How Working-Class People Talk About Uber Is Not How the Media Covers It

The people writing about whether gig work is exploitative have usually never competed for a restaurant shift. The people most helped by a new tech are often the least represented in policy debates.

Photo by Paul Hanaoka on Unsplash

I waited tables for six years at $2.13 an hour. Now I'm a policy researcher in DC. These two worlds talk about technology completely differently. Let me use Uber driving as an example.

The critique: “Uber doesn’t offer health insurance”

Media coverage often frames Uber as exploitative because it doesn’t offer health insurance. But most jobs available to my family members (daycare worker, retail cashier, coat store clerk, construction) don’t offer health insurance either.

I didn’t get private health insurance until I became a diplomat at 23.

This isn’t ideal! But nobody in my world is angry at Uber for something that’s standard across hourly work, day labor, and shift work.

The bigger problem is that America ties health coverage to employment, and Medicaid is bare-bones.

The critique: “no guaranteed wage”

Another common criticism: gig work doesn’t guarantee minimum wage. But some of the best jobs in my community are ones without guaranteed wages because if you’re “fast” or “get good shifts”, you can earn far more.

When I was being advised by family and friends on jobs in high school and college, restaurant server was top of the list. In Texas, the tipped minimum wage is $2.13 an hour. It was still the most sought-after job because on good shifts, you could take home over a hundred dollars. I kept that job for six years.

The frustrations I do hear from my community

Uber requires a relatively new car (10-15 years old). This locks out members of my family unless they’re willing to take on a lease. This adds risk, cost, and rules out using Uber only occasionally to supplement your existing job.

The apps take large cuts of the fare. One driver told me about a ride that cost the customer $79, but he only got $19. That’s an outlier example, but cuts are frustratingly high. In California, roughly a third of each fare goes to state-mandated insurance requirements. These requirements were originally supported by Uber and Lyft as a way to gain legitimacy when rideshare was fighting to exist. Now those same mandates make it hard for more affordable, driver-friendly alternatives to enter the market.

What people appreciate

Uber and Lyft don’t require you to speak English. For immigrant communities like mine, this matters a lot!

Rideshare apps hire people with certain felony convictions, as long as seven years have passed. I have family members and friends with records. Getting any job afterward is hard. The seven-year policy is comparatively forgiving.

Shift workers rarely have regular schedules. As a restaurant worker, your supervisor might schedule you to work Monday to Wednesday then Saturday. The next week, you might work Wednesday to Saturday. This makes juggling the schedule of a second job hard. Apps that let you pick up work on short notice make life easier.

Why the disconnect exists

I don’t think mainstream media or journalists have bad intentions. I suspect it’s partly a supply-and-demand problem.

Most Americans spend less than a minute a day reading news online. The people who subscribe and read online articles skews toward groups with more high-paying employment options. Journalists, their editors, and their main readers don’t overlap much with the communities where gig work is seen as a good option.

In America, richer and poorer people are in separate social groups, mostly befriending within their social class. These worlds are disconnected.

Why this matters

For context, people earning minimum wage or below represent only about 1 million Americans out of 330 million. Uber has roughly 1 million U.S. drivers. These aren’t large chunks of the population.

But the pattern matters: when we evaluate new technologies, we often apply frameworks from people who have options that the actual users don’t have. This biases how we assess progress: the people most helped by an innovation are often least represented in debates about whether it’s good.