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grte

Toronto ride-hail drivers net just $6.37 an hour in 'legislated poverty', report says (www.cp24.com)

submitted 1 year ago by grte to c/canadalabour

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[–] wise_pancake 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

MPPs are discussing the issue in committee. The study authors are pushing the city to consider reinstating its cap on drivers, on the grounds that fewer drivers could mean each driver gets a greater share of the rides.

For the love of god please don't.

This is a supply and demand problem, an oversupply of drivers results in lower wages, and the market should sort itself out in the long term.

Uber and Lyft regulate the balance of supply and demand via price, which they alone determine. The ride sharing companies want enough capacity that riders don't have to wait, and drivers want to be on the app where the users are, but clearly drivers are willing to put up with more than they should in the hope they get rides. Riders don't care about this issue at all, and I'll bet Uber take more of a driver's pay than the taxi companies used to.

So the government has a few good options:

Class drivers as employees, since they effectively are, if you want them to earn minimum wage. Nobody cares that any other class of contractor gets below minimum wage, so why do we care about ride share drivers?
Set rules or establish a market maker for ride sharing, like financial markets have, which would let the demand and supply sides both negotiate and freely set prices. This could/should involve capping the amount of money the ride share companies take. Uber/Lyft effectively tax both riders and drivers and make the market strictly less efficient than it otherwise would be.
Just ban Uber and Lyft. Other countries have done it. If you go to Ireland their free taxi app is every bit as good as Uber with all the regulatory compliance of the taxi industry.
Lend money out for local companies to create their own local ride sharing apps. If drivers are contractors they can run the local ones too which will compete for price.
Build their own ride sharing app (except don't because I don't want to see some huge contract go to a company called "GovServiceWorks" with 4 employees to contract out an RFP, collect the cheque, and outsource the work to India, all while saying they misquoted the price and getting 10x what they quoted)