Let me get this straight: there's a company built to exploit the ignorance of people of just how much it costs to drive their own car and the complete disregard of law and you thought while they don't respect their drivers and various governing bodies all over the globe they will respect you ?
Regardless of how strongly you feel or how wrong other people are, please don't post tendentious rants to HN. This breaks the site guideline which asks the folllowing:
Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize.
That "says" can be extended to "says, does, is". What you posted has a lot of indignation but doesn't come close to passing the "strongest plausible" test. Maybe you don't owe better to a corporation, but you owe better to this community if you want to post here.
I think you will realize, once you have cooled down a bit, that it is exactly people's awareness of how much it costs to own and drive a car in terms of money and mental peace that drives them to use services like Uber.
And yes, I know you were referring to people who drive for Uber.
For many people, the process of owning and driving a car doesn't make overall sense, which is why they pay others to do it for them.
I don't see anyone complaining about how maids have to, oh my gosh, clean houses.
> it is exactly people's awareness of how much it costs to own and drive a car in terms of money and mental peace that drives them to use services like Uber.
The point is that its far less profitable than it seems,
is very stressful, and has variable (unstable) income which further adds to the stress. See for example Uber The Game [1] based on real life examples.
> I don't see anyone complaining about how maids have to, oh my gosh, clean houses.
Well, of course they don't complain about that here. That'd be offtopic.
Part of the problem with issues like these is that if they don't affect you, why bother caring? Reading about it? Investigating the issue? You're not a maid, so why would you bother? You not enough on your plate as it is making your own deadlines and taking care of your family and and... which creates apathy.
I happen to know that regarding maids, and I won't speak for all hotels, but I happen to know from a series called RamBam [2] that at least in 2016 the Bastion and Ibis hotels in Amsterdam, cleaning service profession ("hotel maid") was 1) very stressful 2) paid by amount of rooms being cleared 3) a very low amount of minutes per room is being accounted 4) if you don't make it (setback of any kind), tough luck, you get paid less or you gotta work longer. Its a job you would only get if you can't get any other, and you desperately need the money. The company who hire know that, so the employees get exploited.
If that's still the case, if its more widespread, I don't know...
Cause what happens all too often in situations like these is when companies have shady, illegal, immoral behavior they resort to ostrich politics until they get exposed and it causes public uproar (in US, as a foreigner, I could think about say, Consumer Reports, or a John Oliver broadcast, or news about X in regular media). Then they start with damage control, but not necessarily with real steps to solve the issue. Just the symptom that the public perceives. Examples of damage control could be empty promises, solving the issue of the specific complaint of that one user, more empty promises, a bunch of excuses, some technicalities or pseudo-intelligent speech, yet more empty promises and excuses, shifting the blame, and all kind of other fallacies. It precisely describes what Uber did until a big change occurred (they got a new CEO). Heck, I've seen Uber employees exercise damage control on HN! Another good example is the #metoo debacles where people deny the allegations until the proof stacked up too high.
