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[...] Drivers don't have a dedicated human manager who responds to their inquiries. Instead, they have community support representatives (CSRs), located at the email equivalent of a call center, often located abroad, such as in the Philippines, and managed by third-party companies, like Zendesk. Effectively, Uber offshores and automates its main communications with drivers. Drivers receive automated replies to most of their messages, which often appear to be based on keywords in the the text of their emails. [...]
christ. wonder if they're partnering with a startup that does automated customer service using "AI"
[...] I ask if the company tries to build trust with its drivers, and hte answer - that Uber cares about building trust with all of its end users - floors me. The fact that even in an informal interview this person is deploying the language used in the lawsuits gives me pause [...] the senior employee persists in asking me how Uber can improve its relationship with drivers. I can't hep but think this is roughly akin to asking how to improve your relationship with your girlfriend after she discovers that she is, in fact, your mistress.
hahaha love this
[...] the company contorts itself in order to avoid giving the impression that its workers are considered employees [...] "It says bicycle couriers who work for Deliveroo are never to be referred to as workers, employees, or staff, and that the Deliveroo jackets they have to wear on the job are not uniforms but 'branded clothing'. These workers don't have 'contracts', says the document, but 'supplier agreements'. They don't 'schedule shifts', but 'indicate their availability'. And they can never get sacked - instead, they're 'terminated'."
about a leaked dock in june 2017
short story idea: non-tech company that tries the same thing and gets sued or workers unionise
[...] as Uber enters a new space, it takes a direct-to-consumer approach, bypassing potential barriers, like regulations or political opposition, by winning over consumers with its effective app. It cautions opponents that might try to constrain some of its practices by conveying the message, "Be grateful for the disruptive innovation we bring, because what we offer is superior to the regulations that would hold us back" (what I refer to as "gratitude logic"). Because of its size and influence, it simply shrugs off regulation that it doesn't like. Then, Uber shifts and reshifts its identity, trying to find exploitable cracks and inconsistencies between various systems of rules and laws. Finally, Uber plays stakeholders against each other, using temporary alliances to gain a foothold wherever it goes. In many cases, drivers, passengers, cities, and others benefit from Uber's operations, but there are always others who are left behind.
damn this is good! very similar reasoning to my piece on Uber from sep 2017
[...] when Uber first arrives in a city, rates are higher and drivers are often happier. Then, it floods the market with new drivers, sometimes by widening eligibility criteria (such as by extending the range of cars drivers can use), and often lowers the rates at which driven earn their income. By creating a job for everyone, Uber can undermine the interests of dedicated full-timers. In effect, one civil rights cause—equality of access—is pitted against another cause: job security. The sheen of civil-society partnerships gives Uber cover for practices that negatively affect drivers in other arenas.
[...] The multiplying numbers who hold a stake in Uber's future can create paradoxical clashes between civil rights and labor rights efforts when they might otherwise be aligned, because organization in favor of or in resistance to Uber is not uniform.
The specter of managing labor's economic relations along racial lines evokes other social struggles in American history. For example, historian Nancy MacLean reminds us that at the turn of the nineteenth century, a battle brewed in Tennessee between free miners and employers who (in collusion with the state) were keeping wages low by renting cheap convict labor. "The widely reviled system, so redolent of slavery, created a perverse incentive to lock new up for petty offenses so the state could rent them out to coal companies as dirt-cheap labor to rake the jobs of free miners, who had organized the United Mine Workers of America to demand living wages and decent treatment." [...]
needs to be analysed further but, damn, food for thought
My friends in publishing were skeptical when I told them where I was going to work. They had a lot of questions I felt uneasy answering. Wouldn’t a subscription model undercut author royalties? Wasn’t it basically a cynical, capitalist appropriation of the public library system? Wasn’t an app like this parasitic at best? Was it all that different from the online superstore, and wouldn’t the app’s success come at the expense of the literary culture and community? I didn’t have a good response to most of these concerns. Mostly, I tried not to think about them. Smug and self-congratulatory, I translated most of my friends’ questions to mean, simply, What about us?
lol yep
The CEO did not acknowledge that the reason millennials might be interested in experiences—like the experience of renting things they could never own—was related to student loan debt, or the recession, or the plummeting market value of cultural products in an age of digital distribution. There were no crises in this vision of the future. There were only opportunities.
“She’s too interested in learning, not doing,” the CEO typed once into the company chat room. This was an accident—he meant it only for the other two cofounders. We huddled in the conference room and he apologized sincerely, while I looped the words over and over in my head. I had always been interested in learning, and I had always been rewarded for it; learning was what I did best. I wasn’t used to having the sort of professional license and latitude that the founders were given. I lacked their confidence, their entitlement. I did not know about startup maxims to experiment and “own” things. I had never heard the common tech incantation Ask forgiveness, not permission.
oof
In an effort to hype myself up, I developed the theory, however flimsy, that analytics was a natural extension of my liberal arts education. The e-book startup had used the analytics software to track our alpha users through the app, and I had enjoyed looking at some of the data: what our investors were reading, and abandoning; whether or not people read public-domain books with cover art designed by the CPO, which we had added to bolster the library. In a certain light, I tried to convince myself, business analytics could be seen as a form of applied sociology.
this is basically me with macro
Several months prior, a tech blog had published an article announcing the analytics startup’s first major fund-raising round of ten million dollars. When asked how he would spend the new funding, the CEO made his priorities clear: he would pay the first hundred employees far above market, he said, and spoil current employees to retain them. This was the language of customer acquisition, but I didn’t know. I didn’t think at all about the stratification, either; how the hundred-and-first employee might feel. I’d never worked anywhere with a hundred people—I’d never worked anywhere with twenty. I’d certainly never worked anywhere that wanted to spoil its employees and had the means to do it. Generous, I thought. I found the tenacity winning.