The purpose of the price is to find, quote, the revenue maximizing price.

So the most that the consumer will be willing to pay and the least that the driver will be willing to accept. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Ben Ray.

Ben is the coordinator of the gig economy project and the co-author of Scotland

after Britain, the two souls of Scottish independence. I think particularly relevant right now with the

recent resignation of Nicholas Sturgeon, if you are interested in that. And I would also note that

the gig economy project has a great newsletter that kind of has a weekly update on what's

going on with the gig economy in Europe from a worker's perspective. So if you're interested in that,

I'll have to link to it in the show notes. Now this week, we obviously get into what is going on

with the gig economy in Europe. There is movements toward a platform work directive on the

level of the European Union that would then apply to the various member states. Now, this is still in the works, but there was a recent success at the European Parliament. So we wanted to talk about that. I also wanted to discuss the kind of rollout of dynamic pricing that Uber is doing in Europe, because this is going to have real implications for drivers,

but also for people who use the service, right?

It's going to mean that the prices are going to fluctuate more.

There's going to be less insight into why that is happening.

And it leaves the door open, obviously, for Uber to make sure that they're paying drivers

less and charging workers more and then taking

more of the fees that are in between those two prices.

And then we also discuss what's going on in Barcelona right now, where there's a strong

taxi worker movement that has been really opposing these ride hailing companies and has also

been kind of rolling out a model that is focused on strong

rights and protections for taxi workers while using a public app to access that service instead of

some alternative like Uber or Cabify or various of these private tech companies. So I think that this is

a really fascinating

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