Uber and Lyft drivers staged protests in some major cities Wednesday to call attention to wages and work issues, but travelers didn't seem to have much trouble finding a ride. In both New York and Los Angeles, small groups of drivers picketed as scores of Uber and Lyft cars passed by, staying in service despite boisterous chants imploring them to turn off the smartphone apps they use to pick up passengers. The protest came against the backdrop of the two ride-hailing giants making a play for investors through stock offerings, with billions of dollars in play, at a time when their drivers say they are underpaid. Lyft recently started selling shares to the public, and Uber is on deck. The protests varied by city. In Los Angeles, Rideshare Drivers United urged a 24-hour shutdown starting at 12:01 a.m. PT Wednesday. At Los Angeles International Airport, there were about two dozen protesters in the early morning, but judging from the scores of Uber and Lyft cars passing by, it didn't appear to be having much effect on service. A check of Lyft and Ubers apps about 2 miles from the airport showed an abundance of cars remaining in service. In the Big Apple, the New York Taxi Workers Alliance called for a work stoppage from 7 a.m. to 9 a.m. ET. Some participated in a caravan over the Brooklyn Bridge, and about a dozen protesters rallied near Wall Street. Bhairavi Desai, executive director of the alliance, said drivers are fed up with being treated like they’re “expendable” and “liabilities.” She also cited Uber’s compensation system that awards drivers based on a per-minute and per-mile rate that doesn’t correspond with how much riders spend. “That rate has been frozen, so while these companies take in more money from passengers, none of it trickles down to the drivers,” Desai said. A group of taxi drivers stood behind Desai chanting “driving power, union power.” Inder Parmar, an Uber driver since 2013, said that he’s protesting because he feels that the company is exploiting its workers. “I used to make $37 an hour (driving for Uber), and now I make about $9.80 per hour,” Parmar said. From 2013 to 2015, he said he earned $37 an hour, or about $3 per mile. Today, Parmar said he earns $1.15 per mile. “When I’m on call for 12 hours, minus my expenses, I literally go home with zero dollars,” Parmar said. “I have to pay for my gas, car and I have to support my family. With this money I cannot survive.” The most recent pay statement he showed USA TODAY was for January 2019, which was before Uber’s minimum pay increased in NYC. New York has tried to help ride-hailing drivers by taking action in January, setting a minimum pay at $17.22 an hour after expenses. Under the new rules adopted by the commission, some 96% of drivers were expected to see a boost of $10,000 a year. Organizers in New York are demanding livable wages, a guarantee that drivers receive up to 85% of a fare and an end to workers being kicked off the platform without an investigation. Uber's guidelines state that drivers can lose access to the app if their ratings drop too low or if their cancellation rate is high. Also, drivers can immediately lose their accounts if they are reported for violence, discrimination or harassment. Uber says that some low-level offenders have an opportunity to get back on the road if they take a quality improvement test with a third party. "We are exploring ways to create an appeals process for the most contentious cases," Uber says on its website. Protesters turned out in force in San Francisco, and protests were also scheduled for cities including Boston, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Chicago and Washington, D.C. At one point in the early afternoon, protesters blocked traffic on Market Street in front of company headquarters. Uber confirmed it didn't see any major shortage of ride availability and issued a statement saying it respects its drivers. “Drivers are at the heart of our service, and we can’t succeed without them. We’ll continue working to improve drivers’ experience for and with them, every day.” Lyft didn't comment directly on the protest. On Tuesday, it issued a statement saying its drivers earn over $20 an hour on average, and most drive for the service only about 10 hours a week to supplement their regular income. Uber is seeking to raise $1 billion through its initial public offering. Lyft sold its shares to the public for the first time last month. Protesting drivers said more of their fellow workers would have joined up if they had known about the protests. "A lot of them don't know about this," said Laurel Hirschmann, 59, an Uber driver in Los Angeles. "Ninety-eight percent of the drivers are as outraged as we are." #UberLyftStrike: Commuters urged to support drivers by not using Uber, Lyft apps Ridesharing: Should you let kids ride in an Uber alone?