See https://chuangcn.org/2020/11/delivery-renwu-translation/ for another expose on the brutality of working conditions imposed on delivery workers in China, by a Marxist collective
When he collected his wages for November, Liu was expecting about 6,000 RMB, but only received around 1,000. The other 5,000 RMB, according to Liu, was deducted because the owner of the original station he worked for most likely has seen him working for the other company
:gui-better:
Yeah so the owner already did get Ma'd. Middle management didnt get the memo yet.
6,000 RMB
this is probably the wrong thread for this but holy fuck... if you earn that in brazil you're straight up in the "upper" middle class (like, class B by income levels, going from the lowest E to the highest A), most likely living well with a wife and a single kid
i'm not even joking, that would put you right up in the 25% to 15% richest depending on the region
our per capita gdp isn't even that much worse than china's.......... jesus i really do live in a fucked country
How well do people pulling in Class B income levels live? I'm ashamed to say I know very little about Brazil aside from Bolsanaro and the indigenous struggle.
our biggest expense is, like everywhere else, our rent - i live in a 3-bedroom, 2-bathrooms, 76 m² apartment with a balcony in a closed community and my rent is about 1/5 of that
it's hard to adjust by ppp because it changes so much by region, but if you do it nationally it's more like 1/3
honestly 6,000 RMB would be a reasonable amount of money in all of latin america and i bet in any other 3rd world country, that a food delivery worker could ever earn this is absolutely unthinkable to me
unless i'm messing up on the math here
Honestly it's more than time for China to start to move beyond that whole build up productive forces shit and start cracking down on this.
So yeah I read it. That shit sucks obviously, and I hope the party fixes the situation. I will say that just based off of what was presented they are still way better off then American couriers, which is fucking astounding.
Also that bit about the Chinese cops being allies to the working class and generally helpful made me die a little. Fuck America
Edit: Apparently the the company is owned by Jack Ma now, so I'd expect some reforms are coming lol :xibe-check:
Hasn't Jack been a huge booster of the 996 work week? Not sure he's a friend of the worker...
Yeah Ma sucks but he recently got vanned and reeducated under threat of execution. I imagine the pig will be on his best behavior if he wants to keep his neck
He would have deserved it, but there is something to be said for breaking a class enemy and turning them into a simp for the party. See: Emperor Puyi.
assuming they are actually broken and not just biding their time
Yeah I used Uber over Taxis because they felt safer, what with the gps tracking and rating system.
I don't care about being able to get a taxi 5-10 minutes faster or being able to order packaged food from 20 mid-tier restaurants within the hour, and I think these things have other less savoury effects that outweight the marginal time saving they offer. My ideal socialist utopia is not one where everyone rides taxis everywhere and orders Panda Express to their door every night
Also the Luddites were good
Seems like a pretty major oversimplification of why uber is preferred to taxis, but ok
The former is a marketing gimmick that hasn't turned out to be backed up by data. Not to downplay the benefit of feeling safer, but the actual incidence rate is not meaningfully different (especially if you consider traffic accidents a threat to safety: in this regard app taxis are worse). The latter is true if you have location services on (although in places with taxi ranks or hailable cabs that's much faster still), but anyway as I said, getting a taxi 5-10 minutes faster is something I don't care about or think is worth caring about, and in the case of it being easier, the time saving isn't even in that range, its closer to seconds. Silicon valley is good at making you think a thing that isn't really much better is '100x better' because that is the main thing they do: sell mundane marginal improvements as revolutions and hide the downsides.
There are advantages to both. For example its more convenient still to simply walk up to a car, or hail one, and get in. You don't need a functional phone or a bank account. You don't need to make any account at all. You don't have a predatory system tracking and keeping forever a record of every ride you take. You don't have a homogenous experience everywhere on earth you go.
