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  Uber often argued that its drivers made more money when the company cut fares, and in certain supply-and-demand scenarios, this argument made sense. When Uber’s prices dropped, more customers would use Uber, and there would be more work to go around. Meanwhile, as the low pay offered less incentive to drivers, some workers would drop out of the market, restricting the supply of rides and pushing the price back up.

  In practice, this wasn’t how it always played out. As Ethan Pollack, an economist who works with the Aspen Institute’s “Future of Work” initiative, explained to me:

  While it’s possible that lowering of per-trip payments would result in drivers receiving more money, it’s unlikely, and if true would probably only be true in certain regions. So, for example, if drivers in a given region had a low utilization rate, and thus could be picking up a lot more passengers, then it’s possible the increased volume would more than make up for the loss in compensation per trip. But if overall driver compensation was going up, then this could tempt additional workers to start driving, thus lowering the volume a bit.

  The point is, in order for overall driver compensation to increase when per-trip payments are lowered, there must be a very specific supply and demand situation, with a relatively flat supply curve (i.e. supply is unresponsive to price changes) but a steep demand curve (i.e. demand is very responsive to price changes). Even if that were true for some regions at certain times, it seems unlikely to be true for all regions at all times.4

  What could be worse for drivers than the price cuts alone was that Uber’s constantly shifting compensation model made it difficult for them to understand how much they would make the next day or the next week. “Imagine going into work one day and your boss tells you that you’re going to have to do the exact same job you did last week but for 30% less money,” wrote an Uber driver named Harry Campbell, who started a blog and podcast for ride-share drivers. “After a recent round of fare cuts, that is the exact situation drivers faced, and for many, this isn’t the first time it’s happened either.”5

  Some drivers looked for ways to protest these changes.

  Abe, the Uber driver in Kansas City who had felt scammed by the company, was one of them. He decided that his Facebook page, Uber Freedom, which he’d named for the freedom Uber provided through independence and flexibility, would stand for Freedom from Uber. “I have nothing to lose now,” he said after being deactivated, hypothetically addressing Uber. “Let’s go to war.”

  Abe wanted to start a union of sorts. Though he’d initially envisioned a group for Uber drivers in Kansas City, he almost immediately decided to take it to a national level. Abe parked his car at a gas station in his neighborhood and made a confessional-style video from the front seat that he headlined “UBER DRIVERS NATION WIDE STRIKE!!” He uploaded it to Facebook on October 3, 2015. “The time has come for all drivers across the nation to stand up to Uber and demand real change from Uber,” Abe said in the video, before proposing a weekend strike. “We have to sacrifice a small window of time, just three days, for a greater future for all Uber drivers.”

  To make the video more visible, Abe bought a type of Facebook ad that promotes a post in people’s news feeds. He watched the number of views climb, but it wasn’t enough. Abe paid more. And then more. By the time he was done, he’d charged more than $4,000 to credit cards. The video had been viewed more than 250,000 times, and his page had an audience of 20,000 people who had “liked” it and would now receive its updates. “I spent boom, boom, money, money, boom, boom,” he later recounted, sounding like a gambling addict. “I kept boosting. I kept seeing results. I kept doubling the budget, tripling the budget, quadrupling the budget.”

  Uber drivers, as independent contractors, couldn’t join a traditional union. But with this extra help from social media, what Abe imagined to be a different kind of labor movement for Uber drivers began. “It’s going to be one of the biggest marketing campaigns that has ever been done to promote the strike,” he told his new Facebook audience in another front-seat confessional video. “Hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people will be aware of the strike.”

  A list of demands for Uber followed:

  1. RAISE RATES 60% NATIONWIDE

  Uber was at the time cutting prices in an attempt to win over customers, which in turn lowered pay per mile for drivers. Abe’s campaign requested it raise rates instead.

  2. ADD TIP OPTION

  Though tips were customary in the livery and taxi businesses, Uber discouraged them. “You don’t need cash when you ride with Uber,” the company explained on its website. “Once you arrive at your destination, your fare is automatically charged to your credit card on file—there’s no need to tip.” Many customers assumed that the tip was included in the fare, which in 2016 Uber would clarify, as part of a lawsuit settlement, was not the case.6 Abe wanted Uber to go a step further and put an option to tip drivers in the app, as Uber’s competitor Lyft had already done.

  3. RAISE THE CANCELLATION FEE TO $7

  If a passenger summoned an Uber driver but then canceled the ride after the driver was on his way, the customer usually paid a fee between $5 and $10, of which drivers could keep some percentage. In exchange for spending unpaid time traveling to a pickup point where a job never materialized, Abe wanted more compensation.

  4. RAISE THE MIN FARE TO $7

  Uber set a minimum fare for trips that spanned only a few blocks. After Uber’s commission and fees, drivers sometimes only took home two or three dollars, which Abe felt wasn’t enough.7

  The plan, as Abe noted in another update a few days later, was also simple: “Phase one: Organize the biggest national Uber driver strike in Uber history, check! Phase two: get the main stream [sic] media involved and make the event go viral: in progress.” Abe had written an official chant: “Uber’s greed, puts drivers in need.” It was great, he reasoned, because it was “very basic, very catchy, and it rhymes.”

