Lack of Drivers Is a ‘Reckoning’ for Uber, Executive Says

Ride-share companies like Uber and Lyft have been using incentives to make the gig economy more attractive in an attempt to recruit drivers as a shortage of drivers pushes prices up, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Incentives for drivers to return are an attempt to rectify rising fare prices and a lack of drivers in the market, but the labor scarcity isn’t supposed to end soon, the WSJ reported. Long term solutions might be needed in the gig-economy as a result.

“This is a moment of deep introspection and reflection for a company like ours to pause and say, ‘How do we make the proposition for drivers more attractive longer term?” Carrol Chang, Uber’s chief of driver operations for the U.S. and Canada told the WSJ. “It is absolutely a reckoning.”

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Analysis: Social Security Taxes and the ‘Gig Economy’

by Edward Ring   It is fashionable to refer to the job market of the future as “the gig economy.” In this enlightened, technology enabled wonderland, everyone will be free to balance work and leisure as they see fit. When they want to earn more money, they get online, find a “gig,” and when the job’s performed the money flows into their checking account. Not quite the utopia of Galt’s Gulch, but tantalizingly closer. The problem with the “gig economy” is the troublesome intervention of reality. Tell an Uber driver who has two hungry children, a wife home with the flu (unable to “gig”), who makes $20 per hour and has no health insurance that he’s living in utopia. You may have to duck. In 2017, the opinion section of the New York Times ran a guest editorial that included a graphic entitled “Our Broken Economy, In One Simple Chart.” That chart was drawn from data gathered by a team of economists that included Thomas Piketty, author of the 2014 bestseller, Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Each dot on the chart below represents an income percentile. They form two lines, the grey line showing income growth by income percentile between 1946 and 1980, and the red…

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