<doc-sep>Photo : Bryan Menegus ( Gizmodo ) Long Island City—Just days before Uber’s expected debut on the stock market at a conservative but still-astronomical $80 to $90 billion valuation, the anger among rideshare drivers boiled over into an international day of action. Advertisement In at least 20 cities around the world, Uber drivers with few employment protections and no real way to contact one another came together on Wednesday to demand fairer conditions. That action on this scale could be coordinated at all is, on its own, an astounding achievement. A grand expression of frustration can be cathartic in its own way, but at times the balkanized pockets of organizers appeared to be rowing in opposite directions—nowhere more starkly than in the company’s largest market: New York City. Ask rideshare drivers anywhere, and they’ll likely name the same problems: low pay made lower through vehicle expenses and upkeep, deactivations without recourse, and a higher and higher share of their rides being gobbled up as commission fees. But ask about the best strategy to improve their working conditions, and the answers will probably be less consistent. In three cities in Australia, a handful of drivers delivered a letter expressing “concern about the lack of rights and standards that apply to transport workers in the gig economy” to Uber Greenlight hubs. In Los Angeles, one of the best organized and most militant groups, Rideshare Drivers United, called a 24-hour strike for its estimated 4,200 members. Philadelphia Drivers United responsibly split the difference, opting to hold a rally but not call a strike, as many of its constituent members were “one missed day of work away from vehicle repossession or missed medications.” Unfocused, maybe, but not openly hostile towards one another. New York, however, had the dubious honor of being the only city to host competing rallies between labor groups—the Independent Drivers Guild (IDG) and the New York Taxi Drivers Alliance (NYTWA)—which took turns to protest in front of an Uber hub in Long Island City, Queens, rather than join together. “As New York drivers we’re standing in solidarity with drivers all across the country,” Aaron Smith, the IDG’s director of organizing, told me—apparently referring to every local grassroots group except the NYTWA. Bhairavi Desai, the executive director of NYTWA, believed the majority of her organization’s 10,000 members shut off their apps during their declared strike hours from 7 a.m. to 9 a.m. today, and took credit for an alleged 2.2x driver surge meant to encourage to get drivers out on the road. Citing just a 500-car dip from last week’s numbers, Uber denied the strike’s efficacy, and in fact refused to attribute the change to labor activity. Whether the strike had a meaningful impact on Uber’s business this morning or not, at least three hashtags associated with the strike on Twitter were trending across the city. Little to none of that visibility can be chalked up to the IDG, which did not strike today. Advertisement “We’ll continue to make sure that driving is a career and it’s a path to the middle class and not a path to the poverty wages that these companies want you to live in,” Brendan Sexton, the IDG’s executive director, addressed a crowd of approximately 150 drivers clad in complementary union t-shirts. The IDG, formed almost three years ago to the day, are a divisive organization to say the least. Formed through an arrangement between the International Association of Machinists, drivers, and Uber itself, the IDG are the only union-associated group recognized by the ridesharing platform. But their recognition hinged on signing an agreement with a no-strike clause an d refusal to criticize systemic problems on the app. It’s branded them among skeptics—like the NYTWA—as Uber lackeys. “They are paid by Uber,” Desai told me, when asked why the rallies were not coordinated. “They are a sham company union which goes against every single principle that people like us believe in, because we’re supposed to be working for the interests of the workers. We’re not supposed to be taking money from the bosses.” “We’re built by drivers and we work for drivers,” Sexton shot back. “That other group they represent, I think, medallion owners, or yellow cabs or something,” he bristled, adding incorrectly that the NYTWA “don’t really do app-based drivers yet.” The NYTWA did indeed get its start representing cabbies; no rideshare companies existed when it was founded, in 1998. Advertisement Sexton did confirm however, that the IDG does still receive money from Uber. “Like every other union contract there are contributions from the employer. Most of our funding—over 75 percent—comes from grants, member contributions, donations, and contributions from the Machinists Union.” During Desai’s address to the media at 1 p.m. today, members of Sexton’s guild hung back with banners and whistles, sporadically interrupting speeches. Of course, the stories from drivers in either organization are nearly identical. “After a while, learning the kind of expenses I accumulate I was like ‘Oh, I’m making almost nothing,’” IDG member Jacky Lin told me. “Gas I’ll spend like $1,000. Insurance I’ll spend like $300. Car payments, another couple hundred.” He estimates that, with those various deductions, he takes home a little over $1,000 per month. “Lucky for me I was living at home,” Lin said, “but if it wasn’t for that I don’t think I’d be able to survive.” Advertisement Holding two printed-out sheets before a gaggle of reporters at an earlier event in front of the iconic Charging Bull statue, Inder Parmar, a NYTWA member, claimed his earnings had shrunk from $37 an hour when he began driving for Uber to just over $9 an hour now. In reference to the rash of suicides that took the lives of seven for-hire