Re: <nettime> Uber Blues

[Morlock Elloi <morlockelloi@gmail.com>]

The real tragedy is that what cabbies see as a protest, app-ride systems 
interpret as a solution.



From 
https://www.wired.com/story/why-are-new-york-taxi-drivers-committing-suicide/

Why Are New York Taxi Drivers Committing Suicide?
Miranda Katz


It was a somber scene outside New York’s City Hall on Wednesday 
afternoon. Four coffins sat at the foot of the steps; one by one, taxi 
drivers covered them with white flowers, before assembling on the steps 
and shouting for the city to “stop Uber’s greed” and “stop making us 
slaves.” It was the second such gathering in two months, as drivers and 
their advocates mourned another suicide that they attribute to the rise 
of ride-hailing services like Uber and Lyft. That sudden increase in the 
number of for-hire vehicles on the city’s streets, they claim, has made 
it impossible for drivers to earn a decent living.

On March 16, Nicanor Ochisor, a 65-year-old yellow cab driver, took his 
own life in his Queens home. According to his family and friends, he had 
been drowning financially as his prized taxi medallion, on which he had 
hoped to retire, plummeted in value. The circumstances surrounding 
Ochisor’s death were upsettingly familiar: In February, driver Douglas 
Schifter shot himself outside City Hall after posting a lengthy 
statement to Facebook blaming politicians for letting the streets get so 
saturated. According to the New York Taxi Workers Alliance, a nonprofit 
group that advocates for drivers, at least two other drivers have 
committed suicide since December in response to mounting financial 
pressures.

At Wednesday’s rally, Bhairavi Desai, the executive director of NYTWA, 
described the situation as “a living nightmare.” The assembled drivers 
echoed her sentiment. Noureddine Afsi said he began driving a yellow cab 
in 2001 when a friend said it would be easier money than his job in 
retail. “You could work nine hours and easily make $200 in a day,” he 
recalled. “Now, you’re lucky if you make $50 or $60.” Beresford Simmons, 
who has been driving a yellow cab for more than 50 years, expressed a 
similar frustration: At 71 years old, he said, he had just had heart 
surgery and was on dialysis—and he was in no financial position to take 
a break from driving. “We have guys at home who are losing their 
houses,” he said. “I know cab drivers who are homeless today.”

The anguish and anger on display at City Hall offer an unsettling look 
at the cost of disrupting long-standing industries. Until recently, 
driving a cab in New York was a gateway to the middle class, especially 
if drivers could get their hands on a coveted medallion (essentially a 
permit to operate their own cabs, rather than leasing cars from others). 
With the number of medallions fixed, prices generally rose, peaking in 
2014 at over $1 million—well outside the budget of many drivers, but 
good news for medallion owners who sometimes borrowed against them. 
Since then, though, prices have fallen sharply, as competition from 
ride-hailing services intensified. In January, seven medallions sold for 
under $200,000 each. Many drivers are deeply in debt—and a long way from 
the stable lifestyle they once expected.

Drivers assembled at City Hall on Wednesday afternoon called for 
"regulation now," and demanded that the city "stop Uber's greed."
Miranda Katz for Wired

“To call it an engine of social mobility would be overstating it, but 
[driving a taxi] is definitely a way that men without college educations 
have found to raise families, to provide family wages, for a long time,” 
says Julia Ticona, a sociologist studying technologies of work, 
emotions, and inequality at the Data & Society research institute in New 
York. For taxi drivers, disruption is not only financially 
destabilizing, but also demoralizing, as it recasts their careers as gig 
work. A longtime taxi driver who prides himself on knowing the ins and 
outs of the city’s streets is now competing with tens of thousands of 
newcomers, some of whom may only be driving as a part-time side hustle. 
“There’s this tension between older sets of professional norms and the 
ways that labor platforms are encouraging workers to promote themselves 
and be entrepreneurial,” Ticona says.

Though New York City caps the number of yellow cabs at just over 13,600, 
it doesn’t limit the number of drivers for Uber, Lyft, or other 
services. (It does, unlike most US cities, require that ride-share 
drivers be licensed by the Taxi and Limousine Commission.) The lack of 
regulation has led to rapid growth: Uber launched in the city in 2011 
with just 105 cars on the road; by 2015, that had ballooned to 20,000, 
and today, there are more than 63,000 black cars providing rides through 
various ride-hailing apps, 60,000 of which are affiliated with Uber. 
Those rallying on Wednesday argued that growth is affecting all 
drivers—including those for Uber and Lyft. “The business model of Uber 
and Lyft…is destroying every driver across the sector,” said Desai. 
“They are destroying the full-time jobs of professional yellow [cab], 
green [cab], livery, and black car drivers, and replacing them with 
poverty-paid gigs where Uber and Lyft drivers themselves cannot 
survive.” A 2017 survey of drivers by the Independent Drivers Guild, 
which represents app-based drivers, found that 57 percent of respondents 
earn less than $50,000 per year, and 22 percent earn less than $30,000 
per year.

