Recently a friend and I were talking about Uber in Austin. If you don’t know, Uber and Lyft left Austin for a couple of months in retaliation of additional background checks. After a lot of chaos, people losing their jobs, and tons of startups popping up with their own ride sharing services, they ended up coming back. Read more how they intially left here.
My friend told me how she was talking to an Uber driver, and he was recounting to her how before Uber left they had guaranteed him a wage of $15/hour*. He planned his whole life around this assumption of $15/hour. He bought a house, planned how many hours he could work, how much time he could spend with his family on this promise that he could make $15 for every hour that he worked.
When Uber came back though, they only guaranteed $13/hour. And now he didn’t know what to do. He had already planned his whole life around this assumption that he could work x amount of hours for x amount of money. He wasn’t sure what he would do with almost a 9% decrease in hourly wage.
To put this wage decrease in perspective I will make an assumption that he was planning on working 40 hours/week. That means at $15/hour he would be making $600/week and $2400/month. At $13/hour he would be making $520/week and $2080/month. That’s a $320 deficit per month at a 13% decrease in monthly wages.
Now, I’m not here to debate if being an Uber driver is meant to be a “full” time job or if Uber is required to keep their “promise” after their hiatus in Austin. Being an Uber driver obviously has its pros and cons and the biggest pro clicked for me when a driver told me how about their instant pay plan–after you complete a ride with a passenger, you can immediately cash it out. All this to say that I do not feel like I am in a place to judge anyone’s decisions without being in their situation.
Anyway, back to the math. I think it was really humbling for me that $2/hour could make such a huge difference to someone’s life. It was obvious that he was stressed about this decrease in wages and that it would make a significant impact on his life. Two dollars! I feel like I rarely think about the price of $2. But the reality of it is that $2 can and does make a huge difference in people’s lives everyday. In fact, according to the global rich list $2/hour at 40 hours/week makes you in the top 25.08% of the world! Wow!!
Why am I bringing this up? Because for all the people reading this I know that in the future some of y’all will get to make decisions like lowering or raising people’s wages and I want to create awareness and empathy. That when you see debates on minimum wages you remember the dad stressing about $2/hour. That if you’re ever in a meeting deciding on how to pay people that you will fight for people to have a living and sustainable wage.
The purpose of this post isn’t to give an opinion on Uber or how much the minimum wage should be – but to get you to consider, how much does $2 mean to you?
* It was either $15 or $14/hour. I can find no record of this online as I’m sure Uber tries to keep any “guaranteed” wages away from the public eye.
Theodora Cheng 