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Uber’s CEO Thinks What’s Good for Uber Is Good for the World
But that’s bullshit.
In I Am the C.E.O. of Uber. Gig Workers Deserve Better., Uber CEO Dana Khosrowski makes his argument for a third way between full-time employment and being an unprotected gig worker. Reading between the lines, however, is a massive head fake, since Uber’s economics is based on externalizing the costs of Uber’s operations onto drivers and society:
Our current employment system is outdated and unfair. It forces every worker to choose between being an employee with more benefits but less flexibility, or an independent contractor with more flexibility but almost no safety net. Uber is ready, right now, to pay more to give drivers new benefits and protections. But America needs to change the status quo to protect all workers, not just one type of work.
Why not just treat drivers as employees? Some of our critics argue that doing so would make drivers’ problems vanish overnight. It may seem like a reasonable assumption, but it’s one that I think ignores a stark reality: Uber would only have full-time jobs for a small fraction of our current drivers and only be able to operate in many fewer cities than today. Rides would be more expensive, which would significantly reduce the number of rides people could take and, in turn, the number of drivers needed to provide those trips. Uber would not be as widely available to riders, and drivers would lose the flexibility they have today if they became employees.
More important than what I think is what drivers think: In public surveys over the last decade, the vast majority of drivers have said they don’t want to be employees because of how much they value flexibility. A recent survey commissioned by Uber and other companies found that two out of three app drivers would stop driving if their flexibility was compromised.
This is because they understand the trade-offs between traditional employment and app work. Unlike traditional jobs, drivers have total freedom to choose when and how they drive, so they can fit their work around their life, not the other way around. Anyone who’s been fired after having to miss a shift, or who’s been forced to choose between school and work, will tell you that this type of freedom has real value and simply does not exist…
