Some influencer here in Norway tried to work for a food-delivery service, called Wolt. His workday lasted 9.5 hrs, and he made 1607 NOK, and had 784 NOK in costs related to his car (fuel, toll), or 823 NOK before taxes. That's 86 NOK / hr., before taxes, or roughly $7.7 in USD (1 USD = 11.15). A full work-year here is 1950 hours, so if he consistently made that, it would put him around 167k NOK / year.
In comparison, median salary in Norway is is around 608k - so he made over 3.5x less than the median salary. It should be noted that salaries in Norway are very much centered around the mean, with not a whole lot of variance. The lowest paid workers, like cleaners, call center workers, etc. will make maybe 300k - 400k, while higher paid workers like engineers, lawyers, dentists, GPs, etc. will make 1.5x-3x the median or mean salary.
In any case, gig workers seem to earn a horrible salary
He'd live in poverty on a salary like that, and likely be better off by claiming welfare money.
I've had a ton of friends and coworkers do Lift/Uber/Dash and nobody I know actually makes a serious profit once they account for maintenance, consumables, fuel, healthcare, etc.
The companies know this. They "dynamically" change the payout rate so nobody can actually make real money.
This is in the US where these companies have been caught using "dynamic" pricing to screw everyone over.
I love HN posts with lots of numbers like this. And we can do searches and see its not far off from quick queries. Is that data+driven? Any case,) rooting conversation (especially these days) in ~verifiable data is important for good discourse.
It was always like that, however the marketing was great. Even here you had people arguing how it was better than a regular job since you can make your own hours. Only, your not going to be making money doing food delivery when people are sleeping. Most money for driving people around will be either at rush hour or a weekend evening.
So you're not making your own hours you are working hours set by "the market".
You do make your own hours, because you have the choice to not work when there's work presented to you.
This is not possible in a full time position, nor is it possible in a casual setting (for example, there might be set schedules in a casual work position).
So gig work does give you the choice to make your own hours, because you're choosing to accept (or decline) when work is available, and there's (apparently) no penalty for declining.
Now, of course, there's better versions of "making your own hours" - like those consultant contracts that don't stipulate time, but output by deadline. You get to choose _when_ to work, as well as how much, as long as you deliver. But just because there's a better version of something, doesn't invalidate the slightly less better version of the same thing.
that's what they're counting on: people don't do the math - if the advertised salary was accurate minus costs i'd be surprised if they could stay in business
I've been basically begging my friends that drive for Uber/Lyft in SF to figure out a game plan. I've completely switched over to Waymo at this point because it's just a superior experience in numerous ways. I have to imagine the human drivers will be fighting over scraps in a few more years.
I truly do empathize with the situation, and I understand this report applies to more than just Uber/Lyft drivers in one specific city, but, at the same time, I find it frustrating to see a glaring paradigm shift being met with apathy - as if the value they provide through their work won't drop markedly in the face of automation.
Driving is just a gig, it's not like they are super invested in it and did years of study in a particular style of driving and couldn't do any other job. The apathy is because it's easy come, easy go.
That's actually a really good point. Economists should track statistics from these gig apps as an alternative measure of unskilled unemployment. If gig app wages are low, that suggests unemployment is high in a way that's not being picked up by official stats.
Gigs are part of the sinkhole; funneling money from those struggling to get by to the app-makers and their investors. At best, gigs are the pretty-but-slippery wallpaper lining the sinkhole many have fallen into, and can't climb out of because the apps unilaterally decide how small the gig-workers' share of the revenue is.
Don't gig apps largely create jobs that didn't exist previously? E.g. we used to have a few people employed in pizza delivery and taxi driving; now we have delivery for a much wider variety of restaurants, and taking an Uber/Lyft is far more common than taking a taxi used to be.
So I don't see traditional jobs being cannibalized for the most part.
Alternatively, wages are low in gig apps because so many enjoy the flexibility that the apps provide.
Isn't it the opposite? Have any of these companies made net lifetime profit? They hemorraged money for years to build market share? Which of them are actually profitable and have they made all that money back?
It seems to me more like funnelling money from investors to software developers and consumers given how unprofitable they are.
Not too surprising. That California Prop 22 from 2020 and similar props throughout the country is finally paying off. A waning economy and rising costs also make the gig workers suffer the most.
>In response to the report, an Uber spokesperson told BI that its drivers make more than $30 an hour on average.
Gotta love the ol' "well the average is decent" line in times of unprecedented standard deviations. Though there may be even more creative accounting for their average compared to:
>Uber hide-hailing drivers saw their earnings for 2024 fall 3.4% on average to $513 a week, according to a study released Tuesday by data analytics company Gridwise. At the same time, Uber drivers worked 0.8% more hours in 2024.
The analogy breaks because the mean is skewable by high incomes and the median is well ... a number such that if you add $1 most people earn less than that.
Bottom 10-percentile would be a good measure maybe for something to lift if you are left leaning or right leaning and see the economy holistically.
The US economy appears to growing at about the same (inflation-adjusted) rate that it has since the 80s. [0]
But it certainly does seem that the consumer price index is failing to capture the reality of rising costs. For example the big mac index significantly outpaced the CPI the last few years.[1] And obviously housing and education costs have outpaced inflation. I guess it's politically expedient to under-report inflation... I wonder what the "real" GDP growth would be if we had a measure of cost that actually reflected the reality of people's lives.
Of course, that's not even mentioning increasing inequality.
The components of cpi are all individually reported, as is the weighting. You’re free to present your own weightings, or perhaps analyse people’s spendings as a service and categorise it to present a personal inflation index.
