The first thought that came to mind is “if driving for Uber as an independent contractor is so bad, why do people keep doing it?” Is there no alternative? Perhaps not if (1) those drivers would normally take on low skill manufacturing jobs that no longer exist and (2) those drivers don’t want to pickup skills for high tech gigs instead (Udacity’s post-completion job guarantee comes to mind – learn C#, get a job at google, tuition reimbursed). On point #2, I understand that some Uber drivers may do so only for “extra cash.” But, I wager the ROI is much higher for the Udacity-C# route. As I told a barista many years ago when asked “what should I invest in?”: I said “yourself. Go back to school and learn an in-demand skill. That will do more for you than any stock tip I could give you.”

Next comes a quote near the end of the article

“Over time even bigger companies like Uber, many of which lose money and rely on investors to keep pouring in billions of dollars of capital,”

TSLA comes to mind for repeating this same practice of investor-subsidized losses. SNAP hasn’t made money and the last forecast I saw on Bloomberg shows losses for the next couple years. Twitter paid its executives 10s of millions of dollars last year even though the company and stock exhibited losses (including negative net income every year since at least 2013 [1]).

So just what is going on here? When will the promised (presumed, assumed?) earnings for these companies actually come through? Hot potato and “the greater fool hypothesis” come to mind…

-Dr. Moore

Opinion | The Gig Economy’s False Promise
The New York Times

Instead of freedom, workers at companies like Uber have encountered low wages and coercion. Read the full story

Shared from Apple News

[1] http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/twtr/financials?query=income-statement