The ambitious goals of this company were to answer everyday questions. How do I get from A to B when I can't use public transportation or there is no such transportation? Where can I find an easy and affordable ride when the train is stopped and pretty much anywhere I want to go.

And that’s how Uber was born. So what happened to that dream? Well, we’re here to find out. I’m an Uber driver and I’ve been driving for Uber on and off for quite some time. At first, everything was nice and comfortable.

In the beginning, things were nice and cozy. People were fun to drive, the whole thing was new to everybody, and honestly, the money was there. You could make a living working full-time. But things have changed since those good times.

I’m sharing my experience as an Uber driver, and of course, every Uber driver’s experience could be different, but I believe what I’ll show you will help you form your own opinion on what it’s like to drive for Uber in America these days.It starts with the Big Lie. The Big Lie was the selling point that got me to drive for this company in the first place: « Come drive for us, make your own hours, drive when you want, » and so on.

This might have been true at first, like I said, but today, you have to work an insane number of hours to make it. I’m talking about working 12 hours a day, every day, if you want to earn enough to pay your rent and do anything outside of work. In the end, you don’t even have time for those things.

I’m talking about working 12 hours a day every day if you want to make enough money to pay your rent and do things outside of work. In the end, you don’t even have time to do those things. You have to deal with the fact that you’re competing with casual drivers who are taking virtually all of the work away from you and, most importantly, the fact that Uber controls every aspect of the transaction between you and your customer and that’s where the lying part comes in.

So I started this adventure thinking that I could be a small entrepreneur with the flexibility to choose the time that I could work, but what is the reality?? The reality is that drivers have very little to do with entrepreneurs other than for management. Everything falls on us: vehicle maintenance, insurance, car cleaning, repairs, taxes, fines, etc. And despite all that, we have very little visibility into the calculation that determines our compensation.

Uber controls almost everything actually. In the same way that the passenger does not decide what he pays, we do not decide what we receive from Uber. To give you an idea I could compare Uber to a kind of casino dealer who deals two decks of cards and controls the entire game. He gives the cards he wants to the passengers and other cards to the drivers, and he can choose which cards he gives to whom.

As I said, I've driven for other companies and you quickly realize that they are very, very quick to copy what Uber does. Uber started with a dream, but that dream wasn't profitable at the time and so they had to come up with something to satisfy their shareholders and that's where the algorithm comes in and our nightmare for drivers begins.

First of all, how does this algorithm work? Situation 1 : 1 customer orders a ride. Let's say that 2 drivers are also in the same place, they will not receive the same offer in monetary terms. One will receive a different amount, with several cents or even a few dollars less.

This is how Uber makes money by skimming millions of transactions. Exactly the same way Richard Prior made millions in Superman 4, if you remember. Uber's practice is documented, do the research for yourself.

This is the algorithm.

The more time you spent, the more you would pay. GPS, maps and phones have changed all that. Now you can know in advance, to the nearest centimetre, the distance that will take you from A to Z and Uber is taking advantage of it.

But why are drivers paid more pro rata for driving 20 minutes than for driving almost an hour to nowhere? Once again, we should no longer see Uber as a transport company. Uber is a micro-transaction company. Any transaction is a good transaction and when you process millions of transactions per day you make a lot of money. So obviously the interest of the driver or the customer matters little in these conditions.

The algorithm wins. Just yesterday I got paid $26 to drive almost 1 minute and 20 minutes for 50 miles. In a country where the minimum wage is ridiculously low, that's going to seem like a lot of money for an hour of your time. But when you consider that before I put my foot on the pedal I have maintenance, gas and living expenses (food, etc.) it starts to seem unreasonable. Plus if I don't get a ride back to town it's on me. So reconsider that $26 now what's left? But the algorithm isn't everything and Uber is often at fault for no reason other than their own greed these days.

This forces us to be vigilant. I tend to agree with this, but it gets weird when not only are passengers not really responsible in the same way, but Uber certainly isn't. Situation 3 is where Uber makes mistakes and it happens a lot.

I had to stop working that day. There is no compensation for lost work. Let me tell you what happens if I refuse to take 1, 2 or 3 rides for whatever reason accidents, feeling unwell or just not feeling like it etc… my numbers go down and my acceptance rate goes down, and Uber is now going to threaten me on the app to make me lose my status with the few benefits I have as an Uber Pro driver. Fair? Here is the lesson of the day: Uber is not a transportation company. It is a micro-transaction company.

Now understand this: if the app is responsible for losing your rides, nothing happens either, you can’t say it was because of the app. There is no checkbox about that !!! And the most frustrating thing is that they know there was an outage, but they don’t want to acknowledge it publicly. Did you hear anything about this in September when they updated their driver app?? I’d be curious to know.

Uber is a tech company, don’t you think they should include a way to report bugs when they happen? Well, to my knowledge, there isn’t an easy one. You have to file a ticket of course, but then someone in India answers and you end up down a rabbit hole because they don’t understand what you’re saying, and it leads nowhere. I know I’ve tried…

Of course, there is more, until next time if you are interested. Next time I will explain why drivers like me still drive with Uber despite all these problems, in my opinion, and I will finish my point on the subject of this article: why Uber participates in a form of modern slavery.