“It’s a Very Capitalist Company”
An interview with Dr. Katie Wells, the Georgetown researcher following Uber drivers and lobbyists in DC
When I moved to DC in 2013, the sharing economy was already a thing. The year I graduated from college (2011–2012) our campus obtained a few Zipcars; in the postgraduate year I spent living at home in the suburbs and working in San Francisco (2012–2013) I fist-pounded a few Lyft drivers, who still sported fuzzy pink mustaches across their grilles. But this was nothing like the experience of watching my underpaid peers at Atlantic Media regularly hire drivers through Uber, taking cars not just crosstown but down the street, replacing trips that could have been taken not just by bus or Metro but even by foot.
Even then, I had a vague sense that Uber was…doing something strange to how people related to the economy, to the city, and ultimately to one another. Uber wasn’t just an app; it was a lifestyle.
In the years since I’ve spoken about our mission as opposing an “Ubertarian” ideology; what I meant by that was that I don’t think it’s helpful to think of the city as a constellation of services for you to consume, as a collection of points from which one can effectively teleport by private car, without having to experience the full variety of what’s in-between.
But of course unpacking the ideology practiced and instilled by Uber in drivers, riders and policymakers could be a full-time job, and so it is: Dr. Katie Wells is a a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Georgetown University’s Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor, where she is currently studying “urban development in the age of Uber.” We spoke last fall via video call about her work.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.
“These Drivers Aren’t Free”: Who Drives for Uber?
730DC: Tell me how you became interested in Uber.
Dr. Katie Wells: I moved to DC in 2004 from Canton, Ohio. I got involved in Empower DC right as it was forming, around 2005, and spent the next ten years studying housing and gentrification in DC.
I was doing that when I had a babysitter take this thing called Uber home. It was only five blocks. It was raining on a Friday night. She was like, “It’ll only be $5,” but I thought, I’m sorry, what? Someone’s driving around our neighborhood and is going to drive you home 5 blocks?
A colleague and I were putting together a grant to study Airbnb. We couldn’t answer the questions we wanted to answer given our methodology and training, but he studied transit and I’d had this Uber experience. I said, what about that, it’s kinda similar to Airbnb?
730DC: What was the study that you were able to put together on Uber?
We began doing a longitudinal study of two things: One, what is happening to workers on the ground? We’ve been following a set of 40 individuals who all in 2015 were driving for Uber. At the same time we followed the same 30 stakeholders who’ve moved in and out of government or consulting who’ve been important to thinking about what role Uber plays in the city’s development.
This study began in 2016, and it continues to run. We’re funded through next summer.
730DC: So who are these drivers? Maybe what’s a best case scenario for a driver in your sample, and what’s the worst case?
Let me do best case first. I’m thinking of Joseph, let’s call him.
His wife has a full-time job that offers healthcare to his family and his teenage daughter. He has a car — an old car, but he can afford to get serviced when he needs to get it serviced, and cleaned when he needs to get it cleaned. He used to be a day trader and write things up about trading, but he didn’t make enough so he started doing Uber to help out the family.
It wasn’t critical, in the sense that when his mom began chemo at NIH, he could stop his job and go help her. When COVID hit, because he had someone in his care who was immunosuppressed, he didn’t have to blink an eye. He could quit [driving].
That’s best case. Someone that does not rely on driving. Someone who hasn’t been harassed, assaulted, hasn’t been in an accident. Understands Uber is out to screw him, but sees it quite clearly and yet still seems to be willing to do it.
He still doesn’t understand what he’s earning — but none of the 40 drivers we talked to over the years have been able to figure out what they earned.
730DC: Jeez. The worst case is going to be bad, isn’t it?
The worst case… it’s so hard to choose. Let’s call her Kara.
She got into an accident quite early on. Her suspension system got messed up and she didn’t have enough money to fix it. She kept driving but she knew the car wasn’t safe. She was behind on bills, so she started using this instant pay system. Instead of waiting until Wednesday or whenever when Uber and Lyft would pay you, she would cash out every day; it’s basically like a payday loan.
