The piece is exactly right. Uber is effectively an instrument to shift economic gains from labour to capital by atomizing the workforce. From a macroeconomic perspective this is terrible because turning taxi firms into countless of one man businesses provides no efficiency gains, it's basically reverse economic development.
There is a version of Uber that actually makes sense. As a lean SaaS company that sells its software to ordinary taxi companies, takes a cut and makes a profit. Which is basically how they operate in Spain because Spanish law has not tolerated Ubers attempts to capture markets.
Despite all of the negatives, many of which I agree with, the legacy taxi industry really sucked for riders. Riding in a taxi feels dirty to me, to be honest. Old, ugly cars that never seem well maintained, having to actually call someone on a phone and tell them where to pick you up, often not accepting Apple Pay, Android Pay, credit cards. Rude drivers with no rating system to disincentivize it…
It’s sad that Uber seemingly made such bad business decisions and ultimately has not been successful as a business. However, the “disruption” was widely successful. Hell, they even became a verb.
Personally, even as a customer, I strongly prefer Lyft (but I’d never take a Taxi unless I was somehow forced to).
In most places I've been to, traditional taxis has a captive market and no effective competition due to limited licenses. Drivers were frequently rude, dangerous, and bitterly resentful if you weren't the exact type of ride they happened to look for. Cars were poorly maintained from outside to inside. Calling them would give you a "we'll be there between 5 and 45 minutes, please stay outside in the rain and wait for them" (actual situation that happened frequently in Ottawa or Toronto). They refused to take credit cards, and would cancel the meter after starting so they wouldn't be tracked. Experience was awful from start to finish.
So my sympathy toward old model is negative.
And then there's the whole medallion business in many parts of North America, which is crazy to explain to outsiders - basically, licensed which nominally cost $150 - $1500 (depending on the city), would go for upwards of 450k on secondary market. People would buy loans and invest in them as primary retirement. When city decided to open up the market, people who invested all their money in an extremely speculative irrational market took to streets... And hired thugs to trash uber hq.
So my sympathy toward previous model is negative.
That being said, I agree that exploitation of gig economy is bad. I just feel people have a lot more choice to be or not to be an uber driver for me to fully understand their plight.
Legacy taxis were and still are a more expensive and inefficient business. Outside of airports and maybe cities like New York, hailing a taxi was a terrible experience.
The scale of Uber despite their shitty business model, allows them to have a lot more drivers constantly on the road than traditional companies. This allows for an quicker availability of a cab at a moment’s notice. Anyone remember leaving a party before Uber, calling a cab and then awkwardly sitting around at the host’s place for another half hour?
This also means a generational behavior change where more people use Uber, which in turn allows more continuous business for the driver and a cheaper ride for the consumer.
Uber can charge more (which they are doing now), fix their driver pay and still provide a cheaper and more convenient experience for the users.
I remember one Super Bowl weekend trying to get home via cab from Tribeca after the game was over.
Looking down West Broadway, you could see multiple groups of people at each intersection with their arms up trying to get the first cab to go by.
Or during just times in general. When I first moved to NYC, I was my normal polite self when people would say "I hailed it first" and let them take the cab. After the fourth or fifth time this happened with cabs I was 90% I had hailed first, I realized you had to pretend to be some alpha male and shout "Get the F away from my cab!" in order to guarantee you got in the cab.
I don't know if anyone keeps stats on this but I would bet money that the number of fights in NYC due to the above must have gone down once Uber became common.
Not in NYC, but I've seen cab drivers auctioning rides by asking "who will pay more" after some events. At airports I've definitely had my share of drivers asking multiple passengers where they're going so they could go to the most advantageous location. Both were obviously illegal in the cities I was.
Remembering those, I can definitely see why everyone started using Uber.
You also have to discard the "customer is always right" mindset when using taxis in NYC.
It is notoriously difficult to convince a taxi to take you cross-town. The few times I succeeded... it was a mistake, a miserable experience and it would have been faster to walk.
Conceptually it would be nice to just be able to get a taxi from point A to point B, no questions asked, and sometimes when a driver doesn't want to do it it comes down to racism or profit, but other times it's because you're asking to do something that isn't actually a good idea.
The big taxi company I drove for was at the top of the food chain in the Phoenix, Arizona area because the cars were clean, cabs usually showed up promptly, and if there was a problem you could deal with the company and they'd look into your complaint.
