PhD wrote:
I found this forum and read through and its fascinating, i thought it was just our city and our base that had thse problems but it seems its the same everywhere.
That's just what I've recently discovered as well - and I expect you are speaking for a great many more drivers and proprietors up and down the country too.
As for discussing actual earnings figures, an open forum is perhaps not a discreet enough place for this at this moment in time. Because although hackney carriage drivers are used to their costs and tariffs being discussed at length in public, the private hire side of the trade has a long tradition of keeping that particular aspect of their job as private as possible. So don't rely toooo much on any of the figures that you see bandied about.
However, since both data dispatch systems and meters came into widespread use in PH companies - coinciding more or less with the turn of the century - this secrecy about takings, earnings and hours is no longer relevant. There are, in fact, no more secrets about PH earnings now, than there are about hackney carriage drivers earnings. It's pretty much an open book.
Traditions die hard though and they must be allowed to evolve at their own pace. Timing is important here and I personally think that six years into this new information era, is a very good time for drivers to begin to seriously re-assess the state of their earnings and hours, if not in public just at the moment, then at least behind the scenes.
As for the forum, I can't get over the fact that a driver, from say Inverness, can be discussing something with a proprietor from Swansea and another driver in Portsmouth, with a potential audience of many tens of thousands - and that it's all happening in real time!
