Open Prison Canada: Travis Uber is the 21st Century Version of Tom Sawyer.

Sunday, December 11, 2016

Travis Uber is the 21st Century Version of Tom Sawyer.

Back in 1987 when I worked for the Du Pont Corporation, the company would compensate me for the cost of using my own vehicle at a rate of 25 cents per kilometer. That's equivalent to 40 cents per mile in Canadian dollars.

The equivalent in U.S. dollars at $1 CDN = $.75 U.S. would be about 30 cents, U.S. per mile.

Any decent company that asks its employees to use their personal cars for business will offer fair compensation for the use of that vehicle. Even the government offers compensation.

Janis Rogers's round trip consumed 397 X 2 = 794 miles.

If Uber were to offer its employees fair compensation for the use of their own cars, at 1987 levels, this sweet li'l ol' granny should have received 794 X $.30 = $238 for the use of her car on this assignment. If she were to be paid for her 15.5 hours at, say, $7.00 per hour she would receive an additional $108.50.

That would achieve a grand total payout of $346.5.

Instead, she says she made about $9 per hour (=139.50) for her troubles after paying $32 for her own gas.

So, when the estimated cost of using her own vehicle (at $.30 per mile) is taken into account, her actual pay, if she were compensated fairly, would be her vehicle cost plus a wage. It would be $346.50. Instead, she claims that she got a paltry $139.00.

Now multiply that ripoff by the total number of Uber cabbies, and you begin to see where the Uber corporation could make some money for its rich investors. Except that it doesn't.

Now according to this sweet li'l ol' Uber granny,

“This was not lucrative,” she said. “I did it because it was an adventure.”

Yep.

Paying the Uber corporation 25% or so of the amount the customer pays for the use of your time and your automobile is one heck of an adventure.

Maybe Janis Rogers is willing to work for nothing in order to enrich Travis Kalinik and his investors because it is all just a great "adventure." I guess the subsidy she gets from Uber for the high-tech version of picking up hitch-hikers is just a kind of bonus.

I have used ballpark numbers for this analysis. I decided it was not worth the effort to go digging down into Google holes to collect more current data. Suffice it to say that the 25 cent per Km. payout I received from Du Pont in 1987 has gone up since then. Therefore, the situation for Janis is likely even worse than I have described.

Uber is just a modern re-telling of the old Tom Sawyer tale, "Whitewashing the Fence."

Maybe this is why so many aspiring cab drivers have jumped on to the Uber bandwagon, not for compensation, but for adventure. Maybe this is also why Uber has issued a new set of directives to both its cabbies and its customers. (Uber tries to solve sexual misconduct issues by banning riders from flirting)

Most of the time, when I am in my cab and an Uber driver is beside me, I notice with some amusement that they rarely make eye contact. It's as though they feel guilty in the knowledge of the damage they are doing to their legally straight jacketed competition.

The joke is on them.

This Just In

According to one of my sources, a taxi owner who was recently subjected to a mandatory City of Hamilton taxi inspection, was told he had to replace his vehicle, even though it had another year of useful life under the six-year bylaw limitation.

The reason?

Because the "check engine" light was glowing on the dash, and even AFTER the owner had had the issue resolved by a mechanic, he was STILL FORCED to replace the vehicle.

Not one Uber cab has undergone a similar inspection to date.

You would have thought that, given the City of Hamilton's disgusting abeyance of Hamilton's taxicab regulations in order to accommodate the Uber corporation, they would have, at least, eased up on their heavy handed treatment of the incumbent taxi operators.

You would have been wrong.

This is what bothers me most about the slime-handed way in which the City of Hamilton has handled the Uber issue. They relentlessly harass the incumbent operators while giving Uber a free pass.

"Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under." -- H. L. Mencken

At this point, I am quite proud of myself. I have managed to write another commentary on the morally questionable Uber corporation, and the ass-kissing of that same corporation that has been displayed by the equally morally corrupt government of the City of Hamilton without using ONE SINGLE EXPLETIVE.

That's FUCKING AMAZING!