The company started switching out to the Prius a few years before I started driving for them in 2012. My first few leases were for old Crown Victorias, because I couldn't show up early enough to get in line for a prius (some drivers refused to drive the Crown Victorias, for various reasons).
The company had economy of scale in their fleet operations that was hard to beat: mechanics who knew the Prius like the back of their hand, boneyards (for parts), connections in the automotive industry.
They couldn't compete with people willing to wear out their personal cars giving 'rides' for peanuts. The company eventually sold off their fleet of priuses and their taxi yards, and refocused on the other businesses (app-dispatched medical transportation, etc). The Company tried to build their own dispatch phone app. But it didn't work especially well - I think they eventually decided to cut their losses.
VIP Taxi and Yellowcab are still doing okay, but I hardly ever see the green prius taxis anymore.
The ease of the Uber app is and was key above everything else - which might be enough to keep them operating when they finally have to raise prices to where they should be.
Or they just switch to a SaaS model. Much leaner operations and solves at least some of the friction issues that traditional taxi service has.
Then there's one aspect of their business model that the article missed (Maybe it will be covered in part 2 or 3) which is self-driving. Apart from monopoly power, this seemed like the other exit to profitability. I'm just not sure if those efforts were little more than lip service to placate investors or an honest attempt (probably a bit of both) it seems like the rapid progress of a few years ago has plateaued and that exit has mostly closed.
At risk of sounding like Margaret Thatcher I'd say that the Taxi industry was politically organized to get a good deal for itself but that the riders were not organized and had no voice.
Uber bypassed that and certainly got lower prices and better service for riders; however the old business was sustainable and the new one isn't.
Between growing up in the suburbs in a family that thought it was poor, living on a farm where a car is necessary, and having a public transport habit it's been rare for me to ride an Taxi or Uber. (in Montreal I would ride the 747 bus to/from the Trudeau airport unless it was crazy late or early, I'd take the express bus from LAX to downtown LA and then the subway to Hollywood, etc.) Often I haven't had a cell phone so I usually wind up flagging a taxi or ordering a taxi on the web or over Skype and I don't complain about the service or price.
Taxis at least were so terrible that a complete disaster of a business could disrupt them by just being marginally less awful. I don’t know if they have improved.
what's crazy is in this day and age, you'd think uber/lyft are available in most markets but last week, I had to go to Baton Rouge (LSU with 50k students is based there) and I was relegated to a beat up, cigarette smelling, local taxi because no uber/lyft's were available at the airport (due to storms and delayed flights).
I flew to Hartfort, CT (BDL, actually in the rather distant suburb of Windsor Locks CT) last year, and my flight was delayed to about 10:30pm; I almost didn't get an Uber because the market simply doesn't for the drivers to stick around that late. There were other delayed flights coming in after mine, closer to midnight; my driver said quite plainly that those folks would have to figure something else out, because all the rideshare drivers in the parking lot were heading home for the night.
All this to say, I should have prepared better and I don't know what I expected. We take the "always on" nature of these services for granted, but that's not how the world works outside of the major metros.
>I almost didn't get an Uber because the market simply doesn't for the drivers to stick around that late.
The market does, but it is bad PR for Uber to offer sufficiently high surge pricing to attract drivers. So Uber makes the choice to simply not offer a driver $400 for what would normally be a $40 car ride, even though $400 would get someone on the road to drive you somewhere.
It makes no sense that people complain about surge pricing.
And in well regulated market there would be supply even at that time. Maybe not sufficient, but still guaranteed supply. But oh well people didn't want that... Too bad for them for getting what they wanted.
Given how large the US is, and how large Europe is, I doubt your statement. I can certainly find plenty of well maintained taxis in the US, I bet I can find plenty of beat up taxis in Europe.
I live in lower Manhattan now, and my unconscious mental model for navigating the streets as a ped/biker includes a pretty large coefficient on is_yellowcab. They're complete menaces.
Yep, I think this is universal. I was in China a few years ago and the dude was playing tetris with one hand on his cell phone and driving in the emergency lane at the same time.
Uber/Lyft/Didi/Ola is amazing. I really don't give a shit about these asshole taxi drivers and their union/monopoly grip. Glad it is wiped out.
You'd think it's a joke but it's like a 2nd or 3rd time that my brother ordered a pizza by phone and got a wrong one. Sure the girl who takes order is absent-minded or hard of hearing. And similarly sounding pizza names don't help. We like their pizzas and try to cut out the middle-man, but our colleagues who order from there suggested we just use Pyszne.pl (i.e. Takeaway.com).
