The Con Job of the Century

If you thought the con job of the century was Donald Trump getting elected, you'd be wrong.

No, getting thousands of people to drive for Uber is the con of the century. Because driving for Uber is just driving a cab. And that's one of the worst jobs you can get.

Think about it. The wages are terrible, the hours are terrible, the customers are terrible (drunken, puking morons). In many cities the number of cabs is regulated by controlling the number of medallions issued, making it possible to eke out a living by keeping the number of cabs down to what the local population can support.

But any clown with a car can drive for Uber, which means the number of competitors is determined only by the gullibility of people who mistakenly think they can get rich driving a cab. Uber drivers are "independent contractors" who supply their own cars, pay for the gas, the maintenance, their cell phone bills. If they sit idle for two hours, waiting for fares that never call, they don't make a dime.

The only difference between driving a cab and driving for Uber is that some overvalued high-tech company in Washington takes a big cut out of every fare, instead of staying in the local economy.

What's the running joke in every movie where someone gets into a cab? An immigrant driver who can barely speak English.

And that's because driving a cab is a terrible job. Immigrants get all the terrible jobs in America: the vast majority of dishwashers, hotel maids, meat packers, roofers and cabbies are immigrants, because Americans just won't do them.

I came to this realization while watching an ad for Uber, in which the company's new CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi, apologizes for Uber's past dickishness, promising the company's "culture" has changed. Uber's former CEO, Travis Kalanik, was kicked out a year ago for pushing his employees to wantonly violate laws and regulations in cities across the country, screw over the company's drivers as wage slaves, and blithely ignoring pervasive sexual harassment.

Driving a cab, or an Uber, doesn't have to be terrible. All these jobs should pay enough to live on, and to save up for a down payment on a house, and to help put your kids through college. But Uber pays its employees peanuts, because they've conned people into thinking that driving a cab is somehow a lucrative gig.

New York is cracking down on Uber, capping the number of drivers in the city and setting a minimum pay rate per trip. That may barely squeak Uber drivers out of the hole, but Uber will never give their drivers a decent wage: the company thinks of its employees as just another bot that can be replaced by another bot.

And that next bot will be a self-driving car. Anyone who bought a car thinking that driving for Uber was a long-term investment was taken by the con man of the century, Travis Kalanick.