What's even more unsettling than the fact that many companies have this attitude towards their employees, is the degree to which members of HN unquestioningly defend this practice whenever the subject comes up. As long as only Uber does this, there really isn't a problem. But it will be a problem if it happens everywhere.
I am not saying that this is a black-and-white thing. There are certainly nuances here, and in a purely economic sense, humans are often interchangable. The problem starts when this attitude uncompromisingly becomes part of how companies (read: people) do business. A purely utilitarian, "amoral", selfish attitude to the world has bad ramifications if widely adopted.
Keep in mind that giving the boot to everyone below a 4.3 average rating means that if only one out of three customers conclude that your service was perfect, you will have your contract cancelled with no warning. It's easy enough to say "just have perfect performance, or otherwise just get another job" when you have a 5-year STEM education, grew up in a happy family and don't suffer from any serious condition or illness.
But not everyone has it this easy. If this is the future of employment, there need to be simpler options for people who can't perform significantly better than "average" most of the time. You might be safe in your software development job since you can't easily be replaced, so you boss won't fire you if, say, you go through a really messy breakup and perform at 50% capacity for six months. Everyone in an uncompromising performance-measured job will be canned under such circumstances. And having a tough time is something that all people experience once in a while.
As long as everyone could have their basic needs met when unemployed: Sure, make whatever labor structure is the most efficient. Otherwise, there needs to be a certain degree of compromise.
You raise some interesting points. As an employer, do I have a moral obligation to help an under performing employee through a bad period? Many, though not all, would say, "yes."
Let me rephrase the question. Do I have a moral obligation to pay said employee more than the current value he is providing to me? Now, most economists would say, "No," though there may be an argument about the present value of what the employee can provide me with in the future, perhaps in terms of special skills or increased loyalty.
Now, let me rephrase one last time. What if the cost of supporting this employee is make or break for my business? What if it is not just the under performing employee, but several others who would lose their jobs? What then is my moral obligation?
Do I have a moral obligation to pay said employee more than the current value he is providing to me? Now, most economists would say, "No,"
I seriously doubt that. After having gotten to know some actual economists (you know, academics; not the ones who pretend to know about economics on TV) I have learned that most of them are actually quite different from the "hooray free markets all the way" stereotype.
In fact, I would bet that most of them will say that you do have a moral obligation, and many (perhaps most) will say that it also makes economic sense to help an under-performing employee through a bad period. Real economists don't emphasize the short term.
I think what's lost here is that they're really more of a market place. It's similar to arguing that ebay has a moral obligation to make sure that people selling things there make enough per hour. I'm not sure I'd agree with that.
It's not that Uber is paying $21 an hour. It's that they're allowing the driver to go on and be matched with people who want that service. It might average out to $21 an hour for some set of hours (I imagine it's higher on the weekends and lower at low peak times). The fact you can back out dollars per hour from someone providing services on a marketplace doesn't really change things.
>Let me rephrase the question. Do I have a moral obligation to pay said employee more than the current value he is providing to me? Now, most economists would say, "No," though there may be an argument about the present value of what the employee can provide me with in the future, perhaps in terms of special skills or increased loyalty.
This whole line of argument ignores reality. The normal, real action is actually to pay the employee less than the value he is currently providing you.
That Uber can keep doing that (requiring 4.5 star averages) could be a symptom of a power imbalance: there is a huge surplus of qualified and willing potential employees to them so they can be picky.
That means that at the moment, there is less competition in the business than there could be (competitors could be nicer places to work, and hence could get by for example with paying less to workers, and be cheaper to customers as a result), or there are simply too much workers available compared to the amount of work available.
It's probably some mix of those. I've also noticed that in low skilled jobs, there can be many companies with very different cultures, and people pick the one where they fit in. They might all pay roughly the same and they don't differentiate that much with their service quality, because there isn't that much to differentiate with. Despite all the talk about excellence, the customers are not willing to pay much for any cosmetic extras.
That was really my point, though you said it more eloquently: If Uber does less well (because of image problems), then it will provide a living for fewer people in the end.
It's great to be loyal to employees, if you can. If you put your loyalty to your employees above the quality of the product you're providing, you may find you have no ability to pay any of your employees. Or in the case of Uber, that people stop hiring drivers.
You assume that there is some relationship between churn, and total unemployment. I don't see how that would work.
If Uber were convinced that it was terribly immoral to fire someone, they would just put greater effort into making sure they got the best people in the first place.
So your policies favor a society with 5% of the people unemployed 100% of the time, instead of 100% of the people unemployed 5% of the time.
Job security is of questionable social good because it places a nonsensical emphasis on the harm of getting fired, as opposed to the harm of not getting hired in the first place.
>What's even more unsettling than the fact that many companies have this attitude towards their employees, is the degree to which members of HN unquestioningly defend this practice whenever the subject comes up.
I didn't communicate my point well.
My point wasn't that "it's OK to treat people like crap because: PROFIT!!" I'm the last person to claim that profit justifies everything.
My point was: If Uber doesn't impose serious quality control on its drivers, then even the best drivers will fail to make a living wage, because the perceived value of the Uber service (by customers) will drop with every bad experience.
Uber is creating a market for its service by being better than a taxi. Better in all ways. It takes serious differentiation to convince people to change their current habits.
>Otherwise, there needs to be a certain degree of compromise.
If you're talking about non-customer-facing jobs, or even basic retail jobs where the expectations aren't high, then absolutely.
If you're a giant corporation and someone has been working with you for years and they go through a bad spot, then sure.
If you're trying to create a "new kind of taxi" and part of your business plan is that everyone has a superb experience, then you have no choice but to fire people who can't live up to your goal.