Also, many times we tried to order food to office at work, we just got a busy line.
Doing transactional stuff by phone has horrible UX.
I ordered from a local bagel shop and also got missing items multiple times.
I finally went in and spoke to a manager who said: "Yeah, you order via Seamless/Grubhub, it shows up on a screen and then someone hand writes down your order."
This conversation happened a few weeks ago. It blew my mind that they didn't have a printer etc for this kind of thing.
Goes to show that the "future is here, just not evenly distributed" is 100% true.
That's valid but also hear this out: the local app in my country, called Rappi, gets things wrong so often I wonder how they do it. I mean, it's written, yet restaurants often send you whatever. And let's not talk about the times the delivery person is completely clueless about my location, and you can just see them circling cluelessly on the map while you desperately send them messages trying to orient them.
My point is: mishaps happen whether by phone or app.
The issue isn't social anxiety or anything like that, it's the taxi company dispatch systems are typically run by people who are both bad at their job and hate you for making them pick up the phone.
So you think it is better to have to call someone and then figure out your location in a strange system than clicking on a button, your phone knowing where you and the driver are?
> Uber is effectively an instrument to shift economic gains from labour to capital by atomizing the workforce.
This is the entire gig economy/sharing economy in a nutshell. The platform puts most of the financial risk on the labor side (drivers owning the cars if you're driving Uber, owning the house if you're Airbnb'ing it, etc.) and simply taking a cut of each transaction. The platform owns nothing, the workers have very few rights, and the company has complete control of the market. This is VC utopia right here.
The next financial crisis is gonna show us just how fragile this system is, whenever that is.
> The next financial crisis is gonna show us just how fragile this system is, whenever that is.
For now, a lot of the gig economy (but not all of it) is focused on non-essential services (food or other delivery, vacation rentals, private car rentals, etc), so in a time of crisis people can just stop using those services.
It will suck for the workers but even in a non-gig model that same problem would occur, although there would be more safety nets like unions and insurance ...
What worries me is if essential services start getting "gigged out" in a similar manner, that would be problematic..
Easy to say that would never happen, but "private citizens operating unregulated hotels/taxis" seemed impossible/illegal just a decade ago...
Wow. Someone should probably let the creators of "Big Fat Gypsy Weddings" know this! And all the people that participated in the show. And all of the Travellers that watched it.
Well, it's true the meaning of the word has evolved into a slur. At least some of the people who used to be called gypsies in English don't want to be called that.
As for shows, didn't Netflix's "Gypsy" take flak for the name?
>Well, it's true the meaning of the word has evolved into a slur.
Is it, though, or is it one of those words like "Indian" (referring to an American Indian, not someone from the country of India) that people say is a slur but is not considered offensive at all by the community it supposedly degrades (and in fact, refusing to use it in their company will get you strange looks more than anything else).
See also: my username for a similar "slur".
>As for shows, didn't Netflix's "Gypsy" take flak for the name?
Based on its Wikipedia page (especially in the "talk" page), it looks like it was mainly just a single author generating righteous outrage to get clicks.
> that's not what I'm talking about and you know it. I mean large well-known and easily accessible versions of those
Not particularly.
They existed at a small scale. Always. Smartphones let them knit together. That scale produced efficiencies. Authorities tried to clamp down but consumers loved them and policy adapted. The path from point A to point B looks linear and altogether unsurprising, albeit ex post facto.
> Easy to say that would never happen, but "private citizens operating unregulated hotels/taxis" seemed impossible/illegal just a decade ago...
I think a lot of it was making it "cool". These things definitely existed in the past and you could avail yourself of them if you knew where to look but these were seen as seedy and lesser than calling a real taxi/car service and staying in a "real hotel. Somehow making it an "app" from a "tech company" really changes customer perceptions.
> if essential services start getting "gigged out" in a similar manner, that would be problematic..
Just have Uber drivers carry a gun, handcuffs, a fire extinguisher and a first aid kit in the trunk. Now they can shift from taxi driver to cop to firefighter to paramedic at a moment's notice. Maybe an LED light bar/siren combo they can quickly attach to the roof of the car with magnets when they switch to emergency responder mode. It'll be a hell of a lot cheaper too, they won't have all those silly pensions and unions and stuff.
It's easy to think of Uber as a non-essential service, but it's not really -- it's started to get its tendrils into a lot of places. E.g. https://qz.com/1971558/uber-plans-to-play-a-bigger-role-in-p... -- Uber is being baked into public transit plans as a viable last-mile option.