As much as some taxi and app-based drivers may see each other as 
competition, they also are united on several fronts. They all want more 
money: The IDG is petitioning the city to require apps to raise driver 
pay by 37 percent, and the NYTWA is demanding that the city raise yellow 
cab rates and make them the minimum for all app-based services. Both 
groups also want the city to cap the number of new entrants, as they 
worry that demand isn’t keeping pace with increasing supply of drivers. 
Uber and Lyft bring on hundreds of new drivers per week—though some 
quickly quit. A recent analysis by Bruce Schaller, a former NYC traffic 
and planning commissioner, showed that the hours that taxis and 
ride-share vehicles spend unoccupied in central Manhattan increased by 
81 percent between 2013 and 2017. Without passengers, drivers don’t earn 
money. “We don’t care about competition,” said Afsi, who began driving 
for Uber after leasing a yellow cab for nine years. “When you work 14, 
15 hours and go home with $50, it’s not good. It’s not about 
competition. It’s about survival.”

Drivers and their advocates hope that, if anything, the recent string of 
suicides will compel New York City to further regulate the industry and 
avoid a full-throttled race to the bottom. The city last considered 
capping the number of for-hire vehicles on the road in 2015; however, 
Uber campaigned against the cap, and the City Council did not pass the 
legislation. Now, City Council Member Stephen Levin is again proposing a 
temporary freeze on new for-hire vehicle licenses while the city studies 
on the impact of the industry’s growth.

That’s one of several proposals for mitigating the effects of more ride 
hailing. Last fall, Council Member Ydanis Rodriguez introduced a bill 
that would allow medallion owners to operate two vehicles under a single 
medallion, helping boost the value of medallions. Rodriguez has 
previously suggested that the city bail out medallion owners, saying 
that “we should find a form of restitution to those who have invested in 
our city's future through the purchase of medallions.” Another Council 
Member, Ruben Diaz Sr. introduced a bill last month meant to slow the 
growth of app-based for-hire services with, among other things, a $2,000 
annual fee on every vehicle affiliated with an app-based service. And 
the TLC is considering piloting a program that would let taxi drivers 
offer up-front cost estimates. In theory, that could help them attract 
passengers who currently prefer the cost predictability of Uber to the 
traffic-dependent price of yellow cabs.

All those proposals share one critical element: They place the burden 
for change on the city, rather than the ride-share companies. And 
perhaps for good reason. Though app-based companies could theoretically 
raise wages or cap their pool of drivers on their own, they have no 
incentive to curb their growth. “The only place [a solution] will 
possibly come from is from public policy,” says Schaller, the former NYC 
traffic and planning commissioner. “The [app-based services] are 
hellbent on growth, and if I were the CEO at Uber and had announced that 
I planned to take the company public next year, I would be, too.” In a 
statement, Uber pointed to steps it has taken recently to win back its 
drivers’ trust, such as introducing in-app tipping and allowing drivers 
to earn more while waiting to pick up riders. “Drivers told us we needed 
to do better and we have been working hard to earn back their trust and 
improve the driver experience,” a spokesperson said. A Lyft spokesperson 
said that the company is “in ongoing conversations to find solutions to 
complex challenges in New York in order to provide the best 
transportation for passengers and earning opportunity for those who 
drive with Lyft.”

The New York City Council created a new committee on for-hire vehicles 
in 2018, and that committee had its first hearing shortly after 
Schifter’s suicide in February. For several hours, drivers and advocates 
delivered emotional testimony and asked for a cap on the number of 
vehicles on city streets. TLC Commissioner Meera Joshi appeared 
receptive to the idea of stricter regulation, acknowledging at the 
hearing that “the expanding industry will continue to make driving a 
very stressful career without any growth-control mechanism.”

Some sort of “growth-control mechanism” would likely ease the impact 
that the ride sharing boom has had on drivers across the industry. But 
the days of being able to retire on a yellow cab medallion might be a 
thing of the past. “People are frozen in place, dreaming of the idea 
that the medallion system is about to recover,” says Schaller. “This can 
turn out perfectly fine for yellow cab drivers. It’s very difficult to 
see how it could be fine for yellow cab medallion owners.” In other 
words, it may not be possible to protect every worker from the negative 
effects of disruption—but there is hope that new regulations might keep 
drivers from going to the desperate extremes that the city has seen in 
recent months.
#  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
#  <nettime>  is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject: