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A few days before Uber's first IPO, drivers around the world reported that they were overworked and underpaid, subject to a frustrating and opaque payment system, and even slept in their cars to save enough money. money. The research corroborates anecdotes they've reported to the media: Studies have repeatedly shown that after deducting fees and charges, Uber drivers earn less than the minimum wage in major markets. One of them revealed that half of Uber drivers in Washington, DC, were living below the poverty line.
The strikes, which took place in San Francisco, at Uber headquarters, as well as in New York, London, Chicago, Los Angeles, Sao Paulo and beyond, aimed to establish a striking contrast between a company whose CEO last year, $ 50 million aim for a valuation of $ 90 billion – and are ready to hit many multimillionaires and billionaires – and its increasingly poor drivers, many of whom say that They can no longer afford to buy necessities or pay rent.
Will workers' actions slow down Uber's IPO on Friday? After all, the company is suffering huge annual losses, is largely supported by an even greater influx of investment capital and has already reduced driver salaries in key markets. This is a sign that the working conditions of the workers are bad enough to be able to destabilize Uber's services, after all. This should be enough to worry investors, that is to say, they believed that one or the other of these factors would actually be long enough to revolt.
I bet that will not be the case. The reason is quite simple: investors (like all of us) have been informed, repeatedly and colorful, that autonomous cars are almost there. They are inevitable, even – the next step in the plans of the company Lyft and Uber, as stated in the public statements of their leaders, ambitious research programs and, now, filings with the SEC. The word "standalone" appears more than 100 times in each company's IPO files. Drivers, on the other hand, are substitutes whose general welfare is a concern only to the extent that its degradation could disrupt the service at this time. They are therefore temporary and eminently replaceable. And investors have nurtured this logic for years.
In 2016, CEO Travis Kalanick declared that autonomous automotive technology was "fundamentally existential" for Uber. The company was spending $ 20 million a month on self-driving auto research, having opened a standalone division in partnership with Carnegie Mellon with great fanfare. As such, Uber thought he already had 75,000 driverless cars on the road here this year. But even after Kalanick, notoriously ambitious and reckless, was ousted, his replacement, Dara Khosrowshahi, said in an interview in January 2018 that he was expecting Uber to have autonomous cars in the streets, in use, in 18 months. If you keep the score at home, that would mean we would see Ubers stand alone hit roads next month.
Two months after Khosrowshahi said one of Uber's autonomous test cars was going to hit and kill a pedestrian in Arizona, forcing the company to suspend the program. However, testing has resumed early enough and Uber expects again to compete and even lead in the field of autonomous cars. She just received a $ 1 billion investment from Softbank and Toyota, which indicates even more than smart money says that autonomous cars are the future.
Lyft is even more optimistic about autonomous cars, if only because it is not haunted by a recent pedestrian fatality. It is partnering with Waymo to offer customers autonomous driving of a few vehicles. And in its IPO, Lyft says it will have autonomous cars on the road in the next five years and that most of the transportation needs covered by autonomous cars in 15:
Over the next five years, our goal is to deploy an autonomous vehicle network capable of delivering a portion of the trips on the Lyft platform. In 10 years, our goal is to have deployed a network of autonomous vehicles at low cost and scale, able to achieve the majority of trips on the Lyft platform. And, in 15 years, our goal is to deploy stand-alone vehicles specifically designed for a wide range of carpool and transportation scenarios, including short- and long-term trips, shared transportation services and more.
If you are an investor and you buy this schedule, a few thousand employees who make noise do not seem so disturbing for your prospect of making a profit. The question for them, then, is, as the Washington Post puts it, "As IPOs increase, can Uber and Lyft survive long enough to replace their drivers with computers?" They have little apparent reason to doubt that at least one of them. Even though neither company has ever discussed profitability, the simple fact that they have both been backed by venture capital money and outside investment for more than 10 years now, and that they have an appearance too attractive, encourages investors to buy.
So far, the deployment times for autonomous cars have been like magic – but they have had a real impact on the livelihoods of drivers who actually make Uber and Lyft possible. The promise of a self-driving automotive technology has helped to prime the VC pump, keep cash and prevent fierce businesses from avoiding a true sustainable business model, which would allow especially to take into account the needs of its thousands of customers. strong manpower. Believing that his drivers are proto-automata has probably helped Uber and Lyft justify the maintenance of the harsh and even cruel conditions in which he keeps them at work – Lyft, for example, has recently tried and failed to obtain a law guaranteeing his drivers . minimum wage thrown in New York.
Treat drivers as replaceable and disposable placeholders for algorithms is finally take his toll. Uber even acknowledges it in its IPO, which makes it clear that the company plans to continue cutting wages. "While we aim to reduce driver incentives to improve our financial performance, we generally expect an increase in driver dissatisfaction," the report says. "In addition, we are investing in our autonomous vehicle strategy, which can compound driver dissatisfaction over time as it may reduce the need for drivers."
This is considered a fact of life, this "driver dissatisfaction", ie the fact that Uber's own workers do not openly appreciate it; a problem that will only be solved when the driver is eliminated. This is a distorted and future version of what Astra Taylor calls "the false statement", ie services and products that only seem to be automated but are actually made possible by human labor. In the case of carpool companies, the mere * vision * of future automation prevents real drivers from receiving the decent salary and dignity they deserve.
Nobody knows if and / or when fully autonomous vehicles will replace taxis and cable car services. (Although, if Lyft has a fleet of fully autonomous cars running seamlessly in a decade, I'll be sending one directly into the ocean.) But the only promise of that future that will come preparing soon encourages both the company and its investors to disregard the livelihoods of thousands of people, drivers who do the work.
Uber could well receive another nice influx of investors money on Friday, troubled by visions of a streamlined, application-based and self-sustaining future. But if he hopes to avoid this revolt before he gets there, it is better to invest in the driving force now.
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