Essential services are already effectively being 'gigged out'. Travel nurses and EMTs being employed by staffing agencies rather than the hospitals, Amazon's entire delivery end is almost entirely driven by third party contractors, and in general a lot of employment relationships that would have once been owned by a company are now abstracted to vendors solely as a way to reduce margin.
>The platform puts most of the financial risk on the labor side (drivers owning the cars if you're driving Uber, owning the house if you're Airbnb'ing it, etc.)
Actually people already owned the cars and already owned their houses. How is that a financial risk? These platforms allow people to use their existing resources to make money. That's efficiency gains.
If anyone decides to acquire new vehicles or properties to use on these platforms it's because it's profitable due to the large demand driven by these companies pouring billions into customer acquisition and customer relations/support for them.
> Most Uber drivers seem unaware of how their job costs them when it comes to the value of their cars.
Someone needs money for groceries. A bank will lend them money for a car but not groceries. They use Uber as an inefficient means to turn said loan into cash for groceries.
There's no reason to assume that Uber drivers have priced out devaluation and/or have the long term in mind.
And with all this power these companies still somehow never manage to become profitable. It seem to that the consumer is benefiting the most in this situation because both the VC and labor keep having to subsidize him
It's kind of absurd. These companies are trying to build a moat in an industry with very little barrier to entry and regional compartmentalization. The only thing Uber has going for it is the network effect of being available across multiple cities and countries.
How much of this "never manage to become profitable" is tricks in accounting? Would investors continue to give money after due diligence looking into the books show this constant loss and say "yes, take my money!"?
I think it's time to forgo this idea that investors do any due diligence anymore. They just look at price going up and someone hyping it going up further and jump on the train, thinking they can sell it for more later... And then justifying the price by some far future market dominance and magic tech actually coming real, see Uber and Tesla... Or even with social media companies like Twitter to actually turn decent profit...
> The platform puts most of the financial risk on the labor side and simply taking a cut of each transaction.
This is "intermediation". They are not "simply" taking their cut, the platform gets the task of finding the customers and lending their brand to the workers, as well as doing some quality assurance for the customers.
Done right, this is incredibly useful for both sides and creates a lot of wealth. Done wrong it destroys markets.
> a lean SaaS company that sells Uber's software as a service to ordinary taxi companies, takes a cut and makes a profit
This destroys a lot of value. Most taxi companies suck for reasons independent of their tech stack. (The fact that they’re better post-Uber shouldn’t obscure the effect of that competitive pressure.) Moreover, having a transport app that works in most countries is a value add for such a service’s most-profitable customers. Finally, the claim that taxi companies treat their drivers better than Uber applies in some markets, but it doesn’t in most, e.g. New York and New Delhi.
Uber isn’t profitable as a company, but they’re profitable in some (and a growing number of) markets. There is a recurring set of Uber hot takes that get recycled every few months that ignores this.
They really, really don't suck in Germany. Taxis there are mostly clean, comfortable Mercedes (E-Class usually, Mercedes has a long history and special contracts for that), and Taxi drivers are massively trained. Up until recently, part of the extensive examination was being quizzed about how to get to obscure streets (and remember that Germany does not have a grid system like in the US). That has been abolished, because with ubiquitous GPS it's not necessary anymore, but the other strict requirements stayed.
Travel extensively in Germany. I can hail Uber from an app that works in Frankfurt, Paris and New York. Uber is often cheaper. And it is far more ubiquitous, particularly outside the major metropolitan areas.
I still take taxis e.g. from the airport, but pretending there is convenience parity in all situations is false. (Agree that Frankfurt and London cabbies are good.)
> I can hail Uber from an app that works in Frankfurt, Paris and New York.
That matters to travelers (and skewed towards business travelers, too), i.e. people who visit only for a short time, but not much to anyone else.
> And it is far more ubiquitous, particularly outside the major metropolitan areas.
Not my experience. I can be far outside the city and call (through the App nowadays) a taxi and I know it's going to be there and reliable. Uber was hit and miss, tends to cancel suddenly etc... I don't think I've ever had a german taxi cancel on me, in decades. If something happened to impede my assigned Taxi, the driver would contact the central and they'd dispatch another one.
Uber does not have a proper "central". They only have an app and dispatch servers, no humans to sort things out to guarantee service.
> Uber is often cheaper.
And you get what you pay for... A german taxi gives you trained people and dedicated, specially maintained cars.