drivers, he said, “if my kids and my family didn’t support me, I would be one of the dead drivers.” The divide between the two labor groups is largely idealogical: a hardline approach versus one that’s open to meeting the boss halfway. When I asked Lin why he’d opted to join a group that wasn’t willing (or able) to strike, a nearby staffer interrupted, noting that “obviously, if you’re at a rally, you’re not working. So if you want to call it a strike, it really doesn’t make any kind of difference.” And yet what led the spark of protest to travel from Los Angeles to multiple continents arguably wasn’t “not working,” it was the threat of a strike, and all the weight that suggests. Advertisement “We know we got to them. That’s the triumph,” Desai told reporters gathered in Queens. “We got into their heads. We messed with them. We punched back, and we showed them that we’re not afraid.” Both groups were adamant that today’s action was just the beginning, which even Uber itself seems keenly aware of. “As we aim to reduce Driver incentives to improve our financial performance, we expect Driver dissatisfaction will generally increase,” the company wrote in its S-1 filing, setting the stage for increasingly widespread outrage. But it’s also the beginning of some very difficult coalition-building for these various national and international groups to agree on and pursue unified demands—or risk losing their own momentum to conflict and confusion.<doc-sep>Uber has always been disruptive, to steal a phrase from Silicon Valley, so it’s fitting that the days ahead of its much-anticipated IPO have been disrupted by a global driver strike. Drivers gathered on May 8 to protest Uber and its labor practices in cities from Los Angeles to Atlanta to New York in the US, and in countries from Brazil to Australia to the UK abroad. The strikes, which also targeted Lyft, to a lesser degree, garnered support from Democratic presidential candidates Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden, and Pete Buttigieg, among others, as well as Catastrophe co-star Rob Delaney. They also received extensive coverage online and on cable news. How the demonstrations went, though, was less clear. The New York Post, for instance, reported yesterday that the strike in New York City was a “flop,” with cars plentiful and surge pricing scarce (the actual strike was scheduled for only two hours, from 7am to 9am local time). In San Francisco, a small crowd of drivers gathered outside Uber headquarters to demand better benefits and higher wages. “There are fewer people here than I think they anticipated,” the local CBS anchor admitted in a broadcast. Uber didn’t respond to a request for comment. Lyft spokeswoman Chelsea Harrison said in an emailed statement: “Lyft drivers’ hourly earnings have increased 7% over the last two years… We’re constantly working to improve how we can best serve our driver community.” Collective action has largely eluded drivers over Uber’s 10-year history. The company considers its drivers to be independent contractors, and in the US there are no collective bargaining rights afforded to contractors. Early attempts at strikes by driver groups were easily broken up by the company, which could pull one of its many levers—surge pricing, promotions, and so on—to ensure a critical mass of drivers stayed on the road. Uber has aggressively fought a first-of-its-kind 2015 law in Seattle that gave local drivers permission to unionize. It preempted a similar effort in New York City by sanctioning the Independent Drivers Guild (paywall), a non-union driver advocacy group that helped organize the May 8 strike. I took an Uber on the day of the strike, which I suppose makes me a bad person, but I was in suburban Connecticut and needed a ride to the train station, and had no other options. My driver had briefly heard about the strike from a family member who saw it on TV, but didn’t know any details of where or when it was happening, or what was expected of him. We chatted about what it’s like driving for Uber and Lyft and how rising gas prices have depressed his wages. He said he hoped once Uber went public, it would finally give drivers the recognition they deserve. While an IPO seems unlikely to make Uber change its ways, it’s also hard to see what a strike accomplishes. The public pressure may last a few days, but sooner or later people need to make money and get places, and Uber for all its faults helps them do that. The plight of contractors in the gig economy has also been a talking point for nearly a decade, and it will take more than some tweets from Democratic favorites to get anything substantial passed to improve their lot. The most successful efforts to help drivers have come from sustained local pressure, like the multi-year Independent Drivers Guild campaign in New York that led the city to implement the first-ever pay floor for drivers in February. More to the point, Uber emerged not unscathed but intact from 2017, a year that revealed a culture of sexual harassment and irresponsible management and led to the ouster of Uber’s co-founder and former CEO, next to which yesterday’s strike looks like a comparative blip. Uber also counted 3.9 million drivers on its platform as of Dec. 31, 2018. Tens, even hundreds, of thousands of those drivers could go on strike before the