But in any case, my point is it may be a little easier, but I don't care. Its only marginally easier (although people insist it is revolutionary) and I am not obsessive about using slick interfaces to shave literal seconds off minor tasks, nor do I think it is a good thing to be.
improves safety for the passengers
:porky-happy:
way easier to call
"My ideal socialist utopia is not one where everyone rides taxis everywhere and orders Panda Express to their door every night"
I'm a pretty small and visibly queer woman, I wouldn't do any kind of taxi service alone (especially not drunk or stoned) without having some info on who's picking me up and where I am the whole ride, as a safety concern.
Train stops running at midnight where I live and at that hour it can take an hour and a half to get home with a couple station changes thrown in there. I can want the trains to be better and also acknowledge the material reality that taxi services fill a need until the trains are fixed and more efficient routes are added.
I see both of those things as downsides, although I'll admit the GPS thing is just me being silly. Picking and choosing drivers seems very anti-worker to me and promotes discrimination.
CW: sexual assult
There are unfortunate implications to the suggestion that any taxi driver might be a rapist.
Taxis have dispatchers constantly tracking their whereabouts (with yes, GPS), they have visible liscences, numbered cars, etc. Although the rules have since been changing, for a while Uber basically let anyone join without background checks, during which time you were far more likely to be driven by someone with a rape conviction than had you taken a taxi. The risk in both cases is negligible however, since rapists typically do not rape customers while they are at work.
Fact is the safety thing was a deliberate part of their sales pitch that didn't end up matching with reality. The likelyhood of being raped in a taxi vs an Uber is a hard thing to judge, but neither are as dangerous as hanging around corporate employees of Uber when they start drinking
The dispatcher is only helpful if you call a taxi, if you hail a random one you’d have to take note of the drivers credentials if you wanted to report them for assaulting you. If you forget that all you got is “a cab driver in one of 60,000 yellow cabs”.
With a ride share service you have a digital record of who picked you up from when and where in what car which makes it pretty easy to report an assault by a driver.
The psychological benefit of feeling safe is invaluable, and the train at night is definitely the scarier between that and a car, but the fact is between a car that you call for and a car that you press a button for there is no difference in safety besides one that exists in your mind. The implication that you are safer because an AI pages the car rather than a dispatcher, or that a gig worker who you see a picture of on your phone is less liable to sexually assult you than a full-timer who you see a picture of on their cab liscence, or that a massive multinational is a safer steward than a citywide business - these are just not true, no matter how many people Uber managed to convince through marketing.
Now, in terms of harassment, I could see that taxi drivers being typically older and more male than rideshare drivers would account for a difference (although no data I have seen suggests that), although I've heard stories of Uber drivers too so idk. Uber drivers are less professional which might lead to more harassment.
and orders Panda Express to their door every night”
That sounds pretty tight actually
Better accessibility for disabled passengers. You can request a car to fit your needs. You might not always get it, but at least it's a thing.
I believe this is equally true of taxis most places but tbf I don't really know. Do you mean how Uber has different sizes of car, or do they specifically have wheelchair taxis? Medical taxis used to be a thing, and I have seen wheelchair taxi services before, but I have no guess as to how common those are or were. If its only a matter of size however, places I've lived you could get any size taxi from the same taxi company
Yes, primarily vehicle size requests (some disabled people need a larger or higher vehicle). Many local taxis companies (if they exist where you are) are not so flexible. Somewhere like New York, disabled friendly services are hard to come by. There are things like the city's access-a-ride, but disabled people shouldn't have to go through such bureaucracy just to pop down to the shops when they feel like it. I've lived in more civilized countries where taxi apps allow you to order specifically wheelchair friendly taxis etc. that will arrive in moments. Of course, none of these are the actual solution to the problem of accessible transport, but there are some advantages to the apps over the existing taxi system in this regard.
which always rubbed me the wrong way.
technocrat redditor moment
that’s not inherently baked into the app itself
google neoliberal capitalism
Let's be honest. The big reason Uber took off was because it was cheaper than taxis. Why was it cheaper? Because taxi cabs were a regulated market with fixed pricing to ensure:
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the vehicles were safe to drive and didn't need a swaybar replaced or anything
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the drivers had good records and didn't run into a median last week
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the drivers were payed enough to cover the costs of fuel, maintenance, insurance, and also had enough left over to take home decent pay
Uber came in to this market and undercut the fixed price. Drivers make less and have less to pay for regular maintenance, etc.
