Actions possible, when the market is divided between just two companies. Hopefully, some kind of regulatory body, will investigate if there is no collusion.
"Market share of the leading ride-hailing companies in the United States from September 2017 to July 2021"
"...For years, drivers have seen their earnings decrease despite putting in longer and longer hours behind the wheel. Earnings are decreasing because Uber and Lyft keep changing the rates - keeping prices the same for passengers, lowering pay for drivers and pocketing the difference...As Uber and Lyft continue to make more, drivers continue to make less..."
If you call working for uber "slavery", what do you call what african-americans were subjected to in southern US up to the 19th century? "super-slavery"?
Slavery is not a trade you choose to have practiced on you, it is a trade you choose to practice.
And as a slave, you always have a choice. It's not cost effective to monitor and restrain you well enough to keep you from killing yourself indefinitely. Lacking others, plenty of slaves have chosen and do choose this option. Same as if all physical work turns into piece/gig-work. You can choose to do it, or you can choose to starve.
> as a gig or piece worker, you can choose to do something else
Not if every other job is gig and piecework.
> Do you feel kind of dirty suggesting that a slave can just choose to kill himself and comparing that to Barcelona cab drivers? If you don't, why not?
No, because choice is a word that means something. You're doing the common rationalization that there are always choices in employment, so while any particular employment can be arbitrarily bad, it's not slavery. I'm pointing out that slaves also have bad choices.
I mean, among other things, Spain has a social safety net for people who don't work at all.
There are obviously shitty jobs in the world. There are obviously people whose choices do not include, you know, the ideal of material well-being plus fulfilling days. It is certainly a defensible position that the world owes it to people in that position to try to make their choices better.
Conflating those things to slavery makes you fundamentally an unserious person.
I am interested to hear your reasoning on this. To me, thinking through it, I see some potential commonalities but the sine qua non of being owned as property fails. Is the argument that people have to work in general to survive, and it is the fact that they have to work what renders them as a “modern slave?” I hope not because that seems facile.
That is not the argument. The argument is that Uber business model is more cost-effective than Slavery. (And without trying to sound insensitive here)...the "slave owner" still bears the costs of his "slaves".
Unless you're able to show how Uber used violence or threats of violence to force drivers to work, it's not slavery.
Even if it was the only employer on the driver labour market, it still would not be slavery — but it's not even that. In almost any labour market that Uber operates in, it has competition.
So much more cost-effective than slavery.