Yeah, surprise surprise, $13/hour is getting close to the average minimum wage ($11.18/hour). Except without any benefits, and all the expenses that would normally be covered by your employer.
I do not want to defend the gig apps but there is a major benefit, you can make your own schedule and (mostly) work in the geography that you want. That flexibility is extremely valuable to some people.
Sadly that’s the best option for some people. And it’s worth remembering that the hours many minimum wage jobs give are irregular in quantity with very little consistency of schedule.
We should definitely have robust protections for gig workers but we don’t want to throw out the baby with the bath water.
Thing is, the model could have been built with employees, even lowly paid ones, but then it would have been pretty transparent that they were subsidizing the rates to take market share from licensed taxis. The indirection is a feature, not a bug. Have we learned anything? Probably not.
How do you figure $13/hr? Most of the Uber drivers I have had work less than full time, and often weird hours: 3am to 1pm three days a week for example.
Yeah, thars probably where the "interpretation" from the Uber CEO comes in. If you measure it with 20 hour work weeks, it could indeed come down to $30/hr. I feel most people will compare it to their full time jobs when hearing the statistics, however.
I recently was traveling a lot and would take a uber multiple times a day. I asked all my drivers what they thought of the gig. To my surprise, most were pretty happy about it. The ones that were happy really liked the flexibility and autonomy. They could start and stop when they wanted, work where they wanted, take vacation when they wanted, etc. the ones that were unhappy complained about the pay and lack of benefits.
It really drove home for me that a job is more than just wages. If your goal is to maximize your income, gig work is probably not for you. But the nice thing is, no one is making you do it. If you don’t like the pay, go do something else. But it seems like gig work fills a niche that works really well for some people.
My most surprising encounter was an actual taxi. I asked the driver how does that work and he said that Uber fills the gaps in moments when he isn't getting any calls, as hardly anyone takes a taxi to travel short distances in the middle of the day.
Indeed, I called an Uber because I was in the middle of house hunting and a taxi would be considerably more expensive.
Illegal immigration has really hit gig work wages. So many people without valid work visas are sharing/renting uber and other accounts to do work. At least in Texas, I would guess 30-40% of gig workers are not legally allowed to be doing it.
Anecdotally, around 40-55% of my DoorDash (YC S13) delivery drivers can only speak Spanish (I set my deliveries to require a PIN so I meet them), and the style of Spanish they speak is a Central American register (I think Honduran, El Salvadoran, and Guatemalan) based on accent and word choice.
I'm not sure if they are "officially" illegal, but they are most likely waiting on an Asylum or Immigration hearing.
This is in SF.
I can also provide FB groups that sell DoorDash (YC S13) and Uber Eats delivery driver accounts to those who lack documentation if needed.
> "they only speak spanish" to, "there's a very high chance that they're here illegally"
Because you cannot get a Work Visa to work for DoorDash or Uber Eats, nor are most Central Americans eligible for Diversity Visas (excluding Guatemalans and Nicaraguans), nor is it family reunification as that has financial assistance requirements, nor are students on student visas legally allowed to work gig work roles.
That only leaves Asylees waiting on immigration hearings (Venezolanos, Colombianos) or TPS (Honduras, El Salvador) - which isn't illegal immigration in formal terms.
While TPS is a legally protected form of immigration, as the kid of immigrants who had to wait 16 years just to get a Green Card and were ineligible for a number of social service programs as naturalization includes proof of income sustainability, it grinds my gears because millions of immigrants have to prove employment or financial feasibility to come here.
There's a reason why Latiné and Asian American voters saw a significant shift to Trump in 2024 (not me - dislike his admin - but I get where those swing voters were coming from).
There needs to be immigration reform, but I absolutely don't have sympathy for economic migrants from Central America gumming up the works for an Afghan or Burmese asylee who will now get deported to countries in the midst of civil wars. And our inability to do so in the Biden admin is what allowed Trump to win in 2024.
You still don't have enough information to really know; there are plenty of ways to legally be in a country.
They could be on spouse visas, they could be natural-born citizens, born on american soil, but still haven't learned english. They could have been born to an american-citizen-parent abroad, making them american citizens.
Even though family reunification requires financial assistance, that doesn't preclude the dependent doing gig work for extra money beyond the minimum requirements.
There are far more possibilities than "work visa, student visa, asylee".
> They could be on spouse visas, they could be natural-born citizens, born on american soil, but still haven't learned english. They could have been born to an american-citizen-parent abroad, making them american citizens.
Absolutely, but the population of Salvadoran Americans growing from 710,000 to 2,500,000 and the population of Honduran Americans growing from 240,000 to 1,100,000 in 20 years, despite El Salvador's population remaining stagnant (Honduras's grew significantly over 20 years).
While not every worker is undocumented or abusing the TPS program, the cases you mentioned above cannot account for that scale of growth for a community.
I sympathize as a 1.5 gen immigrant, but at some point it does feel like a slap in the face when there are millions of us who spent decades stuck in immigration limbo due to visa backlogs AND were inelligible for social services like SNAP, free school lunches, etc as those could disqualify you from naturalization.
And that's why a significant portion of Latiné and Asian Americans flipped in 2024.
I really appreciate this response, thank you. I still think you're making some assumptions about quite a lot of people, eg, a friend of an asylum seekers might join an app together where both friends have vastly different legal situations.
Agreed about the lack of immigration reform from Biden's camp being a significant factor towards Latiné swing voters. DACA has always left me with a feeling that, while it was amazing in letting many folk live safely and able to fulfill themselves, it felt like the patchwork that would lead to zero action, followed by disaster. And it feels like the disaster is manifesting its head.
