Taxi Driver Online

Uber drivers strike in pay and transparency row



A group of Uber drivers have gone on strike in a row over pay and fee transparency.

The Newcastle drivers, who do not have formal union representation, gathered to protest outside the company's office by the Bigg Market.

Changes made by Uber following a Supreme Court judgement in 2021 mean drivers no longer know how much a customer has paid, only their own fee, which they say is "unfair".

Uber has been approached for comment.

The court ruled Uber drivers should be considered employees, meaning they would be entitled to minimum wage and holiday pay.

At the time, drivers would take payment from customers and pay the firm a set 25% fee.

Uber has now changed this process to handle payments itself, forwarding a fee to drivers, who have complained there is no transparency over what share they receive.

Abdul Khan, 35, from Fenham, who joined the protest on Tuesday, said he had been driving for Uber for two years but "didn’t get paid enough" and he felt that "this is going to happen again this year".

He said he spent between 12 and 13 hours a day either working or waiting for fares.

"People can't take home even £100 - if they do, it's only going to pay for fuel," he said.

Mohammed Rahman poses for the camera while his colleagues stand behind him holding signs to protest against pay at Uber.

Mohammed Rahman, 31, has been an Uber driver for five years and said drivers and customers are getting a bad deal.

"We've seen a lot of customers paying double, triple the fare," he said.

"For example, if we take a 10-mile job, that might give us £7 or £8, but customers are paying £20 or £30.

"They don't show us anymore what they're charging - just what we'll make and I don't think that’s fair."

Newcastle City Council said while it has no jurisdiction over Uber’s relationship with its drivers, it was aware of their concerns.

"We have sought to discuss the matter with Uber, to better understand the situation, and will continue to monitor the company as we would any of our 81 licenced private hire operators," a spokesperson said.

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IDFIMH

With all due respect, it is none of the drivers business what uber charges the customer. They get offered a job at a price and they either accept that price if it is ok or reject the job if it isn't ok.

Do not understand how the driver does not know what passer has paid when it surely has to be displayed on the app whilst making the journey otherwise how does the passenger know he is not being over charged,

Heathcote, the customer will have the fare displayed on their app, but the driver will only have his share of the fare on his app, so won't know what the customer is being charged.

Unless, of course, the customer tells the driver what the fare is.

Which presumably happens occasionally, which is presumably why the drivers sometimes know what passengers are paying.

But unless the customer actively volunteers to tell the driver what the fare is, the driver finding out could be a tad awkward and undiplomatic - they might worry that their rating might suffer by asking the customer something like that

I thought this article from earlier this year had been posted on here, but can't find it. But worth a read in terms of putting a bit more meat on the bones regarding the pricing thing


Drivers Are Rising Up Against Uber’s ‘Opaque’ Pay System

https://www.wired.com/story/drivers-are ... ay-system/

In London, Uber drivers are protesting a new payment system that they say makes it impossible to understand the algorithms that decide how much they get paid.

As I said previously, If the driver is happy with what he is offered then they take the job. If they are not happy, they refuse it. It doesn't matter what the customer pays. They are not on a percentage of the fare.

I think the problem with the above is that many, if not most, of Uber's drivers have sold their souls to them and have to take the lower percentage, or they will have no work.

We rarely hear Uber drivers gloat about surge prices or punters moan about surges.

Times have changed, it appears the drivers on Uber need Uber a lot more than Uber needs them.

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IDFIMH

As I've been saying since about 1996, if you hand out badges to anyone who can drive a car, then no-one will earn very much.

And one factor that I didn't even really think about for years and years (probably because of the demographic in the two locations I drove a taxi - Dundee and St Andrews) is the effects of immigration

But which, of course, was evident back then in the big global cities like New York and London (at least on the minicab side), never mind many English cities like Birmingham.

But since the East European free movement thing twenty years ago, and more recently the influence of more global labour markets, the effect of immigration on both Dundee and St Andrews has become clear, as of course it has in numerous towns and cities throughout the UK.

So Wolverhampton in particular demonstrates the conveyor belt approach to granting badges, and the effect of more global labour markets should also be self-evident.

So drivers (and operators) may think it's a great thing for Wolverhampton to churn out new drivers willy nilly, but that comes back to my original point - if anyone who can drive can get a badge, it'll always be a struggle to earn, unless the drivers are willing to work long and unsocial hours

And it's not really so much an Uber thing either - as I've always said, Uber are just another platform/provider, and drivers will just go to whichever provider they'll make most money with, whether it's Uber, Delta or Blueline, and the hundreds of smaller local clones

Of course, when Uber first arrived things may have been a bit different, because market 'shocks' or disruptions often distort things, for a period at least (as did Covid, most obviously), and to that extent maybe the early Uber drivers won out in that regard. But now the market is settling down, and any post-Covid shortage of drivers has disappeared, or at least been mitigated, hence perhaps the likes of what's going on in Newcastle

Of course, there are exceptions, and I'd guess the likes of Aberdeen is one, with its tough knowledge for both codes, and probably a lack of migrant labour way up there.

And which is why the business and media elites were so desperate to get Uber into Aberdeen, assuming that what's happened in the likes of Newcastle will happen in Aberdeen. Of course, because of the knowledge in Aberdeen and the lack of a cross-border option, all Uber can do at present is rearrange to furniture a bit. Whether that will continue in future is unknown, obviously.

And although we don't have really have a separate private hire sector here in St Andrews*, in a way it's more like Newcastle than Aberdeen, although the ill-effects are more evident in terms of overflowing ranks etc, and that it's unusual to see a rank without taxis, even into the early hours of Sunday

And, of course, when the box-ticking approach to awarding badges here was questioned in the press back in the summer, the council said it was required so that there were adequate taxis available (although no mention of the totally inadequate rank space).

And even this week, in the context of the WAV thing, the council still saying in the press that there's a shortage of drivers

(*Most cars in the local sector here are HCs, and the smaller number of PHVs run from the same offices as the HCs. When I started in the late 1990s, independent/streetcar HCs were almost unknown, but are widespread now. But, of course, that's been facilitated by mobile phones, so everyone can have a phone number on their HC, while back in the day that would entail a landline with someone on the end of the phone to answer it, thus a substantially more difficult option in a town of a few dozen cars, hence the lack of truly independent cars. Now there are lots of independents, although the line between independents and offices has been blurred, because everyone can have their own phone number without needing someone in an office or at home answering the phone...)