Kalanick, Pay Attention!

Travis, when are you going to pay attention to the best resources you have available? I do not care what type of business you have, the moment it becomes BIG you have a whole bunch of folks looking for ways to take you down. Why the hell are you opening door after door for them to do so. YOU DO NOT NEED TO HIRE 10k DRIVERS EVERY MONTH! You have drivers. What you do not have is enough drivers that will work for free.  So, quit “dicking around” and pay your drivers to work and they will come to work.

Don’t you see that by you are working against yourself by playing games with everybody, when it is not necessary to do so? Let’s look the situation over a bit:

Disruption of Drivers: You seem to think it necessary that you disrupt even your own drivers at this stage . . .

1. All of the drivers know the autonomous car is coming and when they get here most of us will have to seek other employment. This is a “given” it is going to happen. Most of us saw working with Uber as a short term job that would last a few years and then we would be terminated. But, when we signed up we believed these jobs would actually pay us a decent living until they dried up.
2. Instead of paying us and retaining us so you have a ready fleet of drivers, you screw with our money forcing us not to drive because we are losing money driving. What you should be doing is making it profitable to be an Uber Driver so you have a strong ready fleet at your disposal that is happy to work with you instead of against you. You do not need to hire more drivers. You simply have to pay drivers a respectful wage. You have more drivers than the streets can handle, just pay them so they come to work.
3. Your ongoing disruption and exploitation of drivers is bullshit. You should be paying us well to work with you so that we have a nest egg to live on when we lose our jobs to the autonomous cars in the future, and you should be making it possible for us to be part of the future Uber by offering us stock options and other opportunities for the future. Some of us may like the idea of owning a fleet of our own autonomous cars contracted to provide Uber services in the future.

Compliance with local Government: Quit screwing around . . .

1. You cannot tell me that the Legal bills do not outweigh compliance. There is no way that your overabundance of Legal Beagles isn’t costing you more than compliance with Background Checks and other local requirements. LiveScan Fingerprinting costs from $35.00 to $70.00 each and eliminates the millions you are wasting trying to fight it. Without the ability to run each driver through a Law Enforcement database, our backgrounds suck.
2. Most of the drivers that you think you will lose to failure of these background checks, you need to lose anyway. They do not provide you any value as an asset. To the contrary, they provide you a severe liability, you just do not know when it will happen. You do know it will happen, and that adds a negligence issue that multiplies the liability to way beyond acceptable limits.
3. As long as the “fingerprint” and government required backgrounds can eliminate a single person that later becomes a problem from being hired, any failure to eliminate that person from working with us, is a compounded negligence that can back-fire on us dramatically. Besides, we really do not like the negative impact realized by having an incident occur that shouldn’t have ever had such opportunity to happen.

Insurance: This is RIDICULOUS!

1. WTF are you leaving all the drivers to suffer losses that can cause them economic disaster for years to follow? It is like you hope that the drivers have accidents and lose their financial asses due to it. You can bullshit the entire nation on the value of Uber’s Commercial Policy. That policy does absolutely nothing in defense of the drivers. That policy protects the Rider and Uber only.
2. Uber is a multi-billion dollar company, with probably over 300k drivers nation-wide. Why hasn’t Uber secured a decent TNC policy from one or more of the major insurance providers that drivers can purchase at a reasonable cost, that actually protects everybody. C’mon any insurance company that would turn down 300k in new clients would be nutz. Combined buying power says we can get decent insurance coverage.

Auto Purchasing: You hurt the driver instead of help him!

1. Presently you screw drivers to death with every program you come up with. Exorbitant interest rates, reduced driver rates, wrong cars being purchased, no stability with job, and much more.
2. WTF aren’t drivers given an advantage by these programs? Uber is providing thousands of new car buyers, why are they not benefitting from “group purchasing” through Uber? There is not a single car purchase that does not provide for reduced interest rates and a slew of other advantages to the Uber driver. No car purchased should be useful at only one car level. Drivers making such investment should be directed to the best options for advancement.

Driver Rating System: This is so very wrong, it should be criminal . . .

1. Why do you subject your drivers to a rating system that is so full of abuse to the driver? It really would take very little effort to destroy your whole fleet. All it needs is every Taxi Association to instruct their drivers to ride Uber and give bad ratings. Three 1’s in a day to any driver and he/she is terminated. Now add the drunks, dopers, ex-spouses, angry friends or associates, and any asshole having a bad day . . . and half your fleet is gone in a day.
2. You do not even educate the riders as to how the rating system works. Most Riders believe a rating of 3 means the driver was a good driver. How many really competent drivers have found themselves blocked from the App because of this bogus rating system?

Driver Flooding and Rate Reductions: Do you really want everyone to fail?

1. As it stands today, you could raise driver rates a dollar in every market and still be cheaper than Taxi Services. Most Riders would not even blink an eye at paying the additional costs. You proved this by raising the Rider Safety Fees and screwing the drivers out of a rate increase that would put food on their table.
2. Your failure to properly compensate your drivers is the strongest argument to cause government regulation of Uber. There are too many government agencies ready to jump in the game for this to be avoided. The legal costs alone will support a whole bunch of lawyers while both Uber and their drivers go without.
3. Flooding the market with new drivers all the time will sooner or later make it obvious to the Rider and the Government Agencies that the reason Uber so much better responding to the consumer needs is because we have ten cars on the road to every Taxi service out there, sure we are faster we have a car on each corner. Let your drivers earn a living, it will not hurt Uber one bit to make a happy driver for a while.
4. Everybody knows the job will end when the autonomous cars come to bear, let us make a living and maybe pocket a small nest egg until that time. It will work a lot better than running us all into bankrupts one at a time.

Prevention of an Employee/Worker Association: Talk about cutting your nose off to spite your face . . .

1. You should have long ago supported and even financed the development of a Workers Association. Why? Because the development of such an Association can fix every one of the aforementioned issues for you. It eliminates the employer/employee issue, provides representation of the drivers for disciplinary issues, allows such an Association to use “group purchasing power” to provide the services noted above, and likely would provide additional protections for Uber itself.
2. If nothing else, an Association provides a level of self-regulation, or would you rather direct governmental regulation?

There are other issues of concern that have a serious impact on both Uber and Drivers, but if you do not care about the aforementioned issues, you certainly will not concern yourself with other issues. Uber provides both a much needed service and a quality service. We all know that and see the potential for our relationship with Uber to be beneficial to us. We are neither stupid or blind. We see the future and realize we are not in it unless we can participate other than as drivers. Open doors to the future for us all if you want to do justice to the Uber brand.