REFUSING WORK
THE STRANGE NEW BADGE OF HONOUR IN THE TAXI AND PRIVATE HIRE TRADE - REFUSING WORK
Article by Rob Finlayson Operations Manager City Cars Glasgow
rob@citycarsglasgow.co.uk
Like most people in the industry, I am in more driver groups forums and WhatsApp chats than is probably healthy, and one of the common themes that keeps popping up again and again is drivers openly bragging about how little work they are actually accepting.
You will see screenshots from certain ride-share platforms where drivers proudly share their acceptance rates sometimes down as low as 1 or 2%, sometimes even lower. That’s not working, that is sitting, logged in waiting for the universe to drop a perfect hire into your lap.
And it is not just a ride-share quirk anymore, this mindset is creeping into traditional private hire and taxi fleets too.
We are now in a world where drivers are online and available, but only for work that fits their exacting preferences. Anything outside of that, too short, too long, wrong area, wrong time or wrong price gets instantly declined. For those of us who have been around the block a few times, this is a total reversal of how we were brought up in the trade. Being busy used to be a badge of honour and saying yes to everything was the norm. You did not cherry-pick, you grafted and chased work.
If half the fleet is cherry-picking and the other half is doing the heavy lifting then the whole system starts to crumble. That is exactly what we’re now seeing across every city in the UK.
But the problem here is that no one really wants to talk about WHY this is happening.
Most operators are terrified of pushing back because the vast majority of the industry is self employed and with that comes a complete lack of oversight or leverage. A driver can simply say: “Nope, don’t fancy that” and there’s nothing the operator can realistically do about it without upsetting the apple cart.
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l You start putting rules in place – drivers jump to another platform
l You try to enforce minimum acceptance rates, you’re risking a clash over the drivers worker status
l You go too hard on any of the above and you’re a pariah on social media and the damage is done.
l The flip side of doing nothing is just as bad, customers waiting longer, service levels dropping off a cliff and despite your app being littered with cars, your service is unreliable despite having dozens of cars online and showing as available for the customers.
At some point something needs to give, whether that’s with a carrot to the drivers: smarter incentives, more transparency about the issues being created and more intelligent dispatching.
Or using a stick: enforcing minimum acceptance levels, performance reviews and honest conversations about what “online and available” actually means. Some- thing has to shift, because pretending there is not a problem is exactly how this becomes a much bigger issue.
Whilst this behaviour is most extreme on ride-share platforms, with drivers declining tens of thousands of jobs across the country every hour of the day, the habits are contagious. If we don’t get ahead of this it becomes everyone’s problem.
What makes this even more complicated is the total lack of alignment between platforms, operators and drivers on what good behaviour actually looks like. You have the ride-share side with algorithms dictating pricing and demand, whereas private hire has traditionally been customer and reliability driven; but the problem is both share the same pool of driver talent. No wonder the system is creaking. Operators want speed, customers want reliability, drivers want control, but no one wants to be the bad guy in all of this.
The truth though is simple; cherry-picking used to be the exception, it is now become the norm and unless we face that reality head-on then it’s going to reshape the industry whether we like it or not.
MARCH 2026 PHTM
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