Read it on Salon
Join HULU, SEINFELD and SALON to celebrate Festivus!
Sponsored Post
Tuesday, Jun 24, 2014 11:15 AM UTC
5 traits Uber shares with old-school capitalist companies
Don't buy the hype about the "revolutionary" startup. It's no less exploitative than any other enterprise
Topics: AlterNet, uber, New York Times, neoliberalism, Technology News, Business News, Politics News
This article originally appeared on AlterNet.
Now that Uber has received an $18.2 billion valuation from investors, making it worth more than rental car giants Hertz and Avis combined, it would seem the ride-sharing company’s days as a scrappy young tech startup are done. But in the days since the valuation was made public, the Uber hype machine—which insists that the company is revolutionizing the monopolistic, overly bureaucratic taxi industry—has gone into overdrive.
In one of the eight articles on Uber that the New York Times has published in the last two weeks alone, Farhad Manjoo refers to the company as “the hottest, most valuable technology start-up on the planet.” In the opinion of Mitchell Moss, director of the Rudin Center for Transportation at New York University, “Uber is transforming mobility in big cities and has been one of the great innovations in transportation in the last decade.”
With its revolutionary “disruptive” potential, app-based technology and clever marketing—one campaign involved a kitten delivery service in honor of National Cat Day—the service is almost a parody of the quintessential millennial company. But make no mistake: despite the populist, user-focused language of Uber promoters and company reps, the ride-sharing service is a prime example of the neoliberal economic model at work. Uber’s brand of tech sector neoliberalism relies on deregulation, an absence of government oversight and a healthy amount of political spending to sway the rules in their favor. By adhering to the narrative of innovation, efficiency and market disruption, for the good of the people, powerful tech companies can avoid discussing other topics: how their services compromise existing industries, fair labor practices, the security of passengers and drivers. Here are five ways that Uber is just like any other exploitative capitalist enterprise,
1) Regulation Free
Uber and other ride-sharing services have fought for an astonishing lack of regulation in most of the cities where they operate. Unlike traditional taxi drivers, Uber operators don’t have to file for licenses, adhere to fixed rate standards, or comply with other county and state regulations that determine when and how a for-hire car can be booked. According to Uber founder and CEO Travis Kalanick, who has referred to the taxi industry as a “protectionist scheme,” these sorts of rules serve as outdated, industry-friendly ways of cutting out competition.
But, as Ralph Nader would tell you, auto regulations are essential for ensuring quality of service and protecting the safety of passengers and drivers alike. In New York City, for example, taxi drivers go through a multi-month training and examination period, and face high standards for continued licensing, including fines, penalties and even arrests for violations. Uber drivers are unburdened by these requirements, needing only a driver’s license, a background check and an insured car to get on the road. This ease of entrance to the field and lack of oversight makes it much more difficult to ensure that drivers are up to snuff and to monitor illegal pickups, a longstanding headache for regulatory officials.
In airports and large urban centers across the US, independent drivers haggle with customers for rides in their personal vehicles, but with the growing popularity of Uber, it is more difficult to determine who is a freelance agent illegally turning a profit and who is a ride-share operator. According to Bhairavi Desai, executive director of the New York Taxi Workers Alliance, NYC’s union for yellow taxicab drivers, “When it’s just individual drivers doing these pickups, you can educate people and build a public consciousness around that, but that’s much harder to do with a large corporation with a multi-million-dollar PR apparatus at its beck and call.”
2) Avoiding Accountability
Alongside an absence of regulation comes a lack of accountability. While Uber maintains a $1 million commercial liability policy, the company’s approach to insurance coverage is grounded in the concept of plausible deniability. According to its website, “this policy provides up to $1 million in coverage for each and every incident that occurs from the time a driver has accepted a trip and is en route to pick up passengers or is transporting passengers to their destination.”
Yet if the app isn’t turned on, or if an accident occurs while a driver doesn’t have a passenger in the backseat, it is not considered an official Uber ride and insurance won’t cover any bodily injury or vehicular damage. The most disturbing example of this is the New Year’s Eve accident that killed 6-year-old Sofia Liu at an intersection in San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood. An Uber driver, Syed Muzzafar, hit Liu with his vehicle, but the company argued he was not using the app at the time and it has no responsibility to ensure him, given that all Uber drivers are independent contractors rather than employees.
Uber’s deferral of responsibility has also been thrown into sharp relief by several prominent cases of sexual assault over the past few years. A 20-year-old woman in Washington, DC accused an Uber driver of raping her in her Northwest Washington home. A female LA club-goer was allegedly kidnapped by an Uber driver and taken to a seedy motel. Not to mention all the incidents in which women have reported being chatted up, groped, threatened or otherwise made to feel uncomfortable when riding alone in Uber vehicles. In these cases, Uber’s default response has been to issue statements affirming that they deactivate any driver accused of criminal activity, yet the company can legally pass the buck in a way traditional taxi companies cannot, with the simple excuse that the accused individuals aren’t Uber employees.
Salon is proud to feature content from AlterNet, an award-winning news magazine and online community that creates original journalism and amplifies the best of hundreds of other independent media sources.
Most Read
