Does Uber Still Need Drivers?
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Lisa is a good friend, probably the first Uber driver I met when I started in 2020. She’s been doing gig work since 2018, a couple of years longer than I have, and she’s watched this business change quite a bit along the way.
So for the second episode of Where Are We Going?, I picked her up at her house in Solvay, just outside Syracuse, and we drove.
That’s really the whole idea behind this show. I’m trying to recreate something I’ve experienced thousands of times as an Uber driver: two people who may or may not know each other, sitting in a car, looking forward instead of at each other, and talking. Something about that environment creates conversations you don’t necessarily have sitting across from someone at a table.
Lisa and I stopped at Panera for drinks and drove around Syracuse while we talked about her years working in the gig economy. She’s done rideshare, food delivery, Instacart, Walmart Spark, and catering. These days, catering has become her sweet spot. She told me she already knew where the money was when she decided to start doing gig work full-time.
That adaptability is one of the things I find interesting about gig workers. The opportunity is constantly moving. An app that was great a few years ago may not be great today. A type of work you barely considered might suddenly become your best source of income. Lisa hasn’t spent eight years doing the same thing. She’s moved with it.
We also talked about what it actually takes to be a good driver. Lisa’s advice was pretty simple: take care of your car, pay attention to what’s happening around you, and learn to read your passengers. Say hello, but let them decide whether they want a conversation. If they start asking questions, talk. If all they give you is “hi,” sometimes the best thing you can do is shut up and drive.
And, of course, we traded stories.
Lisa told me about taking a group of very drunk Syracuse University students to Turning Stone. When they arrived, one passenger apparently decided Lisa’s car was now his car and started opening the door and inviting random people to get in and go for a ride.
Eventually Lisa locked the doors, drove away from the crowd, and found somewhere else to let everybody out.
That’s rideshare.
But the part of our conversation that stayed with me came toward the end.
I asked Lisa a question I plan to ask other drivers on this show: Imagine the CEO of Uber, Lyft, or DoorDash gets into your car. You have a few minutes with them. What would you ask?
Lisa thought about it and then essentially turned the entire relationship between these companies and their workers into one question:
“Why am I here picking you up?”
Her point was that these companies needed drivers to build the services in the first place, and they still need people actually to perform much of the work. If that’s true, she wanted to know why drivers continually feel like things are being taken away from them.
“You need a driver,” she said. “Why are you cutting everything from drivers when they’re here to help you?”
What I found more interesting was what she said next.
I asked whether she thought these companies cared about drivers. Lisa didn’t immediately jump to the conclusion that somebody sitting in a corporate office was deliberately trying to hurt her. Instead, she wondered whether the people making the decisions even really understood what was happening.
“I think they don’t even really pay attention to us,” she said.
She wondered whether executives dealing with insurance, expenses, and everything else involved in running enormous companies actually know that a DoorDash driver might see a $2 delivery or that an Uber Eats offer might have almost nothing from Uber in the fare itself.
I think that’s a much more interesting question than simply asking whether one side is good and the other side is bad.
Millions of people do gig work. They drive different cars in different cities at different times for different reasons. Lisa’s experience isn’t everyone’s experience. Neither is mine.
That’s one of the reasons I wanted to make Where Are We Going?
I spend a lot of time talking about gig work. But I don’t want to be the only person talking. I want to get in the car with the people actually doing it. I want to hear where they’ve been, how they’ve adapted, what they’ve learned, what they love about the work, what frustrates them, and what they would say if the people building these platforms were sitting in the seat beside them.
For episode two, we’re in Syracuse.
And we’re going for a ride with Lisa.
