Uber is plundering social security funds to ruin the taxi industry.
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The matter is basically quite simple. Take the poorest of the poor with a driving licence, promise them two or three thousand euros of fixed income per month and pay them only four to six euros per hour.
Where does the money come from?
The Job Centre pays the largest share. Uber partner companies issue ridiculously low pay slips and instruct their drivers to get the rest as a citizen’s income from the Job Centre. All Uber partners act this way, with one known exception. The companies can’t do otherwise, because they would be insolvent the moment they paid their drivers the full minimum wage for the first time.
Wage dumping enables dumping prices
The illegally low wages enable Uber partners to undercut the state-regulated taxi prices. In the end, not even the passengers benefit from this, because Uber raises the fares sharply when demand is high.
The plan
Uber and similar companies worldwide follow the same strategy. First, public services are attacked politically and with dumping prices and destroyed. Then the company presents itself as a saviour in the face of poor or non-existent public services. As a result, the prices of the previously low-cost services provided by the public sector are increased as far as the market will bear. Grandma can no longer find a taxi to take her to the doctor because the trip is not worthwhile for the Uber partners.
Follow the money
When you travel with Uber or Bolt, you pay the full fare to the corporstion. They then decide how to divide the ‘booty’ among the parties involved. Our reliable sources tell us that Uber takes around 25 per cent as a commission. The Uber general contractor then receives a further five per cent, and the remaining 70 per cent goes to the contracting company that carries out the trip on behalf of Uber. The Uber company deducts 19 per cent VAT and shares the rest with the driver. In the best case, 29 euros of the driver’s gross wage are earned from 100 euros of turnover. In view of the economic requirements, traffic conditions and the maximum permissible speed in cities, it is impossible to achieve the minimum wage with this distribution of turnover.
Most drivers live on state support, the amount of which is manipulated upwards as much as possible by means of very low fictitious wage statements. The support paid by the job centre is in fact a stolen wage subsidy that remains in the pockets of the corporation.
The scandal here is not the behaviour of the Uber drivers, who are literally poor, but the inaction of the regulatory authorities in the face of a perfectly designed system for diluting responsibility. The many small players can in principle be controlled, but not in official practice, while the organisers of the raid, shielded by an ocean of legal and other red tape, book the illegally acquired profits.
Defending the democratically decided rules
How can this be stopped so that public services and adequate wages are secured? This is also easy, but so far the responsible authorities and a large part of the political class have been reluctant to do what is necessary. The salary payments of all Uber-car companies must be compared with the working hours every month, and any shortfall in the minimum wage must be sanctioned immediately with the closure of the car transportation licence. The data required for this procedure is available and only needs to be requested by the authorities. The process can be automated to such an extent that, on balance, not a single cent more needs to be spent.
State of play
Over the last year, a lot has been done to check whether rental cars licensed in Berlin meet formal criteria. Correct wage payments were never an issue. The result is thousands of foreign cars from Uber and Bolt, which are on the road in Berlin as illegal taxis. A parliamentary initiative aimed at having the supervisory authorities check wage payments was buried in committees of the House of Representatives.
We defend the taxi culture
Today, the Taxi Film Festival begins, presenting and defending taxi culture so that the real value of our colleagues’ work becomes known.
We demand the defence of licensed taxis because they are more than just a means of transport. Taxis are an endangered part of urban culture in Berlin and worldwide.
