Roundup: Uber is cutting workers’ wages globally

For years, people have been calling out Uber for its war on workers — whether it was cutting their pay so they lived increasingly precarious lives or working to change the laws that govern they work to ensure they aren’t considered employees and receive the rights and benefits that come along with that status. After the company claimed to have finally turned a profit, longtime critics were quick to point out how cutting driver pay was essential to achieving it. Now we have some even firmer proof of how that worked.

In a new profile of the company, the Financial Times includes a graph showing how Uber drivers have fared in countries around the world. Needless to say, it’s not so great. There are a few countries where pay has risen, but of the 27 countries included in the data, drivers in 22 of them saw net declines in their earnings between 2022 and 2023 — some precipitously so.

How did Uber do that? Well, a few years ago the company started rolling out a new pricing mechanism that disconnected driver pay from the rider’s fare, allowing it to pay drivers a lot less than the company was charging for a ride. Recently, More Perfect Union got some drivers in a room to see how this works — and how those drivers can be offered very different rates for the same rides, if Uber’s algorithms have enough data to believe they’ll accept a lower payment.

On top of that, Uber has continued to fight against the rights of workers in the United States and beyond. Earlier this summer, Ed Ongweso Jr. wrote about a deal in Minneapolis that, on its face, seemed positive for drivers, but was actually a compromise from the council to after Uber and Lyft threatened to pull their service in the city. More recently, a court in New Zealand ruled that the contractors who brought a case against Uber were in fact employees, setting up the potential for a wider reclassification. Instead, the extreme right-wing government currently leading the country announced it planned to change the law to make it easier for companies to ensure their workers can be — and will remain — contractors.

Once again, Uber is not only keeping its own workers down, but potentially hurting those in other industries too. How long will this company continue to get away with the harm it causes to workers on such a global scale?

In this week’s roundup, some important pieces on child predation on Roblox, a wild interview with Palmer Luckey, and how AI is helping revive interest in Adolf Hilter. Plus, the usual labor updates and other tech news you might have missed.

I was interviewed by Norwegian publication Klassekampen this week, so check that out if you speak the language. Over on Tech Won’t Save Us, I spoke to Karl Bode about a similar subject I wrote about this week: how Mark Zuckerberg has gotten away with rebranding himself as a hip future builder as his company still continues to generate harm on a global scale.

Have a great week!

— Paris