Once the car became undriveable she signed up for a lease — a subprime auto lease with Uber, which became about four times what a normal lease would cost. Her credit goes downhill. She eventually can’t make payment. She’s a single parent, and starts to look for assistance in the form of food.
730DC: A lot can go wrong.
Debt is a common experience. 30% of drivers experience work-related debt within a year. We have found it to be a predatory workplace. In the best scenarios, people can withstand those gambles — but in the worst case it can wreck a family.
730DC: It always sounds like some people like driving for Uber because they choose when to work, but on the other hand Uber’s inducing them to drive on their schedule.
You can understand why workers want control of their schedules. Look at what’s been happening in retail or restaurant with just-in-time and on-call scheduling — “am I on this week or off this week?” For many working-class families their lives have been orchestrated by this algorithmic scheduling model. The allure of Uber is quite easy to understand in that light.
The problem is, when you get beneath the hood, you realize that there’s quite a lot of dirty tricks Uber is playing. They may be “free” to work whatever hours they want, but they don’t have the capacity to earn an income on those hours. Winning the battle, losing the war? That’s what happens with schedules.
These drivers are not free.
730DC: If one of our readers picks up their phone and calls for a driver, what else would you tell them about the person who is on the other end?
The easiest takeaway I would say to people I care about: Be very careful getting into [a ride-for-hire vehicle]. Be careful because people are tired. Be careful because we know people drive when their cars aren’t up to snuff because they don’t have the money to get it fixed.
730DC: What about safety during the pandemic, for drivers and for riders?
There’s no cleaning in between passengers. I would highly encourage readers to think very carefully about the risks they are taking. Not just for themselves, but what exposures they’re giving to drivers. The most absurd things have unfolded in the last couple weeks with Lyft opening a store where you can buy your own PPE. [Editor’s note: Remember, this conversation was months ago.]
730DC: Like a company store?
It’s like a coal mine. But this is really what we’re doing. Drivers have died in New York, Maryland, San Diego…
730DC: If a rider were to get sick and somehow trace it back, is there a liability question? I mean, Uber’s way generally is to foist responsibility onto drivers where a normal company would be responsible for provisioning its workers, right?
I would be very surprised if there were any way to show exposure through a ride. But the reality is that even when a car has killed — in a famous case in San Francisco in 2014, there was a girl killed by an Uber driver — the company has not changed its tune.
When workers get ill, they have trouble getting paid sick leave they’re due. Recently there were huge victories in Pennsylvania and New York courts around the question of unemployment insurance and the extent to which Uber has been standing as a barrier to drivers getting it.
I want to say one thing about “normal” enterprise: The reality is Uber may be shiny, new, popular — but it just exacerbated a tension and a pattern and a practice that has long preceded this digital wave. When we talk to our drivers about whether they have a W-2, workers’ comp, paid sick days — they say, “I’ve never had that.” Whether they worked as a contractor in asbestos removal, long-distance trucking, as a contractor, whatever.
730DC: Could you strip away the “bad parts” of Uber, the gamification, the obfuscation of income, the loans…
There are versions that have tried to get off the ground. There was a co-op version for about a year in Austin. Around the world there are different options. There’s one in Scotland, there’s a bicycle one in Spain. There’s nothing inherently wrong with the idea of a job that takes people from point A to point B.
730DC: The first ridesharing app owned by New York City drivers just launched.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with technology, right? It’s who owns it and how it gets used.
How Uber Took Over DC
730DC: Is DC special in its relationship with Uber?
We laid out a red carpet as a city much more quickly and more beautifully than other places, but there’s not much about what actually happened that’s qualitatively different than what happened elsewhere.
730DC: Is there a little bit of a question of whether we ended up enabling or forcing other cities by way of we don’t want to fall behind?
Uber certainly used [DC] as a model and shepherded the legislative model that was here elsewhere. We call that policy transfer or policy mobility. What happened here shaped what happened elsewhere.