  For an inexperienced organizer armed only with Facebook marketing tools and an overly optimistic outlook, Abe had generated by the end of October a surprising level of publicity. A local Kansas City television station covered plans for the strike shortly after Abe announced it, and small groups of drivers in the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Washington, DC, had joined Facebook groups about local strikes and protests on the designated weekend.

  When Abe arrived in San Francisco before the national strike, he was almost giddy. “This is really inspiring, for sure,” he gushed in a video that showed one San Francisco organizer’s black car, which had been turned into a poster promotion for the strike with white temporary paint. Abe was so excited that he couldn’t eat.

  That Friday morning at 10 a.m., he showed up at the office building that housed Uber’s headquarters. A small group of drivers, many of them holding neon-colored poster boards with slogans written in black marker, stood in a semicircle around him as he spoke into a red-and-white megaphone. They didn’t really know what to do, so they chanted, “Uber’s greed, puts drivers in need!” In some videos of the protest, it looked as though there were more members of the media in attendance than drivers. “That might be true,” Abe said, “but that’s more of an impact, I think.”

  National news outlets like Mashable and the tech industry blog Recode covered the strike, as did local outlets in San Francisco, Washington, DC, Atlanta, Phoenix, and Detroit.

  But even with media attention, the strike suffered from a logistical problem.

  Unions first formed inside factories and mines, and on railroad tracks. Workers could find each other because they worked in the same place. Uber, on the other hand, didn’t provide any way for “coworkers” to talk with each other. Online forums facilitated some communication, but a critical mass of drivers (who spoke different languages and used Uber in different ways) would need to proactively find the same Facebook group or forum to effectively coordinate action against the company. Even in cities where Uber drivers had organized strikes in the past, t
he majority of drivers had never even heard about them. “Unfortunately some drivers are out there working today,” wrote one organizer on the Uber Drivers Network NYC Facebook page during a September strike, “NOT because they just want to cheat themselves and us, but because our message has not reached them YET.”

  Abe’s solution to this problem was to drive around with a megaphone. One of his fellow protestors leaned out the back window announcing, in the tone and cadence that someone might use during a fire drill, “Do not use Uber. Use Lyft or Sidecar. Take a cab. Take the bus.” Another video Abe posted in the Uber Freedom Facebook group showed a driver pulling up to another car. He rolled down his window.

  “You work Uber?” the driver asked, in broken English.

  The other driver confirmed that yes, he did.

  “This weekend is a strike, you know? I work Uber too. This weekend, strike. Only Lyft, no Uber.”

  The other driver started to drive away, but the man filming the video kept yelling at him. “No Uber! Fuck Uber!”

  At a victory dinner later that night, Abe watched himself on the local news. A few days later, the tech blog Pando published a story headlined “The Medium Is the Movement: Abe Husein Is a Labor Leader for Our Times.”8

  From the outside, Abe’s strike looked like a genuine, grassroots effort to stand up to a giant company. But when I began interviewing Abe regularly, I quickly learned that his first priority was making money, not working toward social justice.

  Abe was a jovial guy whose intense faith in his impending success was at times almost endearing. But he had personal philosophies that made him hard to like, such as a belief that racism didn’t exist in America, that homeless people deserved no empathy, and that paying women to go on dates (a setup known as “sugar babies”) was more respectful than trying to start a relationship. And aside from that, he lacked credibility. Lawsuits like the one he brought against Uber at the National Labor Relations Board were one of his favorite ways of rebelling against people with whom he disagreed. Abe loved lawsuits, he said, “because I don’t have to pay anything.” He was also suing a former employer, a restaurant business called Bravo Brio Restaurant Group, for non-tip-generating work he completed while waiting tables and bartending, jobs which could be paid lower than the minimum wage because tips were expected. After he filed the suit, he told me that he posted it in a company social network, where his managers would see it, and started taking conspicuous unauthorized breaks at the Panera next door. He wanted to get fired, which he said would help his case.

  Even as Abe crusaded against the entrepreneurs who he believed had scammed him, he also obviously admired them. He had “researched the hell” out of Travis Kalanick and learned that Uber’s CEO had taken some risks, like joining an early Napster-like startup that was later sued for billions of dollars for alleged copyright infringement. “He took a risk, and I respected that,” Abe told me. “He kept going. It took balls to do that stuff.” And even though Kevin Trudeau had scammed Abe out of thousands of dollars, Abe stuck to GIN’s teachings about how to dress (for success), talk to people (with your hands), and win (believe). “It’s telling you how to do life,” Abe said. “Nobody teaches these things.”

  It seemed inevitable to Abe that by studying the tactics of these men, Kevin and Travis and others like them, he would achieve financial gains similar to theirs. Abe’s favorite motivational CD was “Six Steps to Success” by Arnold Schwarzenegger, and he once repeated the headline advice to me: “Don’t break the law, break the rules.” He saw other successful people who had broken the rules, sometimes at his expense, and figured that was what success would take.

