Abandoning Workers

Uber is a company that has as its core business the transportation of people from point A to point B. It's essentially a taxi business, and driving to bankruptcy any existing taxi businesses is at the core of their mission. In this post I'll examine why Uber Technologies Inc. is listed as an American Technology company as opposed to an American Taxi company...

Uber, as well as other companies that have come to define the "Gig Economy", is the end result of a decades long development of employers trying to get rid of the responsibilities attached to having employees. It's late stage capitalism in action. Let's do some quick history here; right after the industrial evolution many employers still felt they fad some sort of responsibility to their employees. There was still the notion that employees were part of the big family that produced the profit-generating goods at the factory. Here in the Netherlands there are still houses from housing projects built especially for workers at the Philips plants; Phillips built those houses to provide affordable housing for their employees, not too far from the production facilities. Heck, even during the days of slavery, some plantation owners saw their slaves as part of the family...

Those days are long gone now; employees have now decisively been relegated to the "expenses" and "costs" columns of the corporations' book-keeping ledgers. They are now seen as costing the company money, keeping down profits, instead of the vital link in the chain of production that they are. Still, in spite of this evolution toward abandonment of employees, they still have some protected rights: employees have the right to a minimum wage, to protest and unionize, worker safety and in some cases healthcare benefits. This is just too much for our poor employers, so now the latest fashion is to not hire employees, but contract contractors or freelancers. For every job the company needs done, they hire on a temporary and flexible basis an individual with the right skill set to get that job done; every job a gig, hence the name "gig economy".

Uber, while in the business of transportation, is listed as a tech-company because they've developed an app that matches individually contracted drivers with their customers. And because drivers aren't programmers, Uber is allowed to say that these drivers aren't employees of the company. That's just the tip of the Uber-scam-iceberg though. Did you know that Uber has never reported a profit yet? That's because of their business-model; it requires for them to run other taxi services (not other tech-companies!) into bankruptcy, so they use their investors' money to severely undercut prices of that competition. When they're all gone, and Uber has the desired monopoly, then they can boost prices. And because they have minimal expenses for hiring workers (because they don't hire employees), they will then become more profitable than any taxi company has ever been. This is how it works people. Notice, by the way, how this proves that there are no bigger enemies of capitalist competition than the capitalists themselves; they hate competition and love to be able to decide for themselves how much they charge their customers and how little they pay the people who do the work for them.

For a better an more complete explanation how customers and workers alike are bamboozled by the gig economy, please watch the included videos. The first is about Proposition 22 that has been accepted recently in the state of California; Prop 22 is effectively creating a third class of workers next to employees and contractors. The below linked video explains exactly how big the Uber-scam-iceberg really is. And keep in mind that this business model has been cloned by many other hip new gig companies...

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