Travelers hail a disproportionate amount of taxis. Living in a walkable European city with good public transport, approximately the only times I use taxis or Uber are when I'm going to/from the airport/train station and have luggage, or when it's a business trip and I can expense it (and even then I opt for trains when I can).
And the parent commenter mentioned that they usually get a taxi from the airport at least (because it's right there I guess, there are strict special regulations about how german taxis wait at the airport to make things go smoothly), so... Another other reason to take one is when you're so far outside and at a time of day that public transport is spotty.
In markets like Frankfurt and London, Uber has a tougher time competing. Totally agreed. It still has niches. And most taxi markets aren’t filled with lovely, knowledgeable, ambitious drivers.
Uber shifts the relationship from rider <-> taxi company, to rider <-> Uber. This places a significant responsibility on Uber to create a high quality rider experience. If you book a car and the driver doesn't show up repeatedly, Uber will remove that driver.
Uber also fields customer service, meaning you're not trying to call into a one man shop to argue for a refund with whoever happened to pick up your ride that day. You're talking with Uber.
Some cities, such as NYC, have created their own structure around taxis, but in many cities it's a complete guess as to the quality of service you'll get when you call a local cab company.
This is the exact same playbook as Doordash, Seamless, Taskrabbit, Airbnb, or any of the other gig economy platforms. They're vastly more than just software. They're certainly different from software provided to independent operators, though individual people can come to their own determination of whether or not that is "better."
Did you hail or call taxis before Uber? The simple ability to see where your car is while en route was game changing. Add to that ratings, embedded payment (“credit card reader broken”) and dynamic pricing and you have a dramatically better experience.
Balance that against the fact that most taxi drivers know the city by heart, including where there is construction, habitual traffic jam, and transit congestion..
I'll take a better drive-to-destination experience over being able to stare at my phone watching a car inch closer to me, or saving a few dollars when I need to get somewhere.
A lot of part-time Uber drivers, especially in big cities, come in from the suburbs to get fares in the city - where they are not familiar with their surroundings - and just blindly follow the directions on their GPS.
In my anecdotal experience over the last 10 years, I've had plenty of experiences with Uber drivers either not knowing the proper way to get somewhere, or naively driving into avoidable traffic jams, or just getting stuck behind a bus or streetcar and not understanding when/how to get past it.
This very rarely happens with taxi drivers - to the point where sometimes they can be a bit scary in traffic, so there is a counterpoint here too.
Interesting angle. My experience (in NYC) has been that while taxis most certainly have better knowledge of the city, Uber is by far more reliable in just getting me there. This is because of the key difference of Uber knowing exactly where I'm going in advance, and relaying turn-by-turn directions to the driver. Most of the time, the taxi driver knows the address or cross streets I'm going to. But when they don't, it's painful. I've never even been asked in a Lyft/Uber, though.
Yeah where I live (Toronto) the turn-by-turn is the problem often. There's no adjustment for traffic or temporary closures, and combined with part-time drivers not knowing what roads should be avoided at certain times of day, and you can end up taking way too long getting somewhere.
In fact I used to see a lot of Uber drivers switch out to Waze for directions once you're in the car, since that was probably better.
What incentives taxi drivers to do an excellent job. There are not ratings for drivers and they can take you on a more expensive route if they sense that you aren’t from that area.
Uber tells drivers the route to take and has access to Waze esque data to help ensure drivers take an optimal route.
This completely neglects the enormous gains to consumers of having cabs that (1) will actually show up if booked ahead of time (2) don’t discriminate by race/ethnicity (3) don’t take the long way round (4) always take cards instead of the machine being “broken” (5) will pick up and drop you off anywhere.
Uber and their competitors are and were 100x better at getting drivers to follow the rules taxis were always meant to follow than their regulators ever were.
I have had Uber drivers fail to show up multiple times. They appear to be heading to the pickup point but then park some distance away and just wait. It's very frustrating. I've never had that experience with a taxi service.
It's nothing to do with my Uber rating. I've since learned that it has something to do with a scam involving short/undesirable trips and cancellation fees.
As a customer I don't care about economic theory. What I care about is that I take out my mobile, press a couple of buttons and I know the price and time of pick up. This is innovation. Before über nobody was doing this. This has been a huge efficiency gain. The service is safe and reliable and trackable. This really has nothing to do with employees vs contractors. If the government legislated that uber drivers had to be treated as employees, the innovation that uber brought to the market would not disappear. Might be a bit more expensive but we would not be going back to hailing random taxis on the street or calling numbers and negotiating with call centres.
