The other day, I needed to go all of two blocks. Less than a mile, barely a stone’s throw in my location. Go to my trusty Uber app, hit the “confirm” button, and nearly fell out of my chair. Surge pricing, naturally. Paid almost thirty bucks for the privilege. Twenty-seven dollars, to be precise. When the driver, a good bloke just trying to make a living, asked what the fare was, I told him. Then I asked what he got. Six dollars. Six. For a twenty-seven-dollar fare for less than a mile. On earlier non-surge rides, I’d noted about four dollars for that same distance. Four dollars! Why on earth would you even get out of bed for that?
This isn’t an isolated incident; it’s a systemic rot in the so-called “gig economy.” These digital distribution platforms, these modern-day robber barons, actively encourage their workforce to drive during surge periods, promising higher earnings, yet the lion’s share of the inflated price disappears into their own algorithms. What’s the point of charging a customer three, four, five times the normal rate if the person doing the actual work sees only a pittance, barely more than their non-surge rate? It’s a disgrace, a habitual exploitation that has become depressingly normalized.
This relentless squeeze on the workforce, treating them as disposable cogs in a hyper-efficient machine, is precisely why places like California have rightly taken these platforms to task over drivers’ rights. It’s not just unfair; it’s fundamentally unsustainable and frankly, unethical. We laud their “innovation,” their “disruption,” but what they’ve truly innovated is a new, digital layer of exploitation, creating a vast underclass of precarious workers while extracting exorbitant rents from every transaction.
As an industry built on the premise of high-touch service and valuing our people, how can we stand by and watch this happen? This isn’t efficiency; it’s pure, unadulterated avarice dressed up in a slick app interface. The promise of flexibility crumbles under the weight of disproportionate commissions and opaque algorithms that consistently shortchange the very people who deliver the service.
The digital economy demands a reckoning. We need to look beyond the convenience and shine a harsh light on the habitual practices that systematically funnel wealth away from the workers to the platform owners. Until the people providing the actual service are paid fairly, these platforms aren’t innovative; they’re just glorified sweatshops operating in the cloud.
Life is so tech. And sometimes, it’s just plain exploitative.
Mark Fancourt
