<story><title>When Their Shifts End, Uber Drivers Set Up Camp in Parking Lots Across the U.S.</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-01-23/when-their-shifts-end-uber-drivers-set-up-camp-in-parking-lots-across-the-u-s</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>maxfurman</author><text>This isn&amp;#x27;t right. I know &amp;quot;drivers can choose,&amp;quot; and nobody is forcing these people to live and work like this. It still feels wrong. One driver mentioned in the article leased his car from Uber and sleeps in it because it&amp;#x27;s the only way he can make enough to afford the payments. Seems like indentured servitude to me. Uber owes its drivers more.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>strken</author><text>The &amp;quot;drivers can choose&amp;quot; argument is important because it shows that for at least one driver it is genuinely preferable to sleep in his car and work 70 hours a week than do anything else. Clearly, drivers are facing unemployment, poverty, or working conditions that are even worse.&lt;p&gt;It would be very easy to regulate the hell out of Uber and turn the unicorn into a donkey. However, that wouldn&amp;#x27;t improve the conditions that those in the economic class of drivers are subject to, it would just make them less visible. Fixing the Uber problem without providing any alternative employment options is a superficial placebo to make the wealthy feel more comfortable, because it doesn&amp;#x27;t correct any of the underlying economic problems. Those drivers will still exist, they&amp;#x27;ll just be pushed into agriculture, sweatshops, and dingy housing projects; hidden places, where nobody else has to look at them again.&lt;p&gt;There&amp;#x27;s a very good article called The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics[0] which states that &amp;quot;when you observe or interact with a problem in any way, you can be blamed for it&amp;quot;, and &amp;quot;if you interact with a problem and benefit from it, you are a complete monster.&amp;quot; This seems to be the case with Uber, where they make money from a social and economic problem where there&amp;#x27;s an oversupply of unskilled labour, and thus get blamed for the working conditions that were already a reality for so many hidden and unnoticed people, even if they incrementally improve those conditions.&lt;p&gt;This is not a call to give Uber free rein, but rather to consider drivers as more or less rational human beings capable of making their own choices, and to consider driver wellbeing in that light.&lt;p&gt;[0] &lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;web.archive.org&amp;#x2F;web&amp;#x2F;20160806191858&amp;#x2F;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;blog.jaibot.com&amp;#x2F;the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-ethics&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;web.archive.org&amp;#x2F;web&amp;#x2F;20160806191858&amp;#x2F;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;blog.jaibo...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>When Their Shifts End, Uber Drivers Set Up Camp in Parking Lots Across the U.S.</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-01-23/when-their-shifts-end-uber-drivers-set-up-camp-in-parking-lots-across-the-u-s</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>maxfurman</author><text>This isn&amp;#x27;t right. I know &amp;quot;drivers can choose,&amp;quot; and nobody is forcing these people to live and work like this. It still feels wrong. One driver mentioned in the article leased his car from Uber and sleeps in it because it&amp;#x27;s the only way he can make enough to afford the payments. Seems like indentured servitude to me. Uber owes its drivers more.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>djrogers</author><text>&amp;gt;  One driver mentioned in the article leased his car from Uber and sleeps in it because it&amp;#x27;s the only way he can make enough to afford the payments.&lt;p&gt;You obviously didn&amp;#x27;t read the whole article (although the author clearly tried to bury this at the end) - quote from the same driver:&lt;p&gt;“I signed up for this because I am my boss. I kind of own the business. I have the freedom and that’s a beautiful thing,”&lt;p&gt;and&lt;p&gt;“These labor advocates, they don’t know what it’s like to be a driver. They think we’re not being treated right, but I’m happy. If I didn’t like it, I would do something else.”</text></comment>