> I still think you're making some assumptions about quite a lot of people, eg, a friend of an asylum seekers might join an app together where both friends have vastly different legal situations
Absolutely! My heuristic is lossy, and the case you provide is probably happening.
> DACA has always left me with a feeling that, while it was amazing in letting many folk live safely and able to fulfill themselves, it felt like the patchwork that would lead to zero action, followed by disaster
Yep. I was working on the Hill for the Ds during DACA and immigration reform.
I had high hopes that we could have found a happy path to help humanize the immigration process, give documented status to law abiding individuals who lacked that, and prosecute and remove the minority of bad actors who give us immigrants (documented and undocumented) a bad reputation.
Sadly, neither the Rs (wanted to dunk on Obama 2) or the Ds cared enough because, to quote the LegAide who I reported to "immigrants can't vote", and this festered into the horrible situation that now exists.
We could have used DACA as a framework to build a more streamlined and ethical legal immigration process, but no one cared.
And so I became a jaded and very well compensated techie
Most of them are even on F1 visa working on someone else account. I know because many of indian students do that in NY and I used to ask them when I give tips.
Agreed, it’s not allowed and is gross violation of F1 requirement. Thats the reason they purchase account and give like 30% of income to person who sells doordash account. Many of them work at gas stations and motels, which is kinda sad. TBH, they don’t have many options because I’m sure most can’t afford tuition fees.
I wish the U.S. government would let them work 20 hours outside of university jobs, since most universities can’t provide enough work for them. The government should also ensure students have enough funds to study in the U.S.—for example, by checking their bank balance for the entire year, not just one day.
Hardly brand new, but at least done by an actual publication. Uber will never want to publish stats for this kind of thing, so I suspect this is the best we'll get for awhile
I've been documenting this data on my own with screenshots after seeing a degradation in DoorDash (YC S13) deliveries around 2022, and getting annoyed at having to escalate to customer service or peers at mid-level roles internally.
It's not at all scientific, but it's helped me get my escalations resolved fairly quickly after bringing up some of the data collection and potential liability issues (that cannot be resolved by arbitration ;) ) to their Safety teams.
I don't blame the drivers though. Fundamentally, it's product and operation leadership in Mission Bay (Uber) and Rincon Hill (DoorDash - YC S13) that is causing this - and I'm sure a lot of those guys are on HN as well.
Nothing will happen though, plenty of our peers are tight with this Admin. A16Z, YC, and a number of other funds became close to the Trump admin after the Biden admin poked the bear by proposing changes to unrealized capital gains tax brackets [0][1] along with the OECD Global Tax Deal [2]
I would guess based on personal visual observation that at least 50% of doordash drivers are not the person listed on the account. Although over maybe 100 orders, I've only had 2 real problems.
I rode in an Uber home from a rehab hospital recently after a long stay in the ICU. The guy was driving a Land Rover. I was a bit confused to say the least. The wear and tear and depreciation of that vehicle has to be crazy.
I've had several drivers in the LA area using $80k+ vehicles. The few I've asked, they've mentioned they work from home and it gives them an excuse to drive their car.
Ubers I take like the last 5 years are brand new Teslas or some other exorbitant car, car lobby shoving them leasing down the throat so they are enslaved to work off just the lease interest for few years
The only thing stopping minimum wage from rising is the Republican Party. The minimum already isn't market-driven, and it isn't pegged to inflation, either.
Adjusting for inflation, it's not surprising to see the lowest earners making less money.
Not that you were arguing against the point I'm going to make, but ddjusting for inflation, even those in good white-collar jobs are making way less money, and then add the cost of housing (or trying to buy a house) into the mix, and it's downright depressing.
I was just looking at a place that was $240K in 2007, and it now costs 1.05M. My wages didn't go from 150K to 600K in that same time period.
Many peoples’ wages went from 0-150k in that period. There were many layoffs during the Great Recession, and comparing asset values from then to now (a point at which there has been ~15 years of secular growth) is absurd.
If anyone is curious, I recently happened to look at what the federal minimum wage from the early '80s would be equivalent to today. It's $13-16/hour, depending on what method you use to convert to today's dollars.
So yeah, minimum wage workers (at least in states that don't set the state minimum wage higher than the federal minimum wage) have been getting screwed for a long time.
Yes, but that starts drifting into a discussion about company towns where one is free to leave - just as soon as the debt (owed to the company that sets your wages and determines your rent) is paid off
What people don’t understand is that pay isn’t everything.
Like remote work, people will accept being paid less to enjoy the benefits of flexibility that gig work provides, which ends up being better than getting paid more but being stuck to a rigid routine.
There is also more upward mobility in gig work as you can optimize over time to earn more, which isn’t possible in some jobs.
Believe me, if gig work was so shitty, people wouldn’t be doing it.
There’s also some hacks to reduce individual expenses like sharing a car with someone else who works different hours, etc.
The problem isn’t that gig work is low pay, the real problem is everything has gotten so expensive. Gig work was always going to be low pay.
"There is also more upward mobility in gig work as you can optimize over time to earn more, which isn’t possible in some jobs."
I think there is zero upwards mobility. Gig workers will always be a commodity at the bottom of the hierarchy. No promotions, no bonus, no RSU. Even their performance doesn't matter much. For example I can't request a specific Instacart shopper or Uber driver again who did a good job.
If genuine question... it depends. Gig work both creates new opportunities (AI classifying RLHF jobs for example) but also systemically removes them. I.e. jobs may not exist now that companies can gig out the bits they need. I have no solutions just an observation.
“Gig work” was always shitty pay _after_ you consider all of the expenses and depreciation in assets. You are an “independent contractor” after all.
