Uber Eats undercover: Delivering your food for $1.74 an hour
Toronto Star reporter Ghada Alsharif spent six weeks working as an Uber Eats food courier and made a shockingly low wage. Uber says this experience was ‘atypical’ — but workers say differently.
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For drivers, the results are unpredictable and too often unfair. Data obtained by the Star shows Uber Eats’ platform can offer two food couriers different wages for the exact same trip.
Labour advocates charge that the app collects data on driver behaviour and can use it to decide who it can pay at a lower rate, allowing the company to pocket the difference and boost its revenue. This concept is widely referred to as algorithmic wage discrimination.
Wild
Par for the course based on Uber's history. I stopped using them in lieu of a local/community app...which is honestly absolute garbage, but it is essentially completely pass-through and free for my local area restaurants to use.
I maintain that it would be relatively simple to create an open source version of an app/protocol like this that serves people's needs for this exact use case, and if it were designed for any community to use, it could be essentially free as you say and high quality, and be a single point of service for everyone.
If this were done right it could put all these thin platforms out of business and allow delivery drivers to establish fair terms for themselves.
This would be a really good fit for federation I think.
As a software engineer I'm down to help out on this, free of charge.
I'm a developer too, and I appreciate the offer very much, but I'm not really in a situation where I could work on something like this. It's just an idea though, anyone could run with it.
Wage discrimination sounds like a fancy way of saying wage theft.
Yep, it's just when they only do wage theft on the most disadvantaged employees that are the least likely to sue them or quit as a result.
It shouldn't be a massive surprise. The whole platform exists as a way to circumvent minimum wage laws for drivers while taking a massive slice of restaurant profits.
No hygiene inspections either, half the places listed aren't even restaurants or takeaways, it's just in somebody's house...
Time to change your name from Patel to Smith