  His belief in the “law of attraction” often led him to confidently pursue lofty ideas. These had in the past included running for Congress and would in the future include founding a company with the goal of putting Uber out of business. Launching a labor movement against Uber was just another big idea that fit into that pattern.

  Talking about his strike, Abe concluded in a follow-up video, “Mission accomplished, for sure.” But no, it wasn’t “for sure.” The media attention may have slightly annoyed Uber in the way a persistent fly might annoy an elephant, but it would be ridiculous to argue that the strike had impacted Uber’s business. Driving around with a megaphone was not an effective method for informing other drivers about the strike, and the impact had clearly been limited. “A check of the Uber app on Saturday morning showed a number of available drivers for passengers,” the local NBC affiliate in Washington, DC, had noted.9

  Even in more traditional workplaces, strikes—once organized labor’s biggest lever—have become so ineffective that they’re now rare. In the 1950s, there were on average more than 300 strikes every year. In the 2000s, there were on average just 20 strikes per year.10 What hope did a couple of guys with a megaphone really have?

  Uber’s professional public relations team managed to spin the publicity from Abe’s protest into a pitch for the Uber job, using it as an opportunity to talk about “flexibility.” In a sterile, almost comically off-topic response, it wrote to media organizations that covered the strike: “We always welcome feedback from driver-partners,” adding about its gigs, “Drivers say they value the flexibility and the chance to be their own boss, and choose Uber over other options because it fits around their life and works for them.” It was an impressive bit of jujitsu.11

  Abe’s resistance disintegrated quickly. Though he’d scheduled “Nationwide Uber driver strike round 2!” for New Year’s Eve 2015 and, according to documentation in his Facebook accounts, paid an additional $6,500 to “boost” the announcement video, the protest hardly made a blip. And though he’d try to start a drivers’ group with dues that would pay for marketing costs, when he showed me the administrator’s view of his drivers’ association website in July 2016, only 12 people had signed up.

  Abe had also tried one other tactic to take revenge on Uber, which I didn’t learn about until we spent several hours going through emails and accounts related to his organizing efforts. He showed me an email addressed to the Uber support staff on December 31, the day before his failed New Year’s Eve strike. “I have an opportunity for you,” it began. “If you give me 10k, I will take down my FB page and website and will not cause anymore uprising. I will disappear from the uber world. Or I can hand over admin access to you. This will be your one and only opportunity to make this movement go away.” Uber did not take him up on the opportunity.

  I was disappointed when I read the email, but after spending time talking with Abe, I wasn’t altogether surprised.

  Abe, it seemed to me, had felt powerless for most of his life. He’d first seen Uber as a way to take charge of his own destiny, be his own business, and maybe get rich while he was doing it. When that didn’t pan out, he’d scrambled for any tactic that would help him gain control—protests, a lawsuit, a union, and even, I learned now, asking Uber to pay him to drop his organizing efforts.

  There were plenty of driver-led efforts to protest fare cuts that hadn’t involved asking Uber for a payment, though it’s hard to identify one that got much traction. In the course of my time with Abe I also started talking with Mario Leadum, who was separately organizing drivers in San Francisco. He’d gotten off to a good start, organizing a large protest there, but eventually had given up.

  Like Abe, Mario had joined Uber in 2013 after a friend told him he could make good money. At home, he had done the calculations. On $3,000 per week, which is what his friend told him was possible, he could buy a new car and still have plenty of money to make ends meet. So he quit his job in sales and marketing at an accounting firm, and he bought a Cadillac Escalade. Initially, he said, he could make about $3,000 in five long days.

  Then Uber’s fares started to drop, as they often did after Uber had established itself in a city. He started making $650 or $700 each week, driving the same hours. “It was greed,” Mario said. “Obviously, it’s all over the news, Uber is valued at $65 billion.” Mario and a group o
f other drivers started meeting at the airport and near Candlestick Park in San Francisco to discuss their options. Less than a month after Uber announced another round of fare cuts throughout the country in January 2016,12 he and other groups of drivers throughout the United States coordinated a protest.

  The impact was bigger than Abe’s version. The New York Times reported that hundreds of drivers gathered at the New York City Uber headquarters.13 In San Francisco, Mario and other drivers led a caravan of honking drivers from Candlestick Park to City Hall and Uber headquarters. Michael Gumora, who runs a website called Rideshare Report, followed the caravan throughout all of its stops. “It looked like a sea of cars,” he told Wired. “It looked like it spanned about two to three blocks of cars, four lanes across.”14 Enthused by their success, the drivers planned to disrupt Uber’s business during the Super Bowl, which would take place in Uber’s hometown of San Francisco.

  The day of the game, police broke up a small gathering of drivers near the stadium, but there was no disruption to Uber’s service.15 Uber had, according to Mario, guaranteed drivers $40 an hour during the hours around the Super Bowl. Mario planned another shot: “We have something else to respond to that,” he said. “We are planning another event that is going to be really big. It’s going to be seven times bigger than [the last protest].”