I feel that I have something of a calling to write about the rideshare drivers’ vulnerability to exploitation and abuse in the absence of any guidelines or legal framework for protection. This book is written within the context of false promises of economic prosperity and good quality of life for rideshare drivers made by digital taxi platforms on launching. In fact, they delivered quite the opposite: economic hardship, poverty, and labor conditions reminiscent of the slavery era.
This book should be viewed within the context of labormarket economic policies of exploitation that aggravate rather than ameliorate financial hardships of drivers on digital taxi platforms. It wouldn’t make much sense to talk about exploitation and slave wages in abstract without identifying such key factors as lack of a framework of protection for drivers and inaction on the part of lawmakers. These create an opportunity for rideshare digital taxi platforms to extort money from drivers and riders through manipulation of commissions, surge pricing, and cancellation fees.
Some of these factors, including drivers’ inability to exercise their bargaining power collectively, are an affront to the claim of an economic model of prosperity and upward mobility. Those drivers with work experience as independent contractors on both regular taxi platforms and digital platforms are well positioned to expound on the difference.
About the Book
I feel that I have something of a calling to write about the rideshare drivers’ vulnerability to exploitation and abuse in the absence of any guidelines or legal framework for protection. This book is written within the context of false promises of economic prosperity and good quality of life for rideshare drivers made by digital taxi platforms on launching. In fact, they delivered quite the opposite: economic hardship, poverty, and labor conditions reminiscent of the slavery era.
This book should be viewed within the context of labormarket economic policies of exploitation that aggravate rather than ameliorate financial hardships of drivers on digital taxi platforms. It wouldn’t make much sense to talk about exploitation and slave wages in abstract without identifying such key factors as lack of a framework of protection for drivers and inaction on the part of lawmakers. These create an opportunity for rideshare digital taxi platforms to extort money from drivers and riders through manipulation of commissions, surge pricing, and cancellation fees.
Some of these factors, including drivers’ inability to exercise their bargaining power collectively, are an affront to the claim of an economic model of prosperity and upward mobility. Those drivers with work experience as independent contractors on both regular taxi platforms and digital platforms are well positioned to expound on the difference.