If you drive for a TNC, you may on paper earn more per hour but after gas, wear and tear on vehicle (changing out brakes, tires much faster), increased maintenance, steep depreciation of vehicle, higher insurance premiums for commercial auto.
Then you factor in having to buy your own health insurance on the market, dental insurance, and other expenses that a normal, salaried, full time job comes with. Don’t forget about the taxes you have to pay out at the end of the year that would normally be taken out with each paycheck.
I remember doing gig work when those companies were shelling out $1,000s for new drivers. But once those teasers expired and rates got cut, it didn’t make much sense from a financial aspect to continue doing so.
Great beer money for a college student but I don’t see how folks make a sustainable living on the slave wage.
Are you really an independent contractor if you cant set your own prices?
To me Uber drivers are neither employees nor independent contractors. Working as much or as little as they want is not enough to be considered independent contractor.
Sure it's more common that contractors offer pricing, but there are industries where the reverse. For instance, magazines typically have set offered rates they'll pay for articles by freelancers.
And this another example of where all laws have unintended consequences. The same law that was California passed to “help” Uber drivers and other gig workers hurt people who really did want to do gig work like write articles for websites.
> Are you really an independent contractor if you cant set your own prices?
Yes. Most tradespeople have limited control over the rates they can charge. To the extent they can set rates, an Uber driver and accept and decline fares.
Why do people think that independent contractors can always set their own rates? If I could just set my own rate I would ask for 1 million dollars an hour.
I could either negotiate the rate and walk away if it isn’t high enough or accept the rate.
Dynamic pricing is suppose to do just that. Uber sets their own rates rate based on demand. Higher prices should encourage more drivers and the market works itself out.
Yeah you could set your rate at 1m per hour but the market would kick you out.
Let's put an example with carpenters. Lets say I have contracted two different guys and I know how they work. One is cheap but unreliable and the other one is expensive but reliable. As the customer I can decide that the rate of the second one is acceptable and he is being fair with it because I have trust he will show up on time. If he were to charge me 1m per hour I'd no longer consider his rate as fair and no longer hore him for gigs. Also I can also search the unicorn carpenter who is cheap and reliable.
The market decides the rate. You can charge as little as you want but you might be missing money or even be in red numbers. Charge too much and you wont have contracts.
Setting your own rate is not the same as everybody accepting your rate.
> Dynamic pricing is suppose to do just that.
If an Uber driver has a nicer, cleaner car can he charge more? No. Then he cant set up his own rates. No matter how much better he is at the job he will charge the same as everybody else.
That's why Uber drivers are caught in the worst of two worlds. They are not employees but cant decide how much to earn per trip
Yes, they can take and UberXL and UberXXL rides as well Black and Black SUV rides.
There is also a rate that Uber charges for more reliable drivers.
Also, I’ve known many that make deals off platform especially for long drives. There was one older driver we got to know when we go back home to ATL that we call specifically.
This is just like developers use platforms at first that pay less and then move off platform.
idk why government don't make law that clearly says, if someone works for more than 20 hours they should be considered full time employee and deserves all the extra perks and benefits.
Some influencer here in Norway tried to work for a food-delivery service, called Wolt. His workday lasted 9.5 hrs, and he made 1607 NOK, and had 784 NOK in costs related to his car (fuel, toll), or 823 NOK before taxes. That's 86 NOK / hr., before taxes, or roughly $7.7 in USD (1 USD = 11.15). A full work-year here is 1950 hours, so if he consistently made that, it would put him around 167k NOK / year.
In comparison, median salary in Norway is is around 608k - so he made over 3.5x less than the median salary. It should be noted that salaries in Norway are very much centered around the mean, with not a whole lot of variance. The lowest paid workers, like cleaners, call center workers, etc. will make maybe 300k - 400k, while higher paid workers like engineers, lawyers, dentists, GPs, etc. will make 1.5x-3x the median or mean salary.
In any case, gig workers seem to earn a horrible salary
He'd live in poverty on a salary like that, and likely be better off by claiming welfare money.
I've had a ton of friends and coworkers do Lift/Uber/Dash and nobody I know actually makes a serious profit once they account for maintenance, consumables, fuel, healthcare, etc.
The companies know this. They "dynamically" change the payout rate so nobody can actually make real money.
This is in the US where these companies have been caught using "dynamic" pricing to screw everyone over.
Making videos about working at Wolt earns more money than actually working at Wolt
I love HN posts with lots of numbers like this. And we can do searches and see its not far off from quick queries. Is that data+driven? Any case,) rooting conversation (especially these days) in ~verifiable data is important for good discourse.
It was always like that, however the marketing was great. Even here you had people arguing how it was better than a regular job since you can make your own hours. Only, your not going to be making money doing food delivery when people are sleeping. Most money for driving people around will be either at rush hour or a weekend evening.
So you're not making your own hours you are working hours set by "the market".
You do make your own hours, because you have the choice to not work when there's work presented to you.
This is not possible in a full time position, nor is it possible in a casual setting (for example, there might be set schedules in a casual work position).
So gig work does give you the choice to make your own hours, because you're choosing to accept (or decline) when work is available, and there's (apparently) no penalty for declining.
Now, of course, there's better versions of "making your own hours" - like those consultant contracts that don't stipulate time, but output by deadline. You get to choose _when_ to work, as well as how much, as long as you deliver. But just because there's a better version of something, doesn't invalidate the slightly less better version of the same thing.
Does it count as "picking your own hours" if you can't make any money regardless of how many you pick?
if a small business owner (say, a coffee shop) doesn't make money, does it still count as picking your own hours?