There absolutely was this mentality of, we don’t want to be dinosaurs. We don’t want to lose out on this idea of progress and new mobility. DC has this interesting history with Zipcar and bikeshare; there was this sense that we were innovating and doing this sharing thing and Uber was a logical next step.
730DC: What moments in the regulatory timeline do you think people should know about?
A really big moment happened in 2014 with UberX and the legislation around it. Uber cemented its hold on the city. The higher-end Uber Black, the first iteration that Uber rolled out, got legislated in 2012 in a way that shockingly conformed to Uber’s desires.
But then in 2014 it was really clear that the disabilities rights arguments, concerns about taxi drivers, concerns about safety and environmental impacts — these were all going out the window, and that the council and the mayor in particular were fully on board with Uber’s vision of what the city could look like.
That said, in 2018 the council seemed to second-guess this cozy relationship with Uber— they added a little tax, and they tried to say we’d like some data on what’s happening. There was some rolling back of the red carpet, you could say. You can see some cracks emerging in the black box.
730DC: Where did the energy for these changes come from?
The data sharing came from [Chairman] Mendelson, strangely enough, and David Alpert, at Greater Greater Washington. Our understanding is that there was little reticence to it, but it wasn’t publicly done in a public hearing; it was part of a budget support act, a weird quiet way of doing things. Certainly public sentiment had largely shifted by 2018 on these companies.
730DC: Uber is increasingly positioning itself as a public utility. From a Bloomberg piece y’all contributed: “When Uber started, its motto was Your own private driver. Today: Transportation as reliable as running water.” Can you place that within this neoliberal turn we’ve seen —
I don’t know how to understand it without seeing it as part of neoliberalism. It could not or would not have functioned in other moments because it relies on this idea of an expendable workforce that is willing to do a $5 run, like for my babysitter in 2012 on a rainy night. So we have to have the extreme inequality, the power imbalances that allow these companies not to be stopped.
It’s funny hearing you say this neoliberal turn, I’m hung up on “turn” —
730DC: I don’t mean to suggest this is new, but I’m thinking about these neoliberal obsessions arriving to urban policy, like public-private partnerships, marketization…
This makes public-private partnerships look pretty. [In public-private partnerships] there was data sharing, here it’s like “Nah, this is too complicated and algorithmic-y for government.”
They sell themselves as [being a public utility], but they do it without any sense of accountability to the public or any publics. It becomes really slippery and dangerous the extent to which we don’t question their presence and think this is for the public good.
Parting Shots
730DC: I would say delete the app, except full disclosure, I haven’t myself. Or I have Lyft, anyway, not Uber. The sense that if something went wrong somewhere and I needed to leave right that moment, that’s really nice, as a fallback. I used a couple of other ones..
They’re all the same. Via, Lyft.
730DC: Split! I think it turned out Split wasn’t even making money on rides they were just collecting data on traffic patterns or something
That’s one of the arguments, people.
One of my interns was harassed in an Uber. The whole riding with strangers is a bad idea generally. We know people who have driven under different names because they were booted off one account, so they drove under another account.
730DC: I don’t like the fact that Uber takes you away from the public, where you’re all accountable to one another. Whereas in an Uber you are accountable to what, an algorithm? I don’t know.
Going back to your story: You may feel safe as a white young man who’s able- bodied. But there’s been fights for drivers to pick up people hard of hearing, or people with disabilities.
I hadn’t [always] realized that these were a factor. There was some dissension in the disability rights community. Different bodies need different things. If you’re hard of hearing a taxi is hard; this [where you enter your destination via smartphone] is a way around this. But some drivers have preconceptions, and for others it doesn’t feel safe.
We have the ADA. It just turned 30. We should not be going backwards on these things. But apparently that’s a theme in our country, so why the fuck would we not have Uber? Who needs public transit or infrastructure anyway? It fits right in with the whole vision of the world.
730DC: Very American. Or wait. Who owns it? Softbank?
Softbank.
730DC: I was going to say it’s a very American company, but I guess..
It’s a very capitalist company.
730DC: That’s a good place to end it. Thanks, Katie.
