Driving at a sea change: One gig worker’s push for reform

Junior Celestin, 39, of Monroe, has a humble opinion of himself and those who drive for ride-hailing tech company Uber, as he does. Perhaps too humble.
“We’re just like the bottom feeders,” he said. “After Uber takes everything, then we get the scraps.”
Based in San Francisco, Uber is a technology platform that connects drivers with riders through a smartphone app.
The scraps Celestin is referring to are what Uber pays him after the company takes its cut of a fare. Figuring out what exactly that amounts to in dollars and cents is where it gets tricky.
Twenty to twenty-five percent
When he first signed up to drive for Uber in January, Celestin said he was told that Uber would take 20 to 25 percent of his total fares for the week.
He claims that’s not what happened.
Instead of taking the maximum 25 percent of his fares for the week, Celestin said, Uber was taking a percentage of each fare, which varied from ride to ride.
“When I see what I got paid, I was curious so I clicked on the details,” he said. “That’s when I saw what Uber took and I saw that’s not 25 percent, and that’s happened constantly.”
The percentage of any given fare that goes to Uber can be as high as 67 to 80 percent, according to Celestin.
Trying to figure out what was going on was a frustrating and ultimately fruitless endeavor, he said.
According to Celestin, Uber operates help centers that drivers are encouraged to call, should a problem arise on the road.
Except that the help centers are anything but helpful.
“These people that we call on our phone – the Help Desk – they are no help,” he said. “They are just there to fool around and lie to us.”
Where is the help center?
Celestin said he has never been able to resolve an issue by calling a help center, and that Uber does not employ American workers to staff them.
“(I don’t understand) why Uber, that is a multi-millionaire (company), doesn’t have a base here that we can go directly to them or a number to call them directly here if there’s something going on,” he said.
When he has tried to contact the company for help with a problem, his calls have been answered by help center employees in Colombia, India, South Africa and the Philippines, Celestin said.
“When you call, you don’t know who’s picking up and where,” he said.
An employee at the company location in the Bronx told Celestin that Uber’s cut of his fares varies and that the company takes a percentage of each one.
Celestin said that’s not what he was told when he began driving for Uber.
“They’re unclear with us on how these things work,” he said. “They always tell me one thing and then they do something totally different.”
No response to request for an interview
When contacted by email, Uber Senior Communications and Policy Manager Alix Anfang said she would like to discuss Celestin’s allegations, but did not respond to multiple interview requests.
As of December 2018, Uber operates in 63 countries and more than 700 cities worldwide, completing 14 million trips each day, according to the company’s website.
There are more than 22,000 employees at Uber, according to the website, and 3.9 million drivers, which the company classifies as independent contractors.
Employee vs. independent contractor
Ileen DeVault, the director of the Worker Institute at Cornell and Professor of Labor History at Cornell University in Ithaca, said that there is a basic standard of protection that workers in the gig, or on-demand, economy are entitled to.
“These workers should get the minimum wage that everyone else gets,” she said. “They should have control over their hours of labor, they should have unemployment benefits taken out of their pay, they should get everything the rest of us with more traditional work schedules do in terms of rights and protections, including the right to organize.”
According to DeVault, the courts have struggled to come to a consensus on how to classify gig economy workers and whether they should receive employee benefits.
Like statistics, DeVault said that there are any number of court cases that can bear out any number of conclusions, due to the hodgepodge of regulations that exist across state, and, sometimes, municipal lines.
“Okay, so they’re an employee when they’re (here) but when they cross the bridge (to there) they’re an independent contractor?” she said. “No, they’re actually the same person and they’re driving the same people to the same airport! It’s insane!”
Citing an example of Instacart workers who organized through Facebook to push back against a planned algorithmic change to the company’s pay structure, DeVault said Celestin’s allegations sound familiar.
“These companies are using various algorithmic systems and it’s a problem both for the drivers and for the customers,” she said. “Frankly, it doesn’t surprise me that an Uber driver is making that complaint.”
Instacart is a technology company that operates a same-day grocery pick-up and delivery service through the use of a smartphone app, according to the company’s website. It faced a class action lawsuit earlier this year for improperly paying its workers, according to The Food Institute, a food industry information source.
“People think that Uber is so convenient and wonderful," DeVault said, "but this perhaps is one of the ways that it’s not so convenient and wonderful."

Attempting to regulate the gig economy

A recently released report, written by the Worker Institute at Cornell University’s ILR School and underwritten by the New York State AFL-CIO, finds that New York’s regulatory structure does not provide the necessary level of oversight to curb abuse in the gig economy.
The report examines the experiences of on-demand workers, including accountants, food delivery workers and administrative support staff, among others, who find work through online platforms. Data was gathered through survey responses from nearly 200 workers, as well as one-on-one interviews, according to a New York State AFL-CIO press release.
DeVault said that the rise of the gig economy is the culmination of a number of societal forces that have led to less stability in employment overall.
“What I see happening is that our entire economy is getting shaved away, so that there’s less and less security in all sorts of jobs,” she said. “So we see more and more industries where long-term, stable employment is just not available anymore. The fact is it’s the creation of long-term, stable work that really built this country, and the sense of America as a ‘middle class country’ very much came out of not only just having stability in work, but then having unions supporting that stability and so raising the bottom floor even further.”
In response to the institute’s report, the New York State Legislature introduced bills in both the Assembly and the Senate to provide gig workers with basic labor protections and the right to collective bargaining.
“Hopefully what this would do would be to make them feel that their labor is recognized as work,” DeVault said of the proposed legislation. “They’re not just driving people around for fun.”
According to the assembly’s website, the bill was referred to the Codes Committee on June 17.
The New York State AFL-CIO is a federation of 3,000 unions, representing 2.5 million members, retirees and their families that advocates for better wages, better benefits and better working conditions, according to the organization’s website.
Throttling back
These days, Celestin doesn’t do that much driving for Uber. The decision to stop was something of a mutual one.
“When I just started, I was taking more rides because I wasn’t really checking on how it worked,” he said. “When I see that I’m being robbed, I take less rides.”
According to Celestin, accepting a smaller number of rides is one of the ways drivers find themselves receiving less business from Uber.
Declining too many rides or receiving a low customer satisfaction rating can cause the company to stop offering drivers work, he said.
DeVault said she has observed the same phenomenon.
“The companies have tried very hard to present this as (worker friendly), but a lot of these app workers discovered that if they turn down too many jobs, then they don’t get offered other jobs in the future because the companies actually want to know that you are really going to respond,” she said.
Because he doesn’t know any other Uber drivers, Celestin said he is unsure if others have had the same problems with the company that he has.
Some drivers, however, have found a way to organize in support of better paying conditions.
According to an Associated Press report, demonstrations protesting the company’s wages took place in 10 cities across the country in May, just ahead of Uber’s initial public stock offering.
Celestin thinks if other drivers looked more closely at their pay details they might discover the same thing he found.
There is one thing he is sure of though: “The way it works right now isn’t the way it should be working right now.”