I does, and it's still crappy choice. The lag hours are now absorbed by the employee rather than the corporate.
Externalise the costs, call it your profit and boom - it's capitalism baby.
Yeah the math is really important.
Whether a magician at kids birthday parties, or food delivery, or hanging sheetrock you need to figure out how much you’re actually going to make.
that's what they're counting on: people don't do the math - if the advertised salary was accurate minus costs i'd be surprised if they could stay in business
I've been basically begging my friends that drive for Uber/Lyft in SF to figure out a game plan. I've completely switched over to Waymo at this point because it's just a superior experience in numerous ways. I have to imagine the human drivers will be fighting over scraps in a few more years.
I truly do empathize with the situation, and I understand this report applies to more than just Uber/Lyft drivers in one specific city, but, at the same time, I find it frustrating to see a glaring paradigm shift being met with apathy - as if the value they provide through their work won't drop markedly in the face of automation.
Driving is just a gig, it's not like they are super invested in it and did years of study in a particular style of driving and couldn't do any other job. The apathy is because it's easy come, easy go.
Gigs are papering over a gaping sinkhole in the economy.
That's actually a really good point. Economists should track statistics from these gig apps as an alternative measure of unskilled unemployment. If gig app wages are low, that suggests unemployment is high in a way that's not being picked up by official stats.
Gigs are part of the sinkhole; funneling money from those struggling to get by to the app-makers and their investors. At best, gigs are the pretty-but-slippery wallpaper lining the sinkhole many have fallen into, and can't climb out of because the apps unilaterally decide how small the gig-workers' share of the revenue is.
Don't gig apps largely create jobs that didn't exist previously? E.g. we used to have a few people employed in pizza delivery and taxi driving; now we have delivery for a much wider variety of restaurants, and taking an Uber/Lyft is far more common than taking a taxi used to be.
So I don't see traditional jobs being cannibalized for the most part.
Alternatively, wages are low in gig apps because so many enjoy the flexibility that the apps provide.
Isn't it the opposite? Have any of these companies made net lifetime profit? They hemorraged money for years to build market share? Which of them are actually profitable and have they made all that money back?
It seems to me more like funnelling money from investors to software developers and consumers given how unprofitable they are.
Not if the investors can get an IPO done because of their great "innovation", then the bag holders are 401ks, mostly.
"gig" is newspeak for unregulated labor.
Not too surprising. That California Prop 22 from 2020 and similar props throughout the country is finally paying off. A waning economy and rising costs also make the gig workers suffer the most.
>In response to the report, an Uber spokesperson told BI that its drivers make more than $30 an hour on average.
Gotta love the ol' "well the average is decent" line in times of unprecedented standard deviations. Though there may be even more creative accounting for their average compared to:
>Uber hide-hailing drivers saw their earnings for 2024 fall 3.4% on average to $513 a week, according to a study released Tuesday by data analytics company Gridwise. At the same time, Uber drivers worked 0.8% more hours in 2024.
roughly $13/hr.
I eat bread, Uber CEO eats marble steak. On average we eat a burger
There is one Uber CEO and many people eating bread. On average you eat bread;
The analogy breaks because the mean is skewable by high incomes and the median is well ... a number such that if you add $1 most people earn less than that.
Bottom 10-percentile would be a good measure maybe for something to lift if you are left leaning or right leaning and see the economy holistically.
When wealth follows a power law distribution, that's very questionable.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_law#Lack_of_well-defin...
OP should have written
We (1000 people) eat bread, Uber CEO eats 1000 marble steaks. On average we eat a burger each
Economists claim on average we eat a burger each; voters vote in politicians who want to "cut the wasteful burger budget and lower taxes on steaks"
If you have 1000 people making $1 along with one person making $1000, the average is about $2 - so 99.9% of people are making less than the average.
You're forgetting that CEO's steak is the size of a skyscraper.
I'd like to know how much they make after factoring in gas, insurance, and wear/tear on the vehicle
It's very little. Most people I know make around $10/hr after costs if they stay really busy. Most rely on a couple of big tips a day.
That's below minimum wage where I'm at. And remember there's no healthcare, benefits, etc. So that $10/hr is divided further.
> waning economy and rising costs
The US economy appears to growing at about the same (inflation-adjusted) rate that it has since the 80s. [0]
But it certainly does seem that the consumer price index is failing to capture the reality of rising costs. For example the big mac index significantly outpaced the CPI the last few years.[1] And obviously housing and education costs have outpaced inflation. I guess it's politically expedient to under-report inflation... I wonder what the "real" GDP growth would be if we had a measure of cost that actually reflected the reality of people's lives.
Of course, that's not even mentioning increasing inequality.
[0] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GDPC1/
[1] https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2024/apr/how-big-m...
The components of cpi are all individually reported, as is the weighting. You’re free to present your own weightings, or perhaps analyse people’s spendings as a service and categorise it to present a personal inflation index.
Yeah, surprise surprise, $13/hour is getting close to the average minimum wage ($11.18/hour). Except without any benefits, and all the expenses that would normally be covered by your employer.
I do not want to defend the gig apps but there is a major benefit, you can make your own schedule and (mostly) work in the geography that you want. That flexibility is extremely valuable to some people.
Sure, make arguably less than minimum wage but do it whenever you want.
Sadly that’s the best option for some people. And it’s worth remembering that the hours many minimum wage jobs give are irregular in quantity with very little consistency of schedule.
We should definitely have robust protections for gig workers but we don’t want to throw out the baby with the bath water.
