WHAT DOES IT MEAN?
number of hoops to jump through on the way. This is why we have cross-border working and remote licensing.
meal for two costing a day’s wages of your app driver and/or claimed the cost of your trip on expenses, you are not likely to care about the difference between the ride costing £4 or £7. The hide-railing market place is therefore probably not as price sensitive as people think. When Travis Kalanick was in charge of the company, he insisted that drivers were paid enough not to need tips, just as fares were being slashed as reported in the Independent:
https://bit.ly/3pZM6xV
If a rider tips a driver by pound or two, this brings him closer to earning enough for the day and going home. The less the driver earns per hour, the longer he is forced to work and if drivers work longer hours there are more of them available at any given time. Remember, they are free to work for as little or as long as they like. Low earnings therefore incentivises long hours.
Essentially, this is a perfect bonding of 21st Century technology with 19th Century sweated labour and the glue is the slick marketing and guff about flexible working. The ten-hour limit? That’s more marketing spin because the time is calculated according to hours driven (on-trip time) not hours worked, so drivers could still notch up 20 or more working hours.
There are obvious health and safety implications: the worker slaving in the “dark satanic mills” for a pittance might lose a limb in the machinery through a lapse in concentration; the tired driver working on the app might take out his passengers and other road users with him as he tries to follow the blue line, ends up through no-entry signs with his car perched on its roof.
As the p2p app is an on-demand service with no facility to pre-book (other than through the glorified alarm clock otherwise known as ‘the scheduled trip request’) the peaks and troughs of demand can’t be smoothed over by building in lead times as can be done by traditional operators. In this respect the novel technology is less efficient because it needs a greater supply of labour to ensure demand is met without fares having to surge and reduce the demand.
In order to enable this greater supply of labour, Uber may not be able to rely on recruiting all the drivers it needs locally in a timely manner. Drivers are therefore encouraged to obtain a licence from an authority who can process the application as quickly and as cheaply as possible, requiring the fewest
MARCH 2021
In addition, the company hasn’t always been successful in obtaining an operator’s licence in all the areas where there is demand. This is another reason for cross-border working. They, or even the obliging licensing authority, may try to blame ‘loopholes’ in the Deregulation Act 2015 for allowing them to have drivers, vehicles and operators licensed in one area but working in another. Sections 46 (1) (d) and 75 (1) (a) of the LGMP Act 1976 were not removed with the passage of the 2015 Act, therefore remote working is still, arguably unlawful even if cross-border subcontracting is no longer.
In 2018, as a direct result of the TfL challenge, Uber effectively carved up the land into various arbitrary ‘zones’ which bear no resemblance to the boundaries of controlled districts but this is presumably because they have at least one ‘pariah’ council in each area eager to supply them with the drivers they need to cover the entire ‘zone.’
York Council and the local police have decided to be brave enough to try and enforce the law of the land as it is written in the 1976 Act and not allow vehicles and drivers licensed elsewhere to work in their area other than to drop off a fare brought in. I wish them luck but then I have old-fashioned notions about the Rule of Law and not allowing slave labour. And I don’t care how many people have downloaded the app!
How can a company, on one hand, claim, in front of Supreme Court judges determining the working status of their drivers, that bookings are accepted by drivers and the app is a mere peer-to-peer intermediary yet, on the other, when the question is regarding their fitness and propriety as a licensed operator, they claim the driver does not initially accept the booking as this would be contrary to both the 1976 Act and the London 1998 Act?
What we have here is Schrödinger’s booking process; the two contradictions can therefore be simultaneously true!
What if both York and the Supreme Court judgement succeed in making them play by the rules? Would their business model still be viable?
After all, just like Amazon, it would seem that they won’t ever be able to turn a profit until they have essentially monopolised their sector. It would also seem that such a profit will likely require drivers being continually exploited or removed altogether, which isn’t perhaps as imminent as we once thought in recent years.
If the app business (and there are more than one) does ultimately fail, do you think I’ll shed many tears?
Answers on a postcard. 7
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