Is Your Uber Drivers' Pay Rigged?
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3.9 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 3 September 2022
⏱️ 22 minutes
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Summary
Two gig workers standing side-by-side can be offered the very same job and get offered two different wages. Set by an algorithm and based on calculations that are never explained to the workers themselves, this unequal pay for equal work is already subject to lawsuits that call it a form of price fixing and wage discrimination, but the tech is being tested in other industries.
Guests: Veena Dubal, law professor at the University of California College of the Law, San Francisco
Sergio Avedian, senior contributor at The Rideshare Guy
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I want to tell you about an experiment, an experiment run by two Uber drivers in Chicago. |
| 0:10.4 | Driver A is a Tesla owner with an acceptance rate of 9% and a CR or cancellation rate of |
| 0:15.8 | 14%. |
| 0:16.8 | And then driver B is a hybrid renter with an acceptance rate of 15% and a cancellation |
| 0:23.5 | rate of 23%. |
| 0:25.3 | This is from the YouTube channel of the ride share guy, where you can learn all about |
| 0:29.6 | ride share work, the ups and downs and tricks of driving. |
| 0:33.6 | And on the screen, you can see the display of two different drivers phones. |
| 0:38.2 | They're getting requests for the same job, same distance, same customer, everything is |
| 0:43.0 | the same except the amount of money they're being offered. |
| 0:46.4 | So the first one we're looking at is it's a 1702 ride and there you go, same ride 1882. |
| 0:56.9 | In case you didn't catch that, the only difference is the drivers. |
| 1:00.5 | One is being offered $17.02 to do the job, the other $18.82. |
| 1:07.8 | And it's not a fluke. |
| 1:08.8 | Here's another trip, same exact thing, 2033 versus 1863. |
| 1:14.9 | What's happening that you can't see is that an algorithm is figuring out exactly how much |
| 1:19.9 | money each driver will get paid, exactly how much it will take for that driver to accept |
| 1:26.0 | the trip and that all starts when a passenger requests a ride. |
| 1:30.5 | Once you push order or order tab on the ride, on the app, it starts looking for a driver |
| 1:36.6 | to match you with. |
| 1:38.3 | That's Sergio Avidian, a gig worker and senior contributor to the ride share guy. |
| 1:43.0 | I call it almost like a Dutch auction. |
... |
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