Thing is, the model could have been built with employees, even lowly paid ones, but then it would have been pretty transparent that they were subsidizing the rates to take market share from licensed taxis. The indirection is a feature, not a bug. Have we learned anything? Probably not.
How do you figure $13/hr? Most of the Uber drivers I have had work less than full time, and often weird hours: 3am to 1pm three days a week for example.
Yeah, thars probably where the "interpretation" from the Uber CEO comes in. If you measure it with 20 hour work weeks, it could indeed come down to $30/hr. I feel most people will compare it to their full time jobs when hearing the statistics, however.
I recently was traveling a lot and would take a uber multiple times a day. I asked all my drivers what they thought of the gig. To my surprise, most were pretty happy about it. The ones that were happy really liked the flexibility and autonomy. They could start and stop when they wanted, work where they wanted, take vacation when they wanted, etc. the ones that were unhappy complained about the pay and lack of benefits.
It really drove home for me that a job is more than just wages. If your goal is to maximize your income, gig work is probably not for you. But the nice thing is, no one is making you do it. If you don’t like the pay, go do something else. But it seems like gig work fills a niche that works really well for some people.
My most surprising encounter was an actual taxi. I asked the driver how does that work and he said that Uber fills the gaps in moments when he isn't getting any calls, as hardly anyone takes a taxi to travel short distances in the middle of the day.
Indeed, I called an Uber because I was in the middle of house hunting and a taxi would be considerably more expensive.
Illegal immigration has really hit gig work wages. So many people without valid work visas are sharing/renting uber and other accounts to do work. At least in Texas, I would guess 30-40% of gig workers are not legally allowed to be doing it.
Do you have any source that would agree with your 30-40%?
Anecdotally, around 40-55% of my DoorDash (YC S13) delivery drivers can only speak Spanish (I set my deliveries to require a PIN so I meet them), and the style of Spanish they speak is a Central American register (I think Honduran, El Salvadoran, and Guatemalan) based on accent and word choice.
I'm not sure if they are "officially" illegal, but they are most likely waiting on an Asylum or Immigration hearing.
This is in SF.
I can also provide FB groups that sell DoorDash (YC S13) and Uber Eats delivery driver accounts to those who lack documentation if needed.
> "they only speak spanish" to, "there's a very high chance that they're here illegally"
Because you cannot get a Work Visa to work for DoorDash or Uber Eats, nor are most Central Americans eligible for Diversity Visas (excluding Guatemalans and Nicaraguans), nor is it family reunification as that has financial assistance requirements, nor are students on student visas legally allowed to work gig work roles.
That only leaves Asylees waiting on immigration hearings (Venezolanos, Colombianos) or TPS (Honduras, El Salvador) - which isn't illegal immigration in formal terms.
While TPS is a legally protected form of immigration, as the kid of immigrants who had to wait 16 years just to get a Green Card and were ineligible for a number of social service programs as naturalization includes proof of income sustainability, it grinds my gears because millions of immigrants have to prove employment or financial feasibility to come here.
There's a reason why Latiné and Asian American voters saw a significant shift to Trump in 2024 (not me - dislike his admin - but I get where those swing voters were coming from).
There needs to be immigration reform, but I absolutely don't have sympathy for economic migrants from Central America gumming up the works for an Afghan or Burmese asylee who will now get deported to countries in the midst of civil wars. And our inability to do so in the Biden admin is what allowed Trump to win in 2024.
You still don't have enough information to really know; there are plenty of ways to legally be in a country.
They could be on spouse visas, they could be natural-born citizens, born on american soil, but still haven't learned english. They could have been born to an american-citizen-parent abroad, making them american citizens.
Even though family reunification requires financial assistance, that doesn't preclude the dependent doing gig work for extra money beyond the minimum requirements.
There are far more possibilities than "work visa, student visa, asylee".
> They could be on spouse visas, they could be natural-born citizens, born on american soil, but still haven't learned english. They could have been born to an american-citizen-parent abroad, making them american citizens.
Absolutely, but the population of Salvadoran Americans growing from 710,000 to 2,500,000 and the population of Honduran Americans growing from 240,000 to 1,100,000 in 20 years, despite El Salvador's population remaining stagnant (Honduras's grew significantly over 20 years).
While not every worker is undocumented or abusing the TPS program, the cases you mentioned above cannot account for that scale of growth for a community.
I sympathize as a 1.5 gen immigrant, but at some point it does feel like a slap in the face when there are millions of us who spent decades stuck in immigration limbo due to visa backlogs AND were inelligible for social services like SNAP, free school lunches, etc as those could disqualify you from naturalization.
And that's why a significant portion of Latiné and Asian Americans flipped in 2024.
I really appreciate this response, thank you. I still think you're making some assumptions about quite a lot of people, eg, a friend of an asylum seekers might join an app together where both friends have vastly different legal situations.
Agreed about the lack of immigration reform from Biden's camp being a significant factor towards Latiné swing voters. DACA has always left me with a feeling that, while it was amazing in letting many folk live safely and able to fulfill themselves, it felt like the patchwork that would lead to zero action, followed by disaster. And it feels like the disaster is manifesting its head.
> I still think you're making some assumptions about quite a lot of people, eg, a friend of an asylum seekers might join an app together where both friends have vastly different legal situations
Absolutely! My heuristic is lossy, and the case you provide is probably happening.
> DACA has always left me with a feeling that, while it was amazing in letting many folk live safely and able to fulfill themselves, it felt like the patchwork that would lead to zero action, followed by disaster
Yep. I was working on the Hill for the Ds during DACA and immigration reform.
I had high hopes that we could have found a happy path to help humanize the immigration process, give documented status to law abiding individuals who lacked that, and prosecute and remove the minority of bad actors who give us immigrants (documented and undocumented) a bad reputation.
