber casually for a couple of hours, and simultaneously pay yourself whatever amount you think is fair, out of your own pocket. The gist is to track your on-the-clock time and mileage (which is fairly easy w/ the app), and then work out the math to figure out how much the rides should've cost to pay the amount you decided. If the exercise comes out to charging $40 for 10 min rides to account for suboptimal downtime, or you're finding that you need to work a 12 hour day to hit a similar income threshold as a full timer elsewhere, you can be sure that you've neglected some important aspect of the unit economics math and you would've failed at being Uber.