There's massive efficiency gains. The countless one man businesses have no overhead side from owning a car they already have. They don't need to do anything else besides install and run an app. No need for marketing, managing payment systems, customer acquisition...etc Millions of drivers globally have the business side of things taken care of by a single company. Fragmentation across tens of thousands of taxi companies is inefficient.
In the US many neighborhoods and entire cities didn't have access to reliable taxis or any taxi at all. There's significantly more coverage with Uber and ride sharing in general. The same is probably true of other countries.
Almost every useful scalable service ends up shifting economic gains from labor to capital. And consumers benefit from it, because as a very rough economic rule of thumb, the more value that flows to labor the less efficient the service is and the higher price consumers pay.
From a customer POV taxis were horrible, full-stop, and Uber/Lyft are fantastic. I can actually get a reliable, safe ride almost anywhere now, and that was impossible before (ever been held up by a gypsy cabbie because yellow cabs won't go to certain parts of NYC? Not fun...).
I'm sorry...drivers are making a choice, they are not as naive as you seem to think they are and they have infinite other options for unskilled labor if it's really that "unfair", but most of those options pay less per hour - yes, they don't put as many miles on people's cars, but that's a tradeoff for getting cash now, which is often what people want. I delivered pizzas as a college kid, and made 1/3 of what Uber drivers make while driving the same amount, even accounting for inflation.
"Systematically exploited" is a really paternalistic view.
Perhaps, another option would be for the government to help establish a drivers-cooperative app. An app where all the profits collected had to distributed back to the drivers or invested in the common infrastructure to maintain, promote, and improve the app.
The drivers could also agree amongst themselves as to matters such as working conditions and minimum pay.
Uber and others could still exist, but they'd be at a disadvantage because they'd be ploughing billions into nonsense like self-driving blimps or whatever.
I am a bit confused here. This is a money losing company. Yes there has been some shift from labor to capital recently but overall investors are losing money here.
But it's not like people are necessarily worse off by choosing to drive for Uber. The thing is that for a lot of drivers, Uber is complementary income on top of a primary, inflexible income source. AFAIK, there's nothing else other than gig economy that lets someone supplement income piecemeal.
If you think in terms of socio-economic mobility, isn't the ability to squeeze extra earning opportunities in between other responsibilities a good thing?
Also, Uber has shown that it isn't 100% effective at "exploiting" its market. Last year, a lot of drivers were taking home 6 digit gross income due to driver shortages and the ability to opt into stupidly long work weeks. That's pretty significant for what is effectively a unskilled job.
> But it's not like people are necessarily worse off by choosing to drive for Uber.
I'm reminded of the video of the Uber driver confronting Kalanick during a ride because the driver had been encouraged to buy a high end car by Uber in order to participate in Uber Black[0]. After he bought the car, Uber started lowering the rates on Uber Black, which resulted in less income for the drivers.
That guy sounded like he was worse off by choosing to drive for Uber and taking their own advice.
I mean, the whole premise of gig economy is you need to do your homework because you're an independent contractor. A lot of drivers on YouTube will tell you that you have work smart, do your own math, etc.
Obviously the Kalanick incident made news because of how viral the scenario was, but the reality is that there's a lot of variability and for every person complaining that more drivers on the road equate less per-driver demand, there's another five drivers quietly making extra cash after their day jobs.
> Last year, a lot of drivers were taking home 6 digit gross income due to driver shortages. That's pretty significant for what is effectively a unskilled job.
Source needed. Might just as well be a publicity stunt by Uber.
One source is just an acquaintance of mine. A couple of others are people on youtube. Mind you, the caveat is these people worked 50+ hours per week. If you want something that looks less anecdotal, google "uber salary". Glassdoor lists a range from 18k-93k/yr.
It's gross income, so no. For my acquaintance it was still better net income than the job he had been laid off from (we're talking a difference of more than 2x), the trade-off is that the income boost comes from opting into putting long hours. He was able to use the extra income to pay off some debt, FWIW.
If you're interested, some of the YouTube videos go into the earnings breakdown and take home amount after setting aside a maintenance fund.
There is a version of Uber that actually makes sense. As a lean SaaS company that sells its software to ordinary taxi companies, takes a cut and makes a profit. Which is basically how they operate in Spain because Spanish law has not tolerated Ubers attempts to capture markets.