Sadly, neither the Rs (wanted to dunk on Obama 2) or the Ds cared enough because, to quote the LegAide who I reported to "immigrants can't vote", and this festered into the horrible situation that now exists.
We could have used DACA as a framework to build a more streamlined and ethical legal immigration process, but no one cared.
And so I became a jaded and very well compensated techie
Most of them are even on F1 visa working on someone else account. I know because many of indian students do that in NY and I used to ask them when I give tips.
Yep! And that's technically a violation of their F1 requirements.
1099 work is not allowed for F1 holders.
Agreed, it’s not allowed and is gross violation of F1 requirement. Thats the reason they purchase account and give like 30% of income to person who sells doordash account. Many of them work at gas stations and motels, which is kinda sad. TBH, they don’t have many options because I’m sure most can’t afford tuition fees.
I wish the U.S. government would let them work 20 hours outside of university jobs, since most universities can’t provide enough work for them. The government should also ensure students have enough funds to study in the U.S.—for example, by checking their bank balance for the entire year, not just one day.
> the U.S. government would let them work 20 hours outside of university jobs, since most universities can’t provide enough work for them
They don't have to work university jobs.
They need to work for an employer who will file a CPT in conjunction with the university with USCIS. 1099 employment isn't meant for that.
Hardly brand new, but at least done by an actual publication. Uber will never want to publish stats for this kind of thing, so I suspect this is the best we'll get for awhile
https://www.wired.com/story/priscila-queen-of-the-rideshare-...
I'm someone else, but I can vouch that most of my doordash driver names are female, and most of my delivery people are male.
nobody could possibly have that data
I've been documenting this data on my own with screenshots after seeing a degradation in DoorDash (YC S13) deliveries around 2022, and getting annoyed at having to escalate to customer service or peers at mid-level roles internally.
It's not at all scientific, but it's helped me get my escalations resolved fairly quickly after bringing up some of the data collection and potential liability issues (that cannot be resolved by arbitration ;) ) to their Safety teams.
I don't blame the drivers though. Fundamentally, it's product and operation leadership in Mission Bay (Uber) and Rincon Hill (DoorDash - YC S13) that is causing this - and I'm sure a lot of those guys are on HN as well.
Nothing will happen though, plenty of our peers are tight with this Admin. A16Z, YC, and a number of other funds became close to the Trump admin after the Biden admin poked the bear by proposing changes to unrealized capital gains tax brackets [0][1] along with the OECD Global Tax Deal [2]
[0] - https://www.axios.com/2024/07/17/trump-andreessen-horowitz-t...
[1] - https://www.axios.com/2024/08/23/kamala-harris-unrealized-ca...
[2] - https://rsmus.com/insights/services/business-tax/us-rejects-...
I would guess based on personal visual observation that at least 50% of doordash drivers are not the person listed on the account. Although over maybe 100 orders, I've only had 2 real problems.
and this corpos don't give one fuck as usual
I rode in an Uber home from a rehab hospital recently after a long stay in the ICU. The guy was driving a Land Rover. I was a bit confused to say the least. The wear and tear and depreciation of that vehicle has to be crazy.
I've had several drivers in the LA area using $80k+ vehicles. The few I've asked, they've mentioned they work from home and it gives them an excuse to drive their car.
If I were living above my means, that sounds like an excuse I would give as well.
Some of them also don't pay for their vehicles. Their parents lease them a car or some situation like that.
Amazon delivery the other day was a guy in a Mercedes ... gotta pay the lease on the car you can't afford somehow.
Most of the people I see buying Land Rovers probably need a side gig to afford them.
Ubers I take like the last 5 years are brand new Teslas or some other exorbitant car, car lobby shoving them leasing down the throat so they are enslaved to work off just the lease interest for few years
Cannot help but feel gig working is what stopping minimum wage from rising.
The only thing stopping minimum wage from rising is the Republican Party. The minimum already isn't market-driven, and it isn't pegged to inflation, either.
Adjusting for inflation, it's not surprising to see the lowest earners making less money.
Not that you were arguing against the point I'm going to make, but ddjusting for inflation, even those in good white-collar jobs are making way less money, and then add the cost of housing (or trying to buy a house) into the mix, and it's downright depressing.
I was just looking at a place that was $240K in 2007, and it now costs 1.05M. My wages didn't go from 150K to 600K in that same time period.
Many peoples’ wages went from 0-150k in that period. There were many layoffs during the Great Recession, and comparing asset values from then to now (a point at which there has been ~15 years of secular growth) is absurd.
> My wages didn't go from 150K to 600K in that same time period.
the thing is, there are people who did have such an increase (in wealth, if not by income).
Therefore, the value of said house is higher, because those people who did have wealth increases want those houses.
When wage minimums aren’t tied to inflation, we’re stealing from those with the least to increase returns.
If anyone is curious, I recently happened to look at what the federal minimum wage from the early '80s would be equivalent to today. It's $13-16/hour, depending on what method you use to convert to today's dollars.
So yeah, minimum wage workers (at least in states that don't set the state minimum wage higher than the federal minimum wage) have been getting screwed for a long time.
Minimum wage is not a market-driven empirical number "here's the lowest wage that we were able to find someone working for".
It's a government imposition that bans any jobs that would pay less than some decreed amount.
There must be some magic caloric boundary where "work" becomes a "labour" camp in all but name and a dollar value attached to that.
I take your point, but I believe "freedom to quit and go elsewhere" is also a critical distinction...
