The cab drivers in SF always complained to me about their relationship to the dispatcher, but I'm not sure I ever grokked that.
Chicago cabs, I get an earful on leases and minimum number of hours they have to work to pay for their cab/medallion.
You can be on a shift AND in hock to the cab company; the two aren't mutually exclusive.
To me it seems like at least with Uber you can set your hours, and there's transparency regarding your capital costs: you buy/lease the car yourself, so no medallion or other lease shenanigans.
I'm not in love with Uber, by the way: I think Uber should have to comply with a lot of taxi regulation that they don't currently comply with.
It has been 15 years since I've lived in Chicago, so it must have changed. At the time from the cab companies I heard about per-shift leases and drivers were very focused on making the nut, that being the amount to pay for the car's use that (12-hour) shift. But I could see why cab companies would force a shift to longer commitments, as the drivers were pretty strategic about only picking up shifts where they were sure to make money. Great for drivers, but that could leave a lot of cabs sitting idle. And now that you mention it, I recall a few drivers who owned their own cab/medallion, and would time-share it with a couple of driver buddies; they were much more focused on maximizing road time. So I think I was too hasty above.
In SF I've certainly never heard a driver complain about a contract with the cab company or minimum hours, and given the number of complaints they have when you get them rolling, I figure I would have heard. But I'll ask next I get the chance. And the complaints about dispatchers have gone down dramatically now that cabbies have other ways of getting passengers. Flywheel in particular is a big winner for everybody, and I wish some taxi commission had been forward-thinking enough to force a whole city into a universal dispatch with a clean API.
Chicago cabs, I get an earful on leases and minimum number of hours they have to work to pay for their cab/medallion.
You can be on a shift AND in hock to the cab company; the two aren't mutually exclusive.
To me it seems like at least with Uber you can set your hours, and there's transparency regarding your capital costs: you buy/lease the car yourself, so no medallion or other lease shenanigans.
I'm not in love with Uber, by the way: I think Uber should have to comply with a lot of taxi regulation that they don't currently comply with.