The ex-CEO had a rating of 4.3 (the cutoff mentioned in the article was 4.5), but they didn't "immediately fire him;" he had a chance to bring his rating up, and he did. It sounds like there's some compromise already built into the system. Not to mention the minimum 40 ratings before they require a 4.5.
At the end of the day, it's a business with specific goals. Some businesses can employ people who only rate a 3.0 and still meet their goals; some can't.
>you go through a really messy breakup and perform at 50% capacity for six months.
Two months in my case (happened once; was going to leave the job in 2-3 months regardless, but it's the only job I've ever had that they weren't begging me to stay). But you are right that, with my awesome specialized software skill-set, I was able to pick up a new job in just a couple months, and at this point I can practically write my own ticket.
If your hypothetical break-up survivor is pissing off customers, though, Uber has no choice but to fire him or her if they want to meet their goals. How else are they going to keep the fleet-wide ratings at or above 4.5 stars, which is likely their goal?
Honestly I do wonder where people in, say, the bottom percentile of job or interpersonal skills (or both) can get work. I'd fully support a "living wage for everyone" concept, at least if it can be shown to work at some scale, to sidestep this problem. Or a government "works" program that guaranteed a job to everyone who wanted one (in conjunction with a disability system, of course, that could provide support to people who didn't have the mobility or brain function to perform even menial labor).
But how the system works when it's working well (i.e., prior to the 1970s [1]) is that there are more jobs than employees, and so the jobs have to make due with who they can find, and/or the jobs have to be attractive enough to get the applicants. It's how the programming market is right now: I know that most developers have really basic skills compared to mine (probably only 1 in 20 professional developers that I encounter are even in the same ballpark), but even the least productive developers get great salaries and benefits.
And how the system needs to change is that workers need to own the companies they work for. Then their personal motivations line up with that of the company, and employee/owners who have a bad breakup maybe spend six months collecting a lower salary and working part time until they get back on their feet. Or maybe because of their closer support network (employees who own a piece of the action probably will stick around longer -- and care more about their coworkers) they don't take six months to get over a break-up.
I agree that things need to be fixed. I don't agree that a company should be required (morally or otherwise) to shoot itself in the foot to achieve social justice.
Thanks for your long reply. I think we are mostly in agreement. It seems like you are more cynical me, and I get the impression that you probably have less experience interacting with "the bottom percentile" (it's really the bottom 10-percentile) than me. I don't think this is surprising if you are truly better than 95% of all developers you work with - this places you in the elite of an elite group, and there is a very long way down to those who e.g. made a stupid decision and graduated with the wrong degree, or have some benign (mental or physical) health condition that leaves them unable to sustainably work more than 30 hours a week. Not to mention everyone who grow up in harsher social conditions.
But these people are real, most of them are still within the "normal" and their problems are more complex than missing interpersonal skills. I would not want to live in a world that treats "under-performing" (implication: "performing" is our raison d'être) people as second-rate citizens.
But again, our views on the economics of it could probably be reconciled even if our perspectives are different.
I believe you that those people exist. And I don't believe they should just starve to death. I'm equally unsure of how to help them aside from charity, given the current political climate.
I would like to help them, but honestly charity is probably the least helpful of the options (if the only one available); I'm sure that no one likes to accept charity.
I believe that everyone wants to feel useful, meaning that accepting charity actually hurts their self esteem. Which is better than starving, of course. But it seems like there should be a better way.
>I would not want to live in a world that treats "under-performing" (implication: "performing" is our raison d'être) people as second-rate citizens.
Agreed, with the caveat that some jobs still need to have a minimum performance level.
We've been talking about driving people around, where the performance level is "only" critical to the survival of the company. But if you take the "ignore under-performance" concept to its logical conclusion, then you couldn't fire surgeons who kill all their patients.
Yes, that's a far more extreme example, but the point is some jobs really require that you are able to do them well. You can't ignore job performance for social ends, or you will end up harming society. There are many reasons that Communism failed: One is that people who know they can't be fired don't have as much motivation to perform well. An even better motivation to perform well would be to own the business you are working for (just look at the differences between neighborhoods that are primarily owned versus primarily rentals to see a very real example of this). But we can't flip the ownership equation overnight, and in the mean time we don't want incompetent surgeons killing people.
What you can do is create jobs where being a top performer isn't critical. And ensure those jobs pay a living wage -- even at 30 hours per week, ideally. A 30-hour work week might be the right answer, regardless. [1] It worked for Kellogg until the 80s, after all.
I am not saying that this is a black-and-white thing. There are certainly nuances here, and in a purely economic sense, humans are often interchangable. The problem starts when this attitude uncompromisingly becomes part of how companies (read: people) do business. A purely utilitarian, "amoral", selfish attitude to the world has bad ramifications if widely adopted.
Keep in mind that giving the boot to everyone below a 4.3 average rating means that if only one out of three customers conclude that your service was perfect, you will have your contract cancelled with no warning. It's easy enough to say "just have perfect performance, or otherwise just get another job" when you have a 5-year STEM education, grew up in a happy family and don't suffer from any serious condition or illness.
But not everyone has it this easy. If this is the future of employment, there need to be simpler options for people who can't perform significantly better than "average" most of the time. You might be safe in your software development job since you can't easily be replaced, so you boss won't fire you if, say, you go through a really messy breakup and perform at 50% capacity for six months. Everyone in an uncompromising performance-measured job will be canned under such circumstances. And having a tough time is something that all people experience once in a while.
As long as everyone could have their basic needs met when unemployed: Sure, make whatever labor structure is the most efficient. Otherwise, there needs to be a certain degree of compromise.