Yes, but that starts drifting into a discussion about company towns where one is free to leave - just as soon as the debt (owed to the company that sets your wages and determines your rent) is paid off
Moral of the story: don't be a gig worker.
What people don’t understand is that pay isn’t everything.
Like remote work, people will accept being paid less to enjoy the benefits of flexibility that gig work provides, which ends up being better than getting paid more but being stuck to a rigid routine.
There is also more upward mobility in gig work as you can optimize over time to earn more, which isn’t possible in some jobs.
Believe me, if gig work was so shitty, people wouldn’t be doing it.
There’s also some hacks to reduce individual expenses like sharing a car with someone else who works different hours, etc.
The problem isn’t that gig work is low pay, the real problem is everything has gotten so expensive. Gig work was always going to be low pay.
Could you explain what you mean by upward mobility here? If you mean by working more hours, that’s not a novel way to make more money.
Genuinely curious wtf "upward mobility" is in regards to Uber type gig work.
Working more hours isn't "upward mobility".
"There is also more upward mobility in gig work as you can optimize over time to earn more, which isn’t possible in some jobs."
I think there is zero upwards mobility. Gig workers will always be a commodity at the bottom of the hierarchy. No promotions, no bonus, no RSU. Even their performance doesn't matter much. For example I can't request a specific Instacart shopper or Uber driver again who did a good job.
But did they earn more than they did before doing gig work?
If genuine question... it depends. Gig work both creates new opportunities (AI classifying RLHF jobs for example) but also systemically removes them. I.e. jobs may not exist now that companies can gig out the bits they need. I have no solutions just an observation.
Early days of uber - they were making far more than before uber, now far less than they were before uber.
Might have more to do with VC cash, margins and floatations than anything else.
“Gig work” was always shitty pay _after_ you consider all of the expenses and depreciation in assets. You are an “independent contractor” after all.
If you drive for a TNC, you may on paper earn more per hour but after gas, wear and tear on vehicle (changing out brakes, tires much faster), increased maintenance, steep depreciation of vehicle, higher insurance premiums for commercial auto.
Then you factor in having to buy your own health insurance on the market, dental insurance, and other expenses that a normal, salaried, full time job comes with. Don’t forget about the taxes you have to pay out at the end of the year that would normally be taken out with each paycheck.
I remember doing gig work when those companies were shelling out $1,000s for new drivers. But once those teasers expired and rates got cut, it didn’t make much sense from a financial aspect to continue doing so.
Great beer money for a college student but I don’t see how folks make a sustainable living on the slave wage.
Are you really an independent contractor if you cant set your own prices?
To me Uber drivers are neither employees nor independent contractors. Working as much or as little as they want is not enough to be considered independent contractor.
Why wouldn't you be?
Sure it's more common that contractors offer pricing, but there are industries where the reverse. For instance, magazines typically have set offered rates they'll pay for articles by freelancers.
And this another example of where all laws have unintended consequences. The same law that was California passed to “help” Uber drivers and other gig workers hurt people who really did want to do gig work like write articles for websites.
I think they made some adjustments.
> Are you really an independent contractor if you cant set your own prices?
Yes. Most tradespeople have limited control over the rates they can charge. To the extent they can set rates, an Uber driver and accept and decline fares.
Which tradespeople have the same limitations as uber drivers?
> an Uber driver and accept and decline fares.
That just sucks. Bad system.
Why do people think that independent contractors can always set their own rates? If I could just set my own rate I would ask for 1 million dollars an hour.
I could either negotiate the rate and walk away if it isn’t high enough or accept the rate.
Dynamic pricing is suppose to do just that. Uber sets their own rates rate based on demand. Higher prices should encourage more drivers and the market works itself out.
Yeah you could set your rate at 1m per hour but the market would kick you out.
Let's put an example with carpenters. Lets say I have contracted two different guys and I know how they work. One is cheap but unreliable and the other one is expensive but reliable. As the customer I can decide that the rate of the second one is acceptable and he is being fair with it because I have trust he will show up on time. If he were to charge me 1m per hour I'd no longer consider his rate as fair and no longer hore him for gigs. Also I can also search the unicorn carpenter who is cheap and reliable.
The market decides the rate. You can charge as little as you want but you might be missing money or even be in red numbers. Charge too much and you wont have contracts.
Setting your own rate is not the same as everybody accepting your rate.
> Dynamic pricing is suppose to do just that.
If an Uber driver has a nicer, cleaner car can he charge more? No. Then he cant set up his own rates. No matter how much better he is at the job he will charge the same as everybody else.
That's why Uber drivers are caught in the worst of two worlds. They are not employees but cant decide how much to earn per trip
Yes, they can take and UberXL and UberXXL rides as well Black and Black SUV rides.
There is also a rate that Uber charges for more reliable drivers.
Also, I’ve known many that make deals off platform especially for long drives. There was one older driver we got to know when we go back home to ATL that we call specifically.
This is just like developers use platforms at first that pay less and then move off platform.
For how many people is gig work their sole source of income?
Yeah Uber makes sense if someone else pays for the car, and you're not paying your own rent.
Its not really something you do to get an improvement in your salary.. It would be tough to find something lower paying in my state at least!
Asked another way: If the gig work vanished over night, would the people doing the gig work new better off?
idk why government don't make law that clearly says, if someone works for more than 20 hours they should be considered full time employee and deserves all the extra perks and benefits.
Can we restructure society so that the only perks and benefits of work is a paycheck?
Healthcare should not be tied to our employer, for starters--and that's a big start. Is there anything else we need to decouple?
Perhaps then it becomes 'You have reached your weekly maximum 19.5 hours. Come back next week for more work.'
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