The tragic attempt by this food delivery worker to take his own life has not only revealed his desperate plight, but also the broader exploitation of workers in China.

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

  • fuckhaha [any,none/use name]
    ·
    4 years ago

    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.

      • fuckhaha [any,none/use name]
        ·
        4 years ago

        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

        • SteveHasBunker [he/him]
          ·
          4 years ago

          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.

      • fuckhaha [any,none/use name]
        ·
        4 years ago

        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.