You're giving too much credit to the app itself. There were already ride hailing apps in cities, even if a bit clunky. The big driver of Ubers growth was the price of the service.
I'd say you're both correct. The app-based ride hailing system is much much more convenient, which definitely played a role in its success. But the most important ingredient was definitely the exploitation of laborers. A "fair" ride sharing system (fair in the confines of capitalism) would be an 'app' with protected & salaried drivers at the expense of higher customer costs.
There are important "innovations" that take place in global capitalism that do have certain apolitical value, like the internet for example. The problem isn't so much the tools, it's that these tools are currently under the direct control of capitalists, who by nature are exploiters, and the trend seems to be towards even more technocratic capitalist control over these tools.
So in other words, it's a fair position to not be against 'apps' as a whole. But to your point, almost all app-based service companies are successful mainly because of the ease of exploitation they provide.
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Yes, because this doesn't happen in the US.
CW: suicide
https://www.reddit.com/r/SuicideWatch/search?q=financial&restrict_sr=on&sort=relevance&t=all
Edit: knee jerk to defend China which seems to be mostly a normal country with "normal" levels of exploitation of their workers. Obviously this is bad.
Isn’t the whole point that “Communist China” should be better on labor?
Yeah, it should. My immediate response to this sort of thing is that it probably is, but it's not perfect. Obviously this is a bad thing that is happening in China, and should be pointed out, but my rule of thumb is that china is likely better on the whole, but only because America is so bad. Was thinking on was in reddit, I guess. You all know this
Labor is better in China? I really don't think any serious person can make this argument. Average working conditions in China today are miles and miles better than they were 10-20-30 years ago, while an American laborer has seen a stagnation or decrease in working conditions - that's true. But the average working person in China has a much much worse working condition than the average American working person.
The question of course becomes complicated when you start to discuss global economics, geopolitics, or CCP's 'ultimate goal,' which I absolutely won't get into (because I'm not smart enough). But I think you should rethink applying your "rule of thumb" so broadly. Even if you support China 100%.
Watching American Factory (produced by the Obama's I know) gives really amazing insight into this, the confrontation of Chinese workers and American former union workers is great. Unfortunately it doesn't give much insight to the global capitalism aspect, but it has incredible footage of the experience of ordinary workers on both sides. Highly highly recommend.
I'll check it out. Im uninformed in general about this topic. I do remember the suicide nets at foxcon, so yeah definitely not good
Didn't mean to seem more informed, especially on this topic I'm definitely still incredibly uninformed. But this website often makes complicated issues seem simple, when they really are not.
When it comes to Chinese labor rights though, it's also important to remember that a single country its own is powerless against global capitalism. So much of the surplus value produced in China goes to western capitalists. So to critique Chinese labor practices it's not nearly enough to be anti-CCP, because western capitalism is a fundamental part of the equation. Any successful leftist project is inevitably forced to "open up" their markets to global capitalism, or face economic disaster as a result of being sanctioned & left out of the market, not to mention invaded and overthrown.
I do remember the suicide nets at foxcon
i mean the suicide rate is still much lower lmao there's a reason someone put those nets on the liberal media
Anecdotal evidence is basically meaningless for sure. We got suicide nets in america too. Which is why I had such a strong reaction to the article I think. Just came across as propaganda
:haram: this isn't oppression olympics, things can be bad in two countries
the brutality of working conditions imposed on delivery workers in China
there was a bus driver who drove off a bridge recently because his shantytown was demolished. Logistics must be hell in that big ass country
The food delivery industry is outright universally exploitative as hell. Can't trust that shit under any form of private ownership.
Still not sure what to make of Chuangcn considering their links to the National Endowment for Democracy. Han Dongfang was personally awarded by the NED and even works for Radio Free Asia.