impact was really felt. Drivers are understandably angry that Uber employees are about to get rich while they get additional pennies per trip, yet the company is still hemorrhaging money, and it’s unclear whether Uber could pay drivers more even if it wanted to. After New York City’s driver pay rules took effect, the company paused new driver signups and said in an amended IPO filing that the rules “had a negative impact on our financial performance” in the first quarter. Uber has also basically admitted that it thinks of drivers as comparable to restaurant service workers, and that taking a bigger share of the fare is its path to profitability. The tough reality is that Uber isn’t designed for workers to make good money, whatever it may have told them in the past, and it probably never was. Ahead of its IPO, no amount of striking will change that. An earlier version of this post appeared in Oversharing, a newsletter about the sharing economy. Sign up for it here.<doc-sep>
A loose network of ride-hailing drivers took to the streets without their cars from San Diego to Atlanta on Wednesday as they protested ahead of Uber’s highly anticipated initial public offering, which is scheduled for Friday. In Los Angeles, about two dozen protesters took time off work to gather in the early morning at LAX. Meanwhile, tons of working Uber and Lyft drivers dropped passengers off at the airport. In Long Island City, Queens, a lone protester held a sign that read "Uber, Lyft, Juno, Via drivers on strike" as several ride-sharing cars swarmed the area to pick up commuters requesting rides. Five days in advance, organizers urged drivers to abstain from using ride-hailing apps for durations ranging from two hours to a whole day. The action was poised to put a dent in Uber's biggest markets across the globe, organizers said. Uber told USA TODAY there was no noticeable impact in their daily operations. Only about a dozen drivers showed up to a rally in New York City's Financial District Friday morning, and according to local news outlets in Boston, it was a normal day at the airport for travelers trying to hitch a ride using an app. Though later in the day, drivers and protesters blocked traffic on Market Street in front of Uber's San Francisco headquarters. 'With this money, I cannot survive':Uber, Lyft strike hits L.A., NYC, Boston, Chicago as drivers protest 'Don't use the app': Commuters urged to support Uber, Lyft So what happened? It's hard to tell exactly. Experts say that everything from a disconnected workforce to disinterested drivers can be to blame. Not to mention, not everyone can take time off during peak driving hours to protest a job that their livelihood relies on. DRIVERS A wide range of people work for ride-share companies including college students looking to make extra money between classes and chauffeurs who support their families using the optional tips you leave at the end of your trip. That diverse and disjointed workforce might work against organizers who are hoping for big turnouts. "Some drivers will be deeply invested, and others may say 'I don’t care about that,'" said Fabio Rojas, a professor of sociology at Indiana University who has written books on social movements. "There’s a lot of natural variation that could keep a protest from getting off the ground." Unlike workers who share an office space, ride-hailing drivers typically don't have to interact with one another. While they may have coordinated social meetups, "those groups aren't really built for politics," Rojas said. "It's one thing to have a barbecue, it’s another thing to set up a rally or to really encourage people to protest." Also, not everyone is dissatisfied with their jobs. Scott Steinbrink, 51, said that he's not protesting because he's happy with how much he makes driving for Lyft and he prefers the flexible schedule. "I enjoy my work. I enjoy driving. So I don’t have any complaint," said Steinbrink, who resides in Atlanta. "We’re not employees of Uber and Lyft. We’re contractors. We decide our hours, not them. So I disagree with the protest entirely." RIDERS There's no doubt that passengers drive the demand for convenient rides. Ninety-five million people use the Uber app on a monthly basis. So while organizers urge riders to put down the app, many commuters have grown to depend on services like Uber and Lyft. Unlike factory work where a relatively small number of people could halt a company's output, a few drivers taking the day off hardly disadvantages commuters in competitive cities, Rojas says. "If you have tens of thousands of drivers in the area, even if a thousand got together to protest, the other 9,000 or so will still be driving," Rojas said. "And another 9,000 may not even know a protest is going on. But in a factory, you'll know if something is happening at work." ORGANIZERS Convincing people that their attendance matters is one of the biggest hurdles organizers of protests face, Rojas said. "No one wants to be the one guy out there in front of the Uber office with the picket sign," he said. In a digital age, organizers also have to contend with people feeling as though liking a tweet or donating $1 to a cause from their homes is enough to create change. Rojas used the term "slacktivism" to describe the type